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RIP, Robert Taylor, The Innovator Who Shaped Modern Computing (sfgate.com)
"Any way you look at it, from kick-starting the Internet to launching the personal computer revolution, Bob Taylor was a key architect of our modern world," says a historian at Stanford's Silicon Valley Archives. An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
The Internet, like many inventions, was the work of many inventors. But perhaps no one deserves more credit for that world-changing technological leap than Mr. Taylor. The seminal moment of his work came in 1966. He had just taken a new position at the Pentagon -- director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Arpa -- and on his first day on the job it became immediately obvious to him what the office lacked and what it needed. At the time, Arpa was funding three separate computer research projects and using three separate computer terminals to communicate with them. Mr. Taylor said, No, we need a single computer research network, to connect each project with the others, to enable each to communicate with the others... His idea led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet.
A half-decade later, at Xerox's storied Palo Alto Research Center, Mr. Taylor was instrumental in another technological breakthrough: funding the design of the Alto computer, which is widely viewed as the forerunner of the modern personal computer. Mr. Taylor even had a vital role in the invention of the computer mouse. In 1961, at the dawn of the Space Age, he was about a year into his job as a project manager at NASA in Washington when he learned about the work of a young computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute, later called SRI International... Mr. Taylor decided to pump more money into the work, and the financial infusion led directly to Engelbart's invention of the mouse, a computer control technology that would be instrumental in the design of both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based computers.
Taylor had become fascinated with human-computer interactions in the 1950s during his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, and was "appalled" that performing data calculations required submitting his punch cards to a technician running the school's mainframe computers. Years later, it was Taylor's group at PARC that Steve Jobs visited in 1979, which inspired the "desktop" metaphor for the Macintosh's graphical user interface. And Charles Simonyi eventually left PARC to join Microsoft, where he developed the Office suite of applications.
Taylor died Thursday at his home in Woodside, California, from complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 85.
A half-decade later, at Xerox's storied Palo Alto Research Center, Mr. Taylor was instrumental in another technological breakthrough: funding the design of the Alto computer, which is widely viewed as the forerunner of the modern personal computer. Mr. Taylor even had a vital role in the invention of the computer mouse. In 1961, at the dawn of the Space Age, he was about a year into his job as a project manager at NASA in Washington when he learned about the work of a young computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute, later called SRI International... Mr. Taylor decided to pump more money into the work, and the financial infusion led directly to Engelbart's invention of the mouse, a computer control technology that would be instrumental in the design of both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based computers.
Taylor had become fascinated with human-computer interactions in the 1950s during his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, and was "appalled" that performing data calculations required submitting his punch cards to a technician running the school's mainframe computers. Years later, it was Taylor's group at PARC that Steve Jobs visited in 1979, which inspired the "desktop" metaphor for the Macintosh's graphical user interface. And Charles Simonyi eventually left PARC to join Microsoft, where he developed the Office suite of applications.
Taylor died Thursday at his home in Woodside, California, from complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 85.
Truly an innovator. There are many great people in computing.
Have gnu, will travel.
And today we stand on the shoulders of the giants. Building on the foundation they laid. Rest in peace Robert Taylor, to be remembered far longer than the average man.
I had the honor of meeting him once: late 1990s while working @ DEC. Our group had a number of advanced development collaboration projects with DEC-SRC, and I met him while collaborating with various of the researchers there. Including Chuck Thacker, Dick Sites, and multiple early employees @ Google (recruited from DEC). Absolutely a very nice fellow. The world is definitely a much smaller place without him and his endeavors.
My best to to his relatives.
Is this like one of Al Gore's aliases or something?
From TFA:
“He liked the idea immediately, and he took a million dollars out of the ballistic missile defense budget and put it into my budget right then and there.” He added, “The first funding came that month.”
His idea led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet.
So from there, the first steps of one of the most important revolutions in human communication in history, to the mass stupidification of the internet and turning a potential tool for freedom into a tool for oppression and social control.
I wonder if he was dismayed at the sheer magnitude of lost potential. Dismayed at the direction humanity chose to take his work, as end user control is constantly chipped away and everything gets recentralized so that a few governments and companies can control and monitor it all.
If I had ever known the man when he was alive I think I would have wanted to apologize to him on behalf of our species.
This guy sort of sounds like the Forest Gump of computing project management. He's there at the scene for all the really big turning points. The one that made my jaw drop was after inciting arapnet he then funded Doug Englebart.
Somedays I feel like anyone allowed to post on slashdot needs to show they have watched Doug Englebarts "mother of all Demos". My world view changed after that. It's like nothing actually changed in the last 30 years, we just had to wait for consumer hardware to catch up to Doug's dreams.
Seriously, basically everything we consider modern computing was invented on that demo day, from streaming video, to simultaneous multi-user text editing, to the mouse, to windows, to the graphical text editor. No exaggerations.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A truly jaw dropping epilogue: in spite of being the source of essentially the entire modern world of user interface and programming language design, Xerox still managed to toss it all away and fail pathetically. Epic management failure? Blazed the trail for Sun I guess. RIP SGI too, and DEC. Management failure, each one. Maybe there should be a hall of shame right next door to the hall of fame.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I had the (shall I say it) honor of working directly with Vint Cerf at MCI back in the early 90's, part of the triad or more that formed the earliest foundations. We had some interesting conversations.
"Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael A. Hiltzik https://www.goodreads.com/book...
SeqBox
Xerox also employed Gary Starkweather who invented the laser printer. They weren't interested in the technology as it would disrupt their copier business. It took a while. I haven't seen a Xerox copy machine in years.
For a second, I thought Rip Taylor died. That would also be tragic.