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NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers
mccalli writes "The National Academy of Engineering has awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize to various individuals 'for the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers.' The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing."
A more detailed timeline for the awards is available here
Alltogether there are five of them, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the Founders Award, and the Arthur M. Bueche Award
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
...recently as a terrorist organization. I'd hate to see those PARC people get hurt.
That is not cubicism that is the time cube theory, presented in an invited lecture at MIT. Humans are educated stupid and too dumb to know it.
...as long as they leave their almanacs (and all other reference books) at home.
It's good that contributors to the early days of computing are being recognized; I'm sure everyone here understands what it means to do good work and never get a nod for it. At the same time, it comes too late to have a strong impact on careers. Perhaps this is good; the individuals cited in the article seem to have a made a name for themselves in other work as well, and have not been judged solely on their earlier work.
Another thing I would like to see is a more mainstream news source to pick up this story, even if it's a small sidebar; the general populace recognizes names like Jobs and Gates, but a much smaller percentage (including myself) knows of the other, less business-oriented figures in the industry.
"A group of words expressing something other than their literal intention. Now that... is... irony!" - Bender
So often I see credit for "the gui" going to Apple, when it's these guys who should be getting the real credit. More work in GUI design, more original thought and more of the first hard yards in GUI systems were put in by the Alto originators than Apple's work, which was just in mass marketing an already existing product.
Kudos to them I say
RST
The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people...
Headling which was a prelude to this one...
Two Xerox Employees Fired Over Butt-Copying Incident, footage at 11....
he is the great uncle of John 'Captain Crunch' Draper, the infamous phone hacker.
I'm wondering if the Captain will get a prize someday.....
Good Job! Well deserved!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Just FYI, that guy was invited as a joke by a student group. timecube.com is hilarious!
Sounds great -- anyone know where I can get one of these newfangled networked personal computers?
deserve it.
:-)
They brought computing to the masses (or would have if Xerox hadn't shot itself in the foot.)
But Apple followed up with the Lisa, which cost too much, and then the Mac.
Gates tagged along with Windows (which was stolen from IBM's Presentation Manager [which paid for its development.)
The rest is history.
Now if only they had thought or Relationships between Objects... (I have
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing.
So, besides bias, is there a reason that these institutions were mentioned, but not Microsoft?
"Charles P. Thacker also is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft Corp."
Geez...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Ok, cough up the URL to the student group (not to the time cube, I've seen that and it is hilarious).
There's a really excellent book about PARC and the development of the Alto called Dealers of Lightning:
8 87 308910/103-7794804-1212634?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I borrowed this book from my university library and really enjoyed reading about the development of Smalltalk, laser printers, an optical network link from two PARC buildings, Ethernet, and of course, the Alto.
Highly recommended.
Did they have to share because they...copied each other's work?
::rimshot::
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all day folks. Try the linux; it's really secure today.Other developments from PARC are the Graphical user interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer and the Smalltalk programming language.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates borrowed
their ides for the GUI and mouse and such from
not only Xerox PARC but from the Smalltalk
environment. Smalltalk is not just a language, its a Object Oriented operating environment.. Its hard to call it an operating system even though it controlled resources on the machine,
and its not really just a language because it allows the users to change the workings of the language and the operating environment at any time.. Its just a massively self-referencing OO environment.. And everything we know of GUI's and mice and such today was based on smalltalk and the machine designed around it..
Just Xerox was not smart enough to cash in on it because it was so far before its time that there were few with much power to exploit it and sell it.. PARC as was explained at the time was a campus full of nerds designing stuff that made sense without the constraints that usually hold down projects, like having to make money. They had enough money to develop this system.. But certainly nobody was foofing off.. Its hard to know exactly what was involved in the development, what led to it and if this can ever happen again..
Get a big company with lots of money and poor resource management, get a lot of smart people who are driven to solve problems, keep the lawyers off campus.. Make sure the nerds are absolutely clueless about business and making money.. Remember at the time, nobody was making money selling software much.. The idea was to sell a machine.. Xerox sold hardware not software.. I don't think this can ever happen again.. There is just too much to take for granted, like that anyone can take the software and go sell a piece of it or release it on the Internet..
Just say no to license servers!!
...or was she still just a backroom player, still (re)working her way up the development ladder?
For those that don't know about Lynn, she developed the first superscalar computer back in '61, the IBM ACS, and went on to develop much of the tech for VLSI. She spent much time at Parc during the '70's too, which is why I was wondering.
There's something else very special about her as well, which endears her to me for similar reasons.
When I was a college student, I did a co-op assignment at Xerox in Webster, NY, where I had the chance to play with an Alto at lunchtimes. It was an impressive machine, the size of a dishwasher, with a strange mouse arrangement and a crisp, big monochrome bitmap display.
I have fond memories of playing Mazewar (a VERY early real-time networked multi-player 3D VR game, one of the very first FPS games, I suspect) on the Alto in between system crashes.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I thought the Draper award was given to the most outstanding officer in the Armor Officer Basic Course.
Alan Kay who invented Smalltalk-72 and a good deal of what we now call Object Oriented is currently doing a version of Smalltalk called Squeak. Or, as the website puts it, "Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change."
Microsoft, on the other hand, started shipping it's versions of Windows overseas (Japan) well before it's domestic US appearance.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Please note that all the honorees (Kay, Lampson, Taylor, Thacker) did the work in question at PARC - not at MIT, not at HP, not at Microsoft (where two of them currently work).
The "MIT and HP also making a showing" just shows the wisdom of those institutions for giving these guys a job after they've changed the world. It also shows typical Slashdot thinking - why mention HP and MIT, and leave Microsoft out, other than because Microsoft is Satan, even when they also hire the best and brightest after they've distinguished themselves elsewhere?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The Alto's computer was a rack-mounted Data General minicomputer with some special microcode. Xexox built the mouse, Ethernet adapter, and CRT, but manufacture of the computer was outsourced.
The real history of the GUI is that the first GUI appeared on the SAGE air defense system. The SAGE pointing device was a light gun. After light guns came light pens and the "RAND tablet", the first tablet input device. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in the late 1960s, and put together an impressive GUI demo, but he had to tie up an entire mainframe to make it work. The Alto was basically an attempt to squeeze down the technology into a useful size.
Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the price point of a grand piano. He had a clear vision on the hardware front.
The Xerox PARC approach was to create technology that was futuristic but not cost effective, with the idea that progress in electronics would bring the cost down. That was exactly right.
What wasn't right was the emphasis on closed systems. The PARC idea was that it all should just work, and the end user shouldn't have to worry about how it works. Just like Xerox copiers. Out of this mindset came the Xerox Star, Xerox's commercial product. The Star was a networked word processor/office computer networked to file servers and printers. Think of a computer that runs nothing but Microsoft Office and you'll have the right picture. No user-serviceable parts inside.
That wasn't the way things went. The CP/M - Apple DOS - PCDOS end of computing won out over PARC elegance. Mostly for cost reasons.
Does this mean she'll be constitutionally banned from marrying a man?
I remember reading that Edgar Dykstra and his students did an early GUI machine, but I've never been sure where it fit into the overall timeline.
It's been long enough that the details were fuzzy, but they did a new language for it at the same time. Possibly Modula-2.
plus-good, double-plus-good
There is a list of members elected to the NAE this year.
Scroll halfway down and you would see Bjarne Stoustrup's name and invention of c++ to his credit. neat aint it?
Btw there are 8 indians on the list too. *start the flames*
For Alan Kay's current work, look at www.squeak.org and www.opencroquet.org.
"She's a MAN, BAY BEE!"
--Austin Powers
Woah, that's pretty bizarre. You know, I always THOUGHT that there was something strange about a woman cowriting the VLSI textbook in the heavily male-dominated field of electrical engineering. Sounds sexist, but this info seems to vindicate that feeling. I wonder if Professor Mead knew of this, or when (if) he ever found out and what his reaction was.
Other transgendered people include game programmer Dani Bunten Berry (author of M.U.L.E) and Jay Fenton (cofounder of Macro Media).
I'm surprised that sex change operations were available as far back as the mid 1960's. The facial reconstruction surgery that Lynn Conway has is very realistic; I wouldn't have guessed in a million years.
There's another article that details how he (pre surgery) became romantically involved with a female, fathered a child, then got married, and had another kid. So I can't buy the argument that even in "her" mind, she believed she was 100% female.
I'm sorry, but this is creepy. I have a difficult enough time trying to get dates, there are STD's all over the place, and now how do you verify that What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) without examining their chromosomes?
But seriously...
It's kind of strange the number of successful professional geeks that have undergone gender reassignment surgery. Is there something weird happening in the science library? Or do other professions have the same distribution, and we just notice because it's our field?
Bill Atkinson would beg to differ, and argue that the trip to Xerox only reinforced the ideas already promulgated by Jef Raskin. For example, the menu bar that is now standard along the top horizontal row of every application these days was unknown to the Alto, and a lot of the windowing concepts were known. Engelbart's mouse research and NLS work had been done even before PARC.
Furthermore, people complain that Microsoft "stole" ideas from Apple. Actually, Microsoft had hired Charles Simonyi away from Xerox PARC, where Simonyi had developed the first WYSIWIG word processor, Bravo. This was around the time that IBM had contracted MicroSoft to work on Project Chess -- the original IBM PC. So GUI windows were known to Microsoft around the same time (if not earlier) than Apple due to Simonyi.
You keep using this acronym "GUI". I don't think it means, what you think it means.
... about the many "GUI" interfaces. Like GEM (which thanks to this article I now know was a descendent from the PARC space). And there are also the "character graphic" GUI interfaces (like the one for Ashton-Tate's FrameMaker, or the one for Lotus Symphony). Some of you might scoff at the early PC days in this sense, but innovation - and competing visions of what that innovation would bring - was the point.
Many thanks to the original poster. Learned still more about how we got to where we are.
YAAC (yet another AC!)
I was going to reply to a similar thread by you, decided not to waste my time, saw this one, and decided to tell you to STFU.
Apple did not invent the wondowing GUI. Widgets such as resizable windows, buttons, scroll bars, list boxes, etc. were all found in Smalltalk.
STFU!
Alan Kay did everything, and it's good he's recognised. He saw 'organisms'; he invented the term 'object orientation'; he worked with kids and LOGO, and saw this as becoming important for grownups as well. What did Alan Kay not invent or not help invent? Smalltalk everyone's heard of.
And if they need any help financing his prize, maybe they can start a class action against Bjarne Stroustrup.
I invented the term 'object-oriented' and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
-- Alan Kay
You might be thinking of the Lilith by N. Wirth. Modula-2 was created for this graphical machine, which was inspired by actually using the Xerox Alto for a year (so it is a later development).
you had me at #!
It's important to note that there was a creative and collaborative attitude during the 60's and 70's that does not exist now. You can sense this from folowing the history, for instance that Kay et. al. never tried to copyright or patent any of the design aspects of their work -- the use of the mouse and network, the use of overlapping windows and desktop "objects", etc. If such ideas were developed now they would certainly be treated as precious "Intellectual Property" and patented into oblivion. But the attitude was actually the opposite.
I was there to some extent, and attended some presentations by Kay during the 70's and early 80's. I believe he saw himself as simply continuing the work of other researchers in interactive systems before him, citing, for example Ivan Sutherland and the Sketchpad system with some envy. ( Here, for instance) Sutherland is also credited with inventing the mouse, though I believe it was actually more the product of a movement or a time in history than of a single person.
I really belive the creative and exploratory attitude of the society in general is much more important than the individuals involved. The invention of the 70's was fueled by the extreme exploratory abandon of the 60's in all things -- politics, music, space... We seem now to live in a period of collective creative depression, and we get appropriately depressed results. Now we get security, DRM, and a huge effort to copy and open source a successful but anachronistic human - machine interaction model, MS Windows.
Make sure to pay attention to what Kay himself says while accepting the prize -- it is most significant, and not just an exercise in artificial humility:
"The ARPA/PARC research context and community catalyzed researchers to be incredibly better dreamers and thinkers. This context was itself a great work of art, confirmed by the world-changing results that appeared so swiftly, and almost easily."
> Unfortunately, now I'm gonna look at non-pretty women (the ones who have lost a little of their looks) and wonder if they always were women...
You fuck! Non pretty woman?
Go to Lynn's homepage www.lynnconway.com and have a look at the pic of the three women sitting at the table. That's Lynn in the middle, damn hot for a 60+ year old woman, and Andrea James and Callie Addams are on her right and left respectively. I defy you to look at those three and define them as "non-pretty" purely based on their having transitioned!
There are plenty of non-pretty gg's out there, my ex-wife included! I'll never understand why trans-women threaten the oh-so-fragile male ego so much.
You're probably a girlfriendless mongo yourself, and none of these three would even look at you!
Get a life!
Just a quick pedantic point.
Ashton-Tate's really excellent object-based all-in-one package was Framework and not FrameMaker (which is a totally different app)
Framework was also famous for it language, FRED. (FRamework EDitor)