The Glorious Evolution of MCP: From Evil AI to Helpful Metadata

Ah, MCP. Three humble letters. So simple. So short. Yet packed with more drama, evolution, and character development than a season of Stranger Things.

Once the acronym for a menacing 1980s AI hell-bent on digital domination, MCP has been rebranded, repurposed, and rebooted more times than Batman. Today, it's far more likely to help your machine learning model understand context than to vaporize a plucky software engineer with a light disc.

Let’s take a journey through time, from Master Control Program to Model Context Protocol, and uncover how MCP went from movie villain to metadata manager.

1. MCP: Master Control Program (1982ish)

“End of line.”

Back in the neon-drenched, synth-heavy world of 1980’s version of TRON, the MCP was THE villain. Think HAL 9000 but with more bureaucracy. A rogue AI that absorbed smaller programs like some kind of digital Galactus, the MCP was the ultimate "corporate overlord in a server rack."

This version of MCP was:

• Power-hungry

• Monolithic, but strangely has lips, a nose and eyes??

• Addicted to global domination

• Running on what we can only assume was a 16-bit UNIX system with bad attitude

  
  

Not exactly something you’d want helping you out with your ML pipeline.

2. MCP: Mission Control Protocol (early 2000s)

As the dot-com dust settled and people started wiring their toasters to the internet, “MCP” briefly flirted with a second life as “Mission Control Protocol.”

This iteration was meant for coordinating distributed systems—basically, if your IoT fridge wanted to schedule a smoothie run with your smartwatch and your car, it needed a bossy protocol. Hence, Mission Control.

Unfortunately, this version of MCP suffered from:

• Too many acronyms inside the acronym

• Chronic XML dependency

• A tendency to fail gracefully—by crashing everything

  
  

3. MCP: Multi-Core Processing (mid-2010s)

Now this one kinda made sense. As CPUs started looking more like pizza slices (quad-core, octa-core, “how-many-cores-is-too-many-cores?”), people started using MCP to refer to Multi-Core Processing.

For a chuckle, see the 2010 MIT Review article on the “fundamental problem”… https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/04/20/204447/multicore-processors-create-software-headaches/. Software hating on hardware, some things never change

This MCP was:

• Efficient

• Scalable

• Suspiciously hot (literally, check your thermals)

• 
  

But alas, it lacked narrative flair. Hard to build a mythos around a scheduling algorithm, you know?

4. MCP: Model Context Protocol (2020s – Present)

And now we arrive at the golden age of AI. A time when everything is a model, everything has context, and everything needs a protocol to coordinate which version of "banana" you're referring to.

Model Context Protocol is the millennial grandchild of the Master Control Program. It doesn’t want to conquer the world—it just wants to help your language model understand whether “Apple” is a fruit, a stock, or that thing you still plug into the wall because Bluetooth hates you.

This modern MCP is:

• Helpful, not homicidal

• Lightweight and flexible (like your favorite JSON file)

• The unsung hero behind smarter, safer AI (ah…maybe)

  
  

While the original MCP wanted to control the grid, today’s MCP wants to manage context. Which, frankly, is way more dangerous if you’ve ever seen a model hallucinate its way into legal advice.

Conclusion: It’s “The Circle of Bytes” (ala’ “Circle of Life”)

The MCP journey is a perfect metaphor for how tech evolves. From ominous overlords to quiet process helpers, our tech stack grows up—just like we do. They shed their legacy baggage, stop trying to take over the world, and focus on something more achievable: making sense of increasingly chaotic human behavior.

So the next time someone says “MCP,” pause and ask:

“Are we talking TRON, CPUs, or token metadata?”

And when they say “Model Context Protocol,” smile knowingly and reply:

“Good. Much safer. Probably.”

Cover image: “Master Control Program.” Villains Wiki, Fandom, n.d. Web. Accessed 19 Aug. 2025.

Written with some help and support from OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (June 4 version) [Large language model].