Dealers of Lightning

by Michael Hiltzik

  One reaches his home via a steep climb up a hillside to the west of Palo Alto, past the ridgetop thoroughfare known as Skyline Drive. It was ter­rifying to imagine him careening around diose hairpins in his new BMW, the one with the license plate reading THE UDM (for "The Ultimate Driv­ing Machine"). At the front door of a house densely hemmed in by oaks and Douglas firs, Taylor greeted me in slippers. Around us bounded his hyperactive giant poodle, Max. "Down, boy! Go lay down!" Taylor com­manded. The dog humored his master for about five seconds before get­ting up to rampage again, about as tractable as Taylor must have been when confronted with a distasteful injunction from his own bosses.

  From his comfortable living room one can peer down through the win­dows on either side of a pale stone fireplace toward the Hoover Tower of Stanford University, six miles away as the crow flies and eleven by road. PARC is invisible from this vantage point, except perhaps in Taylor's imagination. Divorced, his three sons grown and employed, he lives alone in this aerie and spends a certain amount of time fighting the last war. For him the world is easily divided between the geniuses he employed and those from whom he straggled to protect them.

  I asked him to articulate the common theme lurking behind the great innovations achieved under his leadership. These included the ARPANET, the embryonic Internet he conceived and financed as a Pentagon grantmeister before joining PARC, and the idea of the per­sonal computer, linked into a local network and equipped with a high- quality interactive display.

  He settled back, slippers on the coffee table. "I was never interested in the computer as a mathematical device, but as a communications device," he said, then paused meaningfully, as if to suggest that I would almost have had to live within the military-industrial complex of the 1960s to understand how revolutionary a world view that was. The his­tory of the digital computer up to then was that of a glorified calcula­tor. A mainframe taking up half the floor of a large office building could run a payroll, balance the books of a billion-dollar corporation, calculate in split seconds the optimum trajectory of an artillery shell or a manned spacecraft aimed at the moon. But it was a mute self- contained machine that received its questions via teletype or stacks of punch cards and delivered its answers in the same way.

  "The notion of a human being having to punch holes in lots of cards, keep these cards straight, and then take this deck of what might be hun­dreds and hundreds of cards to a computer . . . You come back the next day and find out that your program executed up until card 433 and then stopped because you left out a comma. You fix that and this time the pro­gram gets to card 4006 and stops because you forgot to punch an O instead of a zero or some other stupid reason. It was bleak."

  Taylor perceived the need for something entirely new. "I started talk­ing functionally," he said. He asked himself: Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain? Obviously, the eyeball. If one then contemplated how the computer could best com­municate with its human operator, the answer suggested itself. "I thought the machine should concentrate its resources on the display."

  The computer traditionalists goggled at him. Most were mathemati­cians or physicists and thus perfectly content to employ calculators the size of cement trucks in quest of the next prime number. In 1968, when he and his mentor, the eminent psychologist J.C.R. Licklider, published an article entitled "The Computer as a Communications Device," the kind of interactive display he was talking about would have consumed memory and processing power worth a million dollars even if limited to the size of a small television screen.

  "It took me a couple of years to get them to come around. The design­ers said, the display? That's crazy, the display is peripheral! I said, No, the display is the entire point!"

  The rest of his career would be devoted to making sure they never forgot it.

  Bob Taylor was born in 1932. If one quarries his early life for keys to his temperament, two things stand out. One is his family's itinerant lifestyle. His father, the Reverend Raymond Taylor, was a Methodist minister in the West Texas of the Depression at a time when church policy was to relocate its ministers every couple of years. There would be two or three years in Uvalde a couple of hours north of the Mexican border, followed by a few in Victoria, Ozona, or Mercedes, none of these places notable for much except the wrenching poverty of field and ranch hands. Even today this is a region where one out of three residents lives below the poverty line.

  This went on until almost the onset of war, when his father took a job teaching philosophy and religion at the Methodist University of San Antonio. The frequent relocations had already left their mark on the boy. "You've got to make a new set of friends and interact with a new set of prejudices every time," he recalled. Living under the spotlight that falls on the local minister's son scarcely made things any easier. "There's the usual number of fights you have to go through to find out where you stand in the pecking order." By the time he was ten Bob Taylor had mas­tered the skill of establishing his place in the local hierarchy and holding it against all comers.

  The second element was something his mother, Audrey, revealed to him at a very early age. He had been adopted as a twenty-eight-day-old infant.

  "The first bedtime story I remember being told was about how I had been chosen. Picked out by my mother and father. All the other parents had to take what they got, but I was chosen. That probably gave me an undeserved sense of confidence." He chuckled in a rare moment of self- deprecation. But throughout his adult life few things would be as sacred to Bob Taylor as the process of selection. For him it was almost an anoint­ing. He would be the one doing the choosing, but he expected the select to feel invested with the same confidence he had felt, and the same pro­found gratitude.

  After the war he was ready for college—or rather, not ready at all. There was a short stint at Southern Methodist University ("I majored in campusology") followed by a break for the Korean War, which he spent as a naval reserve officer landlocked at the Dallas Naval Air Station. The G.I. Bill paid for a berth at The University of Texas, where he followed an eccentric course of study for another two years. "One day in 1956 I real­ized I'd been in school an awfully long time. I walked into the Deans office to find out what it would take to graduate. They checked and said, 'If you take these two courses you can graduate next semester. Your major will be psychology and you'll have minors in mathematics, English, phi­losophy, and religion.'" In truth it was not quite as haphazard as that. He stayed long enough to earn a master's in sensory psychology, the study of how the brain receives input from the senses. The year 1961 found Bob Taylor in Washington, D.C., which he had reached by a circuitous route. After leaving UT he had briefly taught at an experimental boarding school run by a friend outside Orlando, Florida. But the arrival of his second and third children, twin boys, quickly put an end to life as a dormitory housemaster on $3,600 a year. He found a job at Martin Aircraft, which was building the mobile missile system known as Pershing at a nearby plant. A year later he jumped to a better-paying post with a Maryland company designing flight simulators for the military. What caught his attention here was the tremendous power of information delivered interactively. This was a principle every­one understood in the abstract, but got driven home only when they wit­nessed it in action: You could teach pilots from books and theory until your voice gave out, but find a way to place their hands on a joystick and their eyes on a simulated landscape and it was as though they were learn­ing everything for the first time.

  This job also led directly to his next stop. President Kennedy’s exhorta­tion to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade had the fledg­ling National Aeronautics and Space Administration scrounging for management talent wherever it might surface. Taylor, by lucky coinci­dence, had tried to sell NASA on a research program using one of his simulators to explore a wide variety of sensory inputs. NASA was intrigued by the idea, but even more by its proponent. The agency agreed to fund further work by his company, but only if he joined NA
SA as the project manager.

  Not yet out of his twenties, the rural preacher's son was in the thick of the most important government crash program since the Manhattan Project. He met with the original seven Mercury astronauts, the era's reigning national heroes, and witnessed space shots first-hand. But such thrills soon paled. NASA and the Mercury program might appear the apogee of scientific glamour to a public devouring the polished hagiographies of the seven astronauts in Life Magazine, but the truth was less splendid.

  "We said we were going to the moon, but we were a hell of a long way from getting there," Taylor recalled. "It was mostly engineering, and sometimes fairly pedestrian engineering. It wasn't science, and I was much more interested in science."Deep down he was looking for a way out. He glimpsed it one day in 1962 when he received an unexpected invitation to an interagency meet­ing on computer technology. The summons came from the Pentagon, or more specifically from J.C.R. Licklider, an MIT behavioral psychologist who had taken charge of a new program at ARPA, the Defense Depart­ment's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Taylor knew Licklider only by his forbidding reputation, which had been forged in the same spe­cialty, psychoacoustics—the study of the psychology of hearing—in which Taylor had done his master's thesis. What he did not anticipate was that Licklider would compliment him on his thesis during their first meeting. "I was thirty in 1962, and he was internationally known," Taylor said. "It floored me that he knew who I was."

  In those days ARPA did science, not engineering. Founded in the nationwide panic that followed the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, the agency at first focused almost exclusively on missile physics—specifically, how to bring the United States quickly up to par with the Soviets in shooting projectiles into Earth orbit. By 1962, how­ever, when Licklider was tapped to run a new Information Processing Techniques Office, or IPTO, the urgency had waned. Whatever mili­tary orientation ARPA still harbored was visible only as a sort of artifact, as when Licklider discovered by accident that one "cloak- and-dagger" project under his nominal jurisdiction was so highly classi­fied even he was not cleared to know what it was. ("That made me nervous," he admitted later.)

  ARPA had refocused itself on civilian research in broad scientific areas, some of them having only tenuous relevance to national security. "I did not feel much pressure to make a military case for anything," Licklider told an interviewer years later. Of course, the Pentagon did expect that the agency's work might serendipitously lead to solutions of some of its technical problems, such as the vexing issue of "command and control": how to employ effectively the immense volume of infor­mation generated on a battlefield to manage the armed forces' increas­ingly elaborate weapons systems.

  For years the military had viewed this issue in terms of training the human beings with their fingers on the triggers. Licklider informed his bosses that the real solution lay in making the machine meet the human halfway. This was something he called "man-computer symbiosis," a sub­ject on which he happened to have published a paper two years earlier. Traditionally, problems had to be written and presented to the computer very carefully so the machine would understand every step. One tiny error, and all computation would cease. Try planning a battle under these conditions—you would be obliterated before reaching the second step in the process. But what if the system were designed so the computer was no longer a mute data manipulator, but a participant in a dialogue— something, he had written in that paper, like "a colleague whose compe­tence supplements your own?"

  Nothing like that was possible given the technology of the time, but it could be foreseen. "Every time I had the chance to talk, I said the mis­sion is interactive computing," Licklider said. "I thought, this is going to revolutionize how people think, how things are done." He promptly allo­cated most of the money in his budget to its pursuit.

  Licklider was a tall Midwesterner whose owlish glasses camouflaged a warm and pleasant personality. He loved nothing more than bringing people together and insisted that even new acquaintances address him as "Lick." A few months after joining ARPA he convened his summit of government agencies with computer research projects in their bud­gets. The group was an august one, encompassing not only ARPA and NASA but the research arms of the Navy, Army, and Air Force; the National Institutes of Health; and the National Science Foundation. When Lick opened the session by describing his own "very modest" program he left no doubt about who stood at the top of the computer funding pyramid. His $14 million budget, which already supported projects at MIT, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon University, was larger than those of all the other agencies combined.

  Licklider's program launched the golden age of government-funded computing research. Very soon he had established a full stable of academic scholars entitled to come back to his well whenever an appropriate new line of study struck their fancy. And Licklider defined "appropriate" broadly. He understood that computer research differed from traditional sciences like physics and chemistry, which lumbered incrementally from discovery to discovery, building on centuries of theory and experiment in a process that resembled geological accretion. Computing, by contrast, was young and explosive, driven forward as though by a series of pistol shots, eveiy technological innovation inspiring a headlong leap ahead.

  His Information Processing Techniques Office accordingly awarded its contracts without any of the bureaucratic paperwork other agencies required. Recalled Wes Clark, who had introduced Licklider to his first digital computer—the Clark-designed TX-2—when they shared an office floor at MIT "I almost felt as though I was called up from time to time to see if I wouldn't be willing to take another quarter of a million dollars off their hands."

  By the time he left IPTO in 1964 to return to MIT, Licklider had set in motion numerous trailblazing projects aimed at making the computer more accessible to the user. Studies in graphics pointed toward new ways of displaying computer-generated information. There were initiatives in computer networking and new programming languages. Systems to reor­ganize the computer's memory and processing cycles so it might serve many users simultaneously—which was known as time-sharing— brought the per-session cost of building and running these enormous contraptions down to a level that even midsized and small universities could afford.

  Lick's successor seemed tire perfect man to manage this expanding program. Ivan Sutherland was a brilliant MIT graduate who happened to be serving with the Army as a first lieutenant. Only twenty-six, he had already amassed an enviable research record, the crowning achievement of which had been the development of the first interactive computer graphics program. Known as Sketchpad, the system allowed a user to draw highly detailed and complex drawings directly on a computer's cathode-ray screen using a light pen and store them in memory. Among tire bonds uniting Lick and Sutherland was that the latter had designed Sketchpad during a protracted series of half-hour sessions on that very same TX-2 computer. Licklider left Sutherland with a $15 million budget, a workload that had grown far beyond what a single man could handle, and a suggested deputy: Bob Taylor. At first glance he was a strange choice. Taylor had never taken an advanced course in computing. He would never be able to design hardware or write a software program. But he displayed two qualities Licklider found appealing: an instinctive grasp of the promise of man-computer interaction, and an exceptionally high degree of "people skills." Next to this, Lick and Sutherland figured, his inability to get down among the bits and electrons was scarcely significant. They could not have known that within a few short years Bob Taylor would outshine them both in his influence over computer research in the United States. The humble job of serving as deputy to a first lieutenant with a Pentagon staff appointment was about to set Bob Taylor on the path to his, and the computers, destiny.

  Ivan Sutherland spent scarcely eighteen months at IPTO. Late in 1965 Harvard offered him a tenured position. He was officially gone by June 1966 but unofficially much earlier. By January or February that year Tay­lor was already running IPTO all by himself.


  The apprenticeship had been short, but edifying enough. Taylor rapidly digested such important conventions of Pentagon life as the enor­mous significance of tiny gradations in rank. One day he learned drat his own new assistant, a twenty-three-year-old MIT engineer named Barry Wessler, was to be assigned the humble Chilian rank of GS-9. Too low: Taylor concluded the appropriate level would be GS-13. The difference was a trivial one in terms of pay, which was nearly the same for both grades. But Taylor reasoned that the higher rank would guarantee that Wessler got treated by the Pentagon’s brass hats as a seasoned profes­sional rather than a greenhorn. This was a distinction certain to return dividends day after day in terms of Wessler's interaction with military offi­cialdom. (Plus there would be the satisfaction of having squeezed Penta­gon rules until they squealed.)

  As Wessler recalled, "Bob worked by finding out what he couldn't do, and then going for it. He could have gotten me a level or two higher without too much trouble, but GS-13? That was off the scale. But he got it done."

  In contrast to the rigid protocol of the brass, ARPA's civilian chiefs left Taylor undisturbed to fashion his program as he chose. What he chose was distinctly an extension of Licklider's. Interactivity, time-sharing, graphics: All of Lick's pet preoccupations became Taylors. He also shrewdly adjusted Licklider's management style to fit his own extroverted personality. He would visit his grant recipients several times a year, but not solely to hear the researchers' obligatory progress reports. He was engaged in something more like community outreach, developing new teams, nurturing up-and-coming young researchers, cultivating an entire new generation of virtuosi.