Robert William Taylor | |
|---|---|
 Robert William Taylor in 2008 | |
| Born | (1932-02-10)February 10, 1932 |
| Died | April 13, 2017(2017-04-13) (aged 85) Woodside,California, United States |
| Resting place | America |
| Alma mater | Southern Methodist University University of Texas |
| Known for | Internet pioneer Computer networking & Communication systems Modern personal computing |
| Children | Kurt Taylor Derek Taylor Erik Taylor |
| Awards | ACM Software Systems Award (1984) ACM Fellow (1994) National Medal of Technology and Innovation (1999) Charles Stark Draper Prize (2004) Computer History Museum Fellow (2013)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | ARPA Xerox PARC Digital Equipment Corporation |
Robert William Taylor (February 10, 1932 – April 13, 2017), known asBob Taylor, was an AmericanInternet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director ofARPA'sInformation Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager ofXerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager ofDigital Equipment Corporation'sSystems Research Center until 1996.[2]
Uniquely, Taylor had no formal academic training or research experience incomputer science;Severo Ornstein likened Taylor to a "concert pianist without fingers", a perception reaffirmed by historian Leslie Berlin: "Taylor could hear a faint melody in the distance, but he could not play it himself. He knew whether to move up or down the scale to approximate the sound, he could recognize when a note was wrong, but he needed someone else to make the music."[3]
His awards include theNational Medal of Technology and Innovation and theDraper Prize.[4] Taylor was known for his high-level vision: "The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography."[4]
Robert W. Taylor was born inDallas, Texas, in 1932.[5] His adoptive father, Rev. Raymond Taylor, was aMethodist minister who held degrees fromSouthern Methodist University, theUniversity of Texas at Austin andYale Divinity School. The family (including Taylor's adoptive mother, Audrey) was highly itinerant during Taylor's childhood, moving from parish to parish. Having skipped several grades as a result of his enrollment in an experimental school, he began his higher education at Southern Methodist University at the age of 16 in 1948; while there, he was "not a serious student" but "had a good time."[6]
Taylor then served a stint in theUnited States Naval Reserve during theKorean War (1952–1954) atNaval Air Station Dallas before returning to his studies at the University of Texas at Austin under theGI Bill. At UT he was a "professional student," taking courses for pleasure. In 1957, he earned an undergraduate degree inexperimental psychology[7] from the institution with minors inmathematics,philosophy, English andreligion.
He subsequently earned a master's degree in psychology from Texas in 1959[7] before electing not to pursue aPhD in the field. Reflecting his background in experimental psychology and mathematics, he completed research inneuroscience,psychoacoustics and the auditorynervous system as a graduate student. According to Taylor, "I had a teaching assistantship in the department, and they were urging me to get a PhD, but to get a PhD in psychology in those days, maybe still today, you have to qualify and take courses inabnormal psychology,social psychology,clinical psychology,child psychology, none of which I was interested in. Those are all sort of in the softer regions of psychology. They're not very scientific, they're not very rigorous. I was interested inphysiological psychology, in psychoacoustics or the portion of psychology which deals with science, the nervous system, things that are more likeapplied physics andbiology, really, than they are what normally people think of when they think of psychology. So I didn't want to waste time taking courses in those other areas and so I said I'm not going to get a PhD."[6]
After leaving Texas, Taylor taught math and coached basketball for a year at Howey Academy, a co-ed prep school inFlorida. "I had a wonderful time but was very poor, with a second child — who turned out to be twins — on the way," he recalled.
Taylor took engineering jobs with aircraft companies at better salaries. He helped to design theMGM-31 Pershing as a senior systems engineer fordefense contractorMartin Marietta (1960–1961) inOrlando, Florida.
In 1962, after submitting a research proposal for a flight control simulation display, he was invited to joinNASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology as a program manager assigned to the crewed flight control and display division.
Taylor worked for NASA inWashington, D.C. while theKennedy administration was backing research and development projects such as theApollo program for a crewed moon landing. In late 1962 Taylor metJ. C. R. Licklider, who was heading the newInformation Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of theAdvanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of theUnited States Department of Defense. Like Taylor, Licklider had specialized in psychoacoustics during his graduate studies. In March 1960, he published “Man–Computer Symbiosis”, an article that envisioned new ways to use computers.[8] This work was an influential roadmap in the history of the internet and the personal computer, and greatly influenced Taylor.[9]
During this period, Taylor also became acquainted withDouglas Engelbart at theStanford Research Institute inMenlo Park, California. He directed NASA funding to Engelbart's studies of computer-display technology at SRI that led to thecomputer mouse. The public demonstration of a mouse-based user interface was later called "the Mother of All Demos." At the Fall 1968Joint Computer Conference inSan Francisco, Engelbart,Bill English,Jeff Rulifson and the rest of the HumanAugmentation Research Center team at SRI showed on a big screen how he could manipulate a computer remotely located in Menlo Park, while sitting on a San Francisco stage, using his mouse.[10]
In 1965, Taylor moved from NASA to IPTO, first as a deputy toIvan Sutherland (who returned to academia shortly thereafter) to fund large programs in advanced research in computing at major universities and corporate research centers throughout the United States. Among the computer projects that ARPA supported wastime-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of usingpunched cards orpunched tape in abatch processing style. Taylor's office inthe Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing atMassachusetts Institute of Technology, a terminal connected to theBerkeley Timesharing System at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, and a third terminal to theSystem Development Corporation inSanta Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.[10]
Taylor hoped to build acomputer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else, to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal. By June 1966, Taylor had been named director of IPTO; in this capacity, he shepherded theARPANET project until 1969.[11] Taylor had convinced ARPA directorCharles M. Herzfeld to fund a network project earlier in February 1966, and Herzfeld transferred a million dollars from a ballistic missile defense program to Taylor's budget.[12] Taylor hiredLarry Roberts fromMIT Lincoln Laboratory to be its first program manager. Roberts first resisted moving to Washington DC, until Herzfeld reminded the director of Lincoln Laboratory that ARPA dominated its funding.[13] Licklider continued to provide guidance, andWesley A. Clark suggested the use of a dedicated computer, called theInterface Message Processor at each node of the network instead of centralized control. At the 1967Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, a member ofDonald Davies' team (Roger Scantlebury) presented their research onpacket switching and suggested it for use in the ARPANET.[14][15] ARPA issued arequest for quotation (RFQ) to build the system, which was awarded toBolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). ATT Bell Labs andIBM Research were invited to join, but were not interested. At a pivotal meeting in 1967 most participants resisted testing the new network; they thought it would slow down their research.
In 1968, Licklider and Taylor published "The Computer as a Communication Device". The article laid out the future of what the Internet would eventually become.[16] It began with a prophetic statement: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face."[16]
Beginning in 1967, Taylor was sent by ARPA to investigate inconsistent reports coming from theVietnam War. Only 35 years old, he was given an identification card with the military rank equivalent to his civilian position (brigadier general), thus ensuring protection under theGeneva convention if he were captured. Over the course of several trips to the area, he established a computer center at theMilitary Assistance Command, Vietnam base inSaigon. In his words: "After that the White House got a single report rather than several. That pleased them; whether the data was any more correct or not, I don't know, but at least it was more consistent."[13] The Vietnam project took him away from directing research, and "by 1969 I knew ARPANET would work. So I wanted to leave."[13]
The election ofRichard Nixon to the presidency and ongoing tensions with Roberts (who, despite maintaining a putatively cordial relationship with Taylor, resented his lack of research experience and appointment to the IPTO directorship) also factored in his decision to leave ARPA. For about a year, he joined Sutherland andDavid C. Evans at theUniversity of Utah inSalt Lake City, where he had funded a center for research on computer graphics while at ARPA.
Unable to acclimate to theChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-dominated milieu, Taylor moved toPalo Alto, California in 1970 to become associate manager of the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) atXerox Corporation's newPalo Alto Research Center.
Although Taylor played an integral role in recruiting scientists for the laboratory from the ARPA network, physicist and Xerox PARC directorGeorge Pake felt that he was an unsuitable candidate to manage the group because he lacked a relevant doctorate and subsequent experience in academic research. While Taylor eschewed a Pake-proposed research program in computer graphics in favor of largely administering the day-to-day operations of the laboratory from its inception, he acquiesced to the appointment of BBN scientist and ARPA network acquaintanceJerome I. Elkind as titular CSL manager in 1971.[17]
Technologies developed at PARC under Taylor's aegis focused on reaching beyond ARPANET to develop what has become the Internet, and the systems that support today's personal computers. They included:
Belying his lack of programming and engineering experience, Taylor was noted for his strident advocacy of Licklider-inspired distributed personal computing and his ability to maintain collegial and productive relationships between what was widely perceived as the foremost array of the epoch's leading computer scientists. This was exemplified by a weekly staff meeting at PARC (colloquially known as "Dealer" afterEdward O. Thorp'sBeat the Dealer) in which staff members would lead a discussion about myriad topics. They would sit in a circle of beanbag chairs and open debate was encouraged. According to Kay, the meeting "was part of the larger ARPA community to learn how to argue to illuminate rather than merely to win. ... The main purposes of Dealer -- as invented and implemented by Bob Taylor -- were to deal with how to make things work and make progress without having a formal manager structure. The presentations and argumentation were a small part of a deal session (they did quite bother visiting Xeroids). It was quite rare for anything like a personal attack to happen (because people for the most part came into PARC having been blessed by everyone there -- another Taylor rule -- and already knowing how 'to argue reasonably')."[19]
Throughout his tenure at PARC, Taylor frequently clashed with Elkind (who held budgetary responsibility for new projects but found his managerial authority undercut by Taylor's intimate relationships with the research staff) and Pake (who did not countenance Taylor's outsized influence in the laboratory and deprecatory attitude toward Xerox's physics research program, then directly overseen by Pake); as a result, he was not officially invited to the company's "Futures Day" demo (marking the public premiere of the Alto) inBoca Raton, Florida in 1977. However, after one of Elkind's extended absences (stemming from his ongoing involvement in other corporate and government projects), Taylor became the manager of the laboratory in early 1978.
In 1983, physicist and integrated circuit specialist William J. Spencer became director of PARC. Spencer and Taylor disagreed about budget allocations for CSL (exemplified by the ongoing institutional divide between computer science and physics) and CSL's frustration with Xerox's inability to recognize and use what they had developed. In a heated discussion led by Elkind and above, it was implied that Taylor without his PhD might be let go he said he would do them one better, "I quit", he said. After leaving the building, all of Taylor's scientists were brought into a large meeting room and were informed of his departure from PARC. A scientist stood up and said that they had better get him back and that if they didn't he would never set foot in this place again. Then, one by one, they all stood up and walked out. This sort of loyalty was unprecedented. By the end of the year, Taylor and most of the researchers at CSL who had left Xerox were rejoined again, this time in a Computer Corporation, not a copier company. A coterie of leading computer scientists (including Licklider,Donald Knuth andDana Scott) expressed their displeasure with Xerox's decision not to retain Taylor in a letter-writing campaign to CEODavid Kearns.
Taylor was hired byKen Olsen ofDigital Equipment Corporation, and formed theSystems Research Center in Palo Alto. Many of the former CSL researchers came to work at SRC. Among the projects at SRC were theModula-3 programming language; the snoopy cache, used in theDEC Firefly multiprocessor workstation; the first multi-threaded Unix system; the first User Interface editor; theAltaVista search engine[20] and a networked Window System.
Taylor retired from DEC in 1996. Following his divorce (coinciding with his departure from Xerox), he lived in a secluded house inWoodside, California.
In 2000, he voiced two concerns about the future of the Internet: control and access. In his words:
There are many worse ways of endangering a larger number of people on the Internet than on the highway. It's possible for people to generate networks that reproduce themselves and are very difficult or impossible to kill off. I want everyone to have the right to use it, but there's got to be some way to insure responsibility.
Will it be freely available to everyone? If not, it will be a big disappointment.[4]
On April 13, 2017, he died at his home in Woodside, California. His son said he had suffered fromParkinson's disease and other health problems.[21]
In 1984, Taylor,Butler Lampson, andCharles P. Thacker received theACM Software Systems Award "for conceiving and guiding the development of the Xerox Alto System demonstrating that a distributed personal computer system can provide a desirable and practical alternative to time-sharing."[22] In 1994, all three were namedACM Fellows in recognition of the same work.[23] In 1999, Taylor received aNational Medal of Technology and Innovation. The citation read "For visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including computer networks, the personal computer and the graphical user interface."[24]
In 2004, theNational Academy of Engineering awarded him along with Lampson, Thacker andAlan Kay their highest award, theDraper Prize. The citation reads: "for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers.[25]"
In 2013, theComputer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow, "for his leadership in the development of computer networking, online information and communications systems, and modern personal computing."[26]
Authors who have interviewed dozens of Arpanet pioneers know very well that the Kleinrock-Roberts claims are not believed.
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