December 20, 1999
An Internet Pioneer Ponders the Next Revolution
By JOHN MARKOFF
he Internet has many fathers, but few
deserve the label more than Robert W.
Taylor.
In 1966, as a director of the Pentagon's
Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Processing Techniques Office, Mr.
Taylor came up with the idea for the Internet's precursor, the ARPAnet. After authorizing money for research to develop a
nationwide computer network, Mr. Taylor
wrote a white paper in 1968, a year before
the network was created, with another
ARPA research director, J. C. R. Licklider.
The paper, "The Computer as a Communications Device," was one of the first clear
statements about the potential of a computer network.
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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
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Robert W. Taylor, the real "father" of the Internet.
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Even before coming to ARPA, Mr. Taylor
saw the computer's potential as an interactive device. As a research manager at the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he arranged financing for Douglas
C. Engelbart, a young researcher who used
the money at what was then called the
Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, to invent the computer mouse.
At ARPA, Mr. Taylor's office continued
financing Mr. Engelbart's Augment research group, which pioneered many of the
most important ideas in today's computer
industry. It was Mr. Taylor who financed
Mr. Engelbart's legendary demonstration
of advanced computer technologies -- including the mouse, windows, hypertext,
networking and teleconferencing -- at the
1968 Joint Fall Computer Conference in San
Francisco.
The demonstration left many of
the nation's best computer scientists, then
living in a world of punch cards and paper
tape, in awe.
Mr. Taylor's contributions did not end
there. After leaving ARPA and spending a
year at the University of Utah, he was hired
to direct the newly formed computer systems laboratory at Xerox's brand-new Palo
Alto Research Center.
From that laboratory
and several others at PARC came the personal computer, computer networking,
desktop publishing, laser printers, the
graphical user interface and modern word
processing.
Mr. Taylor, who never profited personally
from the commercial Internet boom, is now
retired at 67 and lives in Woodside, Calif. In
a recent interview, he reviewed these pivotal events in the computer industry and
looked to what the future might hold.
Following are excerpts from that conversation:
Q.
What led to your ideas about computer
networking?
A.
I discovered computers in the 1950's, and
the whole business of punching holes in
cards turned me off. I really wasn't interested in computers from the beginning as an
arithmetic engine. What struck me about
them really came home when I read J. C. R.
Licklider's 1960 "Man-Computer Symbiosis" paper. I said, "Yeah! Now we're talking!"
Q.
How did you come across that article?
A.
It appeared in an I.E.E.E. Transactions
journal that I subscribed to. I was
working as a systems
engineer at the Martin Company at the
time. That's when the
power of interactive
computing dawned on
me. I had other reasons to pay attention
to Licklider. I did my
thesis on psycho-acoustics and Licklider was world famous in that field, before he started to play
around with computers.
Q.
How did you meet
Licklider?
A.
NASA had approached me to become a program manager in 1961 to look
after research areas including flight displays and manned flight-control systems. I
told them they needed an area called simulation technology because we were going to
have to make huge investments in simulation, and they liked that idea.
In late 1962,
Licklider moved to ARPA and started this
computer research program. I was at NASA
and he was at the Pentagon. I had been
supporting Doug Engelbart's work.
Q.
This led to the mouse?
A.
Yes. You know, it's quite funny -- several
years ago NASA began looking for spinoffs
that their research had led to in the civilian
economy and they never realized that the
mouse was developed under a NASA contract. But Licklider, shortly after he took
over at ARPA, organized an informal committee of people in the government who
were supporting computer research. He invited me to come over and join the committee.
I walked into his office and right away
he started talking to me about my thesis. It
blew me completely away. How would he
know anything about my thesis? I was a no-name nobody graduate student. He wowed
me from Day 1.
Q.
What did you set out to do at ARPA?
A.
I began to think that if I was going to do
this for a while, I wanted to find some
particular program to measure my performance by. I wanted to put a nail on the
wall or whatever the proper metaphor is. I
wanted to make a difference. We had in my
office three terminals to three different
programs that ARPA was supporting. One
was to the Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica. There was
another terminal to the Genie
Project at U.C. Berkeley.
The
third terminal was to the C.T.S.S.
project that later became the
Multics project at M.I.T. We hadn't had these terminals very
long. But I had already seen a
very interesting thing. As these
three time-sharing projects
came alive and they collected
users around their respective
campuses, the only users they
had were local users because
there was no network to speak of.
All communications were local
except to ARPA.
Q.
What did you discover?
A.
The thing that really struck
me about this evolution was how
these three systems caused communities to get built. People who
didn't know one another previously would
now find themselves using the same system.
Because the systems allowed you to share
files, you could find that so-and-so was interested in such-and-such and he had some
data about it. You could contact him by e-mail and, lo and behold, you would have a
whole new relationship.
Q.
Were these first communities built
around mailing lists?
A.
Well, you had a directory, so you knew
how to send them e-mail, but you might only
know 2 or 3 people, and you would meet 20 or
30 through the computer.
It wasn't a static
medium. It was a dynamic medium. And
that gave it a lot of power.
Q.
It was all about community?
A.
There was one other trigger that turned
me to the ARPAnet. For each of these three
terminals, I had three different sets of user
commands. So if I was talking online with
someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to
someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about
this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal,
go over and log into the other terminal and
get in touch with them.
I said, oh, man, it's
obvious what to do: If you have these three
terminals, there ought to be one terminal
that goes anywhere you want to go where
you have interactive computing. That idea
is the ARPAnet.
Q.
When did you get the idea?
A.
I decided to do that in late 1965. In
February of 1966, I was officially the head of
the Information Processing Techniques Office. So I went to see Charlie Herzfeld, who
was the head of ARPA, and laid the idea on
him. The first funding came that month. 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.
Q.
Was the idea an immediate success?
A.
I had to go around and talk to our
contractors to see if I could get their cooperation -- and some of them were enthusiastic, and some of them saw it as an infringement on their computing facilities. They
said, "I don't want to share my [computing]
cycles with some guy across the country. I
don't have enough cycles as it is. Now you're
going to build something that allows people
to come in and use my machine?" That took
a while to bring people together.
Q.
Did you see right away that this would
have an impact broader than just a small
group of military-funded researchers?
A.
Oh, yeah, sure. It was obvious to some of
us that interactive computing was here to
stay. And by the late 60's, the personal
computer was obvious as well. By the time I
went to Xerox in 1970, I tried to get the guys
to build the Alto [one of the first experimental personal computers] and they built it
two years later, but that's a whole other
story.
Q.
Was there one shared vision?
A.
The model that some people were pushing
in those days for how this was going to
spread was that there were going to be
gigantic computer utilities. This was the
power utility model. I never bought that. By
the late 60's, Moore's Law was pretty obvious. It was just a matter of time before you
could afford to put a computer on everyone's desk. That was what I came to Xerox
to do.
Q.
How did you arrive at Xerox?
A.
I left ARPA in late 1969 after I knew that
the ARPAnet was up and running, and I
went to Utah for what turned out to be only a
year. When I was in Utah, I got a call from
George Pake, a physicist who was setting up
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. I had
the impression that he just wanted to pick
my brain. There was no discussion of a job.
He told me that Xerox was going to have a
research lab here in Palo Alto and part of it
was going to be devoted to computer research. The research group was going to
develop technologies that would be used at
S.D.S., a computer company that Xerox had
recently purchased. I said, "Oh, that's too
bad." He said, "What do you mean?" "Well,
you won't be able to get anyone who's any
good to come work here because there's
absolutely no respect for S.D.S. among the
best computer folks." They were floored.
They said, "What do you think we ought to
do?" I replied, "You ought to computerize
the office; everything that happens in the
office can be put on the computer."
Q.
If the personal computer has been the
foundation for the Internet, where will the
next major burst of innovation come from?
A.
Broadband networks. If you take real-time video and audio and you couple them,
and you imagine some kind of a chair that's
connected to this system that you sit in and
fly around wherever you want to go . . . .
Q.
How will we use these new technologies?
A.
You'll also be able to wear -- maybe not
in my lifetime but certainly reasonably soon
-- an unobtrusive device that will record in
full color and sound everything that you see
or point your head at, or, depending on how
many of them you have, everything that's
around you. And share it. Every waking and
sleeping moment in your life will be recorded. And you will be able to store and
retrieve it and do what you will with it.
Q.
How will that change the world?
A.
I don't know, but it will. There are obviously implications for privacy that will have
to be worked through. I'm actually more
concerned about nearer-term issues. I want
the Internet to become a right, not a privilege. I think we need a driver's license to
allow you to use the Internet, much like you
drive on the road today. If you misbehave on
the road, you get your license taken away.
Q.
Do you have a sense of what the future
will look like from a computer network point
of view?
A.
I can't help much about the future, I'm
afraid. I was a bad predictor of the future 30
years ago. I was sure that from the early
1970's, all the pieces were there at Xerox
and at ARPA to put the Internet in the state
by the early '80's that it is in today. It was all
there. It was physically there.
But it didn't
happen for years.
