Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 163

Bob Taylor and Xerox PARC

Bob Taylor (see B.10.10 ) had a master's degree in psychology and
was working for NASA as a project manager when he was invited to the
Pentagon to meet Licklider. The two scientists had a shared background in
psychoacoustics but also shared a vision for the future of interactive com-
puting. When Licklider left ARPA in 1964, he persuaded Ivan Sutherland,
creator of Sketchpad, one of the first interactive graphics programs, to
leave MIT and take on management of the IPTO program with Taylor
as his deputy. Sutherland stayed only a short time so Taylor soon found
himself running the entire IPTO program. He continued to support the
embryonic U.S. computer science community and a vision of interactive
and networked computing. He organized annual IPTO research confer-
ences and gained an unrivaled personal knowledge and the trust of the
most creative individuals in the U.S. computing research community. This
served him well when he was appointed to recruit researchers for the
Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox's brand new Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC) that had just opened in June 1970.
PARC was the inspiration of Xerox's CEO, Peter McColough, who realized that the copier market
would soon become much more competitive with the expiration of one of Xerox's key patents. McColough
wanted Xerox to own what he called the “office of the future.” The new mission for Xerox was to control “the
architecture of information.” Taylor brought together a cast of computing superstars at PARC. These stars
included Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker, both rescued from a failed Berkeley start-up called the Berkeley
Computer Corporation, and Alan Kay, one of Ivan Sutherland's research students from the University of
Utah. Kay's vision was to build a “Dynabook” - “a notebook-shaped machine with a display screen and a key-
board you could use to create, edit, and store a very personal sort of literature, music, and art,” 33 - exactly
the sort of vision that Taylor and Licklider had wanted their IPTO program to generate. One more element of
the mix at PARC came from another of their investments, Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at the
nearby Stanford Research Institute.
Taylor wanted to incorporate elements of Engelbart's vision of interactive computing into PARC, so he
recruited Bill English, the engineer who had done the detailed design work for the mouse. Eventually others
from Engelbart's team followed, and the ideas of the Augmentation Research Center team and their NLS elec-
tronic office system became essential elements of PARC's own vision for interactive computing. At PARC, the
stage was set. Taylor believed that, having provided the researchers with the overall vision and funding, his
job was now to keep out of the way and let them do what they did best.
Taylor was a key player in the history of Xerox PARC ( Fig. 8.21 ) but was also a controversial figure.
Nevertheless, in his resignation speech he could fairly say:

Fig. 8.21. Lab Director Bob Taylor held
periodic informal meetings in the “bean-
bag” conference room where his Xerox
PARC staff presented their new technical
ideas. Speakers always received frank and
honest feedback from their colleagues.

Most people spend a lifetime without opportunities for pioneering completely new ways of thinking about
large collections of ideas. I have been fortunate to have been a leader in three: time-sharing; long-distance
interactive networking; and personal distributed computing. 34