Robert Taylor (computer scientist)

Robert W. Taylor (born 1932) was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1965-69), founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) (1970-83), and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center (SRC) (1983-96). Taylor is retired and living in California.

Background

Bob Taylor was born in Texas, the son of a Methodist minister. Taylor was trained as an experimental psychologist and mathematician and his earliest career was devoted to brain research and the auditory nervous system. After working for a defense contractor, Martin Marietta, and after he submitted a research proposal to NASA, Taylor was invited to join NASA in 1961.

Career

As a research manager at NASA, Taylor funded Douglas C. Engelbart's work developing the computer mouse.

J.C.R. Licklider and Taylor co-authored the seminal paper, "The Computer as a Communication Device" [cite journal|title=The Computer as a Communication Device|journal=Science and Technology|date=April 1968|first=Robert|last=Taylor|coauthors=|volume=|issue=|pages=|id= |url=http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/publications/taylor/licklider-taylor.pdf|format=|accessdate=2008-05-07 ] . Licklider's and Taylor's ideas and the funding from their group led to the creation of ARPANET, which later became the modern internet.

Taylor and Licklider were interested in the possibility of networking computers together to facilitate collaborative work and communications, and to share resources. Taylor has on numerous occasions said that the widespread belief that this work was done to make computer systems resistant to nuclear attack is completely false. The first three mainframe computers involved were at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), System Development Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Licklider exerted the most important influence on Bob Taylor, and if ARPA's Director Charlie Herzfeld allocated the budget at Taylor's urging, it was Lawrence G. Roberts, who Taylor was able to attract from MIT, who made the whole thing technically possible.

At CSL, Robert Taylor was in his element as a manager, encouraging collaborative, informal working structures among the researchers. CSL originated the Ethernet, the modern personal computer graphical user interface (GUI) paradigm, and object-oriented programming. It combined various of these ideas into the Alto, the prototype for the personal computer as we know it today.

Xerox management could not be convinced of the possibilities of personal computing, and eventually Taylor and most of the researchers left CSL. Taylor was hired by Ken Olsen of DEC, and formed the Systems Research Center. Many of the former CSL researchers came to work at SRC. Among the projects at SRC were the Modula-3 programming language; the snoopy cache, used in the Firefly multiprocessor workstation; the first multi-threaded Unix system, Taos; the first User Interface editor; and the first networked Window System, Trestle.

Awards

In 1984, Taylor, Butler Lampson, and Charles P. Thacker received the ACM 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." In 1994, all three were named ACM Fellows in recognition of the same work. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology "For visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including computer networks, the personal computer and the graphical user interface." In 2004, he won the Charles Stark Draper Prize together with Alan Kay, Butler W. Lampson, and Charles P. Thacker "For the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers."

External links

* [http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/frame.html?main=/bios/bio0146.html? Article from kurzweilai.net]
* [http://www.almanacnews.com/morgue/2000/2000_10_11.taylor.html? Building the Internet] A biography of Robert Taylor
* [http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/10.html? The New Old Boys From the ARPAnet] Extract from 'Tools for Thought' by Howard Rheingold
* [http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=8751640&srt=year&year=1984&aw=149&ao=SOFTWSYS 1984 ACM Software Systems Award citation]
* [http://fellows.acm.org/fellow_citation.cfm?id=1076264&srt=all 1994 ACM Fellow citation]
* [http://www.technology.gov/Medal/1999/recipients.htm 1999 National Medal of Technology citations]
* [http://www.nae.edu/NAE/awardscom.nsf/weblinks/LRAO-5WEUYY?OpenDocument 2004 Draper Prize citation]

References

2. Smith, Douglas K. and Alexander, Robert C., "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" (1999)