Robert Taylor (computer scientist)

Robert Taylor was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1965-69), founder and associate manager of Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) (1970-77), manager of Xerox PARC CSL (1977-83), founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center (1983-96).

== Robert W. Taylor's 2004 Draper Prize Acceptance Remarks ==

The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize was presented to Mr. Robert W. Taylor, Director Emeritus, Systems Research Center, Compaq Computer Corporation, as well as to Dr. Alan C. Kay , Dr. Butler W. Lampson, and Mr. Charles P. Thacker "for the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers."

Before I address matters directly related to the 2004 Draper Prize, I ask for your indulgence while I state a few personal facts and give you some sense of my career. I was adopted when I was 28 days old by a Methodist minister and his wife in Texas, where I grew up and went to college. College was temporarily interrupted by some unexciting time in the Navy during the Korean War. In the late 1950s, after being a professional student with numerous majors and minors, I did a graduate thesis in psychoacoustics and earned a master's degree. In the process, I learned enough about computers to be repelled by the idea of punching holes in cards, taking them to a priest behind a glass wall, and then waiting hours or days for results. A now famous paper published in March 1960 by J. C. R. Licklider convinced me that there was a better way called "interactive computing." This realization, given to me by Lick, set the theme for the rest of my career.

By the early 1960s, after some experience with a flight-simulator company, I was a program manager for the NASA Headquarters Office of Advanced Research and Technology. While there, perhaps my best decision was to award a NASA research contract to Doug Engelbart's group at SRI. The invention of the computer mouse was one result of their work. Did you think NASA gave us only Tang and Teflon?

J.C.R. Licklider joined ARPA in late 1962 and founded the now famous Information Processing Techniques Office. This office supported most of the U.S. computer research throughout the 1960s and provided the funding base for the creation of academic computer science. Licklider was succeeded by Ivan Sutherland, and they suggested I join ARPA in 1965 as Ivan's deputy. When Ivan left soon after, I became the director. In February 1966, with the support of my boss, ARPA Director Charles Herzfeld, I launched my most important ARPA project—the ARPAnet.

In 1970 I founded the Computer Science Lab of the then new Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, called PARC, where I worked for 13 years. This is the period relevant to the Draper Prize, and I will say more about it later.

In 1983, Digital Equipment Corporation asked me to build SRC, the Systems Research Center, in Palo Alto. More than a dozen PARC people joined me there (the glory days at PARC were over). SRC developed an excellent reputation in the computer research community and had a number of achievements, of which web search technology, Alta Vista, is probably the best known. I retired in 1996.

From this sketch, perhaps you can see how fortunate I was, beginning with my adoption by loving parents. The importance of being in the right place at the right time cannot be overestimated. I was very, very lucky; and as has often been said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Sometimes I am asked why I never started a company. I was never interested in starting a company because I didn't want to work with the nonresearch people necessary to the founding of a company. I loved the world of research. Looking back, one of my greatest joys was that I could pick and choose my colleagues—and such wonderful colleagues they were!

And now, about the 2004 Draper Prize. Once upon a time and for many centuries, beginning with the first computer, the abacus, the purpose of computers was to solve arithmetic problems. With electricity, they could solve them faster, and the advent of the integrated circuit made them even faster, more reliable, and a lot cheaper. But they were still only arithmetic engines. Then a remarkable transformation occurred.

Xerox opened its Palo Alto Research Center in 1970, and it grew over time to about 300 people. Today, PARC is known for its innovative computer science research of the 1970s, but computer science was only a small part of its research investment. Most of it went into physics, materials science, and optics. But a few dozen computerists at PARC redefined the nature and purpose of computing, and their research put PARC on the map. The 2004 Draper Prize honors this research.

The four individuals named in this year's prize formed the cadre of that extraordinary group, which today reads like a "Who's Who" in computer science. In the last half of the 1960s, they were graduate students at a handful of universities, where, with support from ARPA, they built the first experimental interactive computer systems. From these, they gained insights into interactive computing that were not available to others. In the 1970s, when they were recruited to PARC, they shared a dream—that computer systems could be completely redesigned and that this redesign could enable personal interactions with text, pictures, and networking for millions of individuals. The dream promised to encourage creative potential and new forms of communication. The value of connecting people and their interests could dwarf the value of computing only for arithmetic.

The dream was not widely shared outside the group. The great majority of computing experts and leading computer manufacturers in the 1970s rejected these ideas as absurd. Some said, "No one wants it; the world doesn't need so many computers. What could I possibly do with my own computer?" It was asserted that there weren't enough people to maintain so many machines. Some calculated that the costs would be prohibitive or that it would be a profligate waste of valuable computer time. A Xerox senior manager once said to me, "If this is such a good idea, why isn't IBM working on it?" T he established computer manufacturers had their own products to protect, and the dream did not fit their visions of their businesses. So they ignored the new technology and suffered somewhat as a result. They became victims of what were later referred to as "disruptive technologies," and their suffering gave a certain, perhaps perverse, pleasure to those of us who believe that the punishment should fit the crime. When a company encounters a technology that could disrupt its business, it ignores it at its peril. If possible, the company should embrace, understand, protect, and nurture a disruptive technology, or else the company may be bitten—sometimes fatally.

The list of technical innovations from PARC that were disruptive to the computer companies of the 1970s included: the first operational internet; the first local area network; the direct precursor to Microsoft Word; the first graphical user interface; the first laser printer; the first client-server architecture; the first networked personal computer; and desktop publishing. Of these, the least disruptive to Xerox was the laser printer. That and the Ethernet were the only technologies on the list that Xerox developed into successful products. However, the laser printer created a billion dollar business that paid for their research investment many times over.

In the next 20 years, a number of new companies developed successful products based on the technologies created at PARC, and the world was changed. A list of these companies includes Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, 3Com, and Sun, among others. By the mid 1990s, the Internet, which was fundamentally dependent upon all these products, was in full swing and growing. The result is arguably one of the greatest and most beneficial engineering innovations of the twentieth century, as influential as the automobile, the airplane, and television and, perhaps, just ahead of duct tape and Post-It notes , which have also been very beneficial.

This story began with "once upon a time," and if we keep our perspective, we might just "live happily ever after." Thank you, National Academy of Engineering, for recognizing this work!

National Academy of Engineering Website http://www.nae.edu/NAE/awardscom.nsf/weblinks/LRAO-5X4TSP?OpenDocument