现代计算机之父罗伯特W.泰勒去世，享年85岁

诸平

现代计算机之父罗伯特W.泰勒（Robert W Taylor，1932-2017）因患帕金森于当地时间2017年4月13日周四在美国加州伍德赛德的旧金山半岛社区（San Francisco Peninsula community of Woodside）的家中去世，享年 85 岁。罗伯特W.泰勒除了在创建计算机方面的贡献之外，在创建互联网方面也起了重要作用。是他的儿子库尔特·泰勒（Kurt Taylor）将家父去世的消息告诉了《洛杉矶时报》（Los Angeles Times ）和《纽约时报》（New York Times）记者。

罗伯特W.泰勒于 1932 年 2 月 10 日在达拉斯出生，28 天后，他被卫理公会牧师雷蒙德·泰勒（Raymond Taylor）夫妇收养。在南方卫理公会大学毕业之后，罗伯特W.泰勒前往美国德州大学读研。当时，他所学习、研究的实验心理学让他对人类与计算机的互动产生了兴趣。

1961年,罗伯特W.泰勒担任美国国家航空航天局（NASA）某项目经理,当时他负责直接管理向美国斯坦福研究院（Stanford Research Institute）的道格拉斯·恩格尔巴特（Douglas Engelbart）提供经费，帮助开发现代电脑鼠标。

1966 年，罗伯特W.泰勒在五角大楼正式开启了自己的职业生涯，在高级研究计划局(Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency，ARPA)的信息处理技术办公室担任主管。由于当时 ARPA 的通信是通过 3 台位于不同位置的计算机终端展开——一台在麻省理工学院（MIT）、一台在加州伯克利大圩额、一台在加州圣莫妮卡市，这使得他们的工作变得非常麻烦。于是，罗伯特W.泰勒想到将这些各自为营的计算机终端连接起来。得益于在大学时代学习的心理学，罗伯特W.泰勒根据人类的神经网络提出了一个构想并得到了领导的支持。

众所周知，阿帕网络（Advanced Research Project Agency Network，ARPANET）最终已演变成网络。正如罗伯特W.泰勒的预言,有限的交流工具会演变成一个互联系统,人们只要动动手指就可以获得从百科全书到投资理财，无所不包。几年后,罗伯特W.泰勒去了施乐公司，在其著名的帕洛阿尔托研究中心（Xerox Corp.'s famous Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC）工作。在此期间，他管控一个研究小组,帮助创建PC-Alto 计算机前身。

Alto为每个研究者提供了个人工作站,而不是共享一个房间大小的大型计算机。其设计采用图形用户界面,使得用户通过图标、窗口和菜单指挥计算机,而不是以计算机语言来输入文本命令进行计算机操作。此技术使微软Windows软件和苹果电脑的研发受到启发。而像史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs，1955-2011）、查尔斯·西蒙尼（Charles Simonyi）等先锋企业家都曾在与 罗伯特W.泰勒的对话中获得了为其在日后创造出开创性技术产品的灵感。罗伯特W.泰勒的工程团队还帮助开发以太网（ Ethernet）和文字处理程序（word processing program）即后来成为Microsoft Word。

硅谷斯坦福大学档案项目的历史学者莱斯利·柏林（Leslie Berlin）告诉《纽约时报》（New York Times）记者：“无论从任何角度看,包括从启动互联网到推出的个人电脑革命,鲍勃·泰勒（Bob Taylor）都是现代世界的一位关键架构师。”

1999年,罗伯特W.泰勒被授予美国国家技术与创新勋章（National Medal of Technology and Innovation）。分别在2004年和2013年,他和其他帕洛阿尔托研究中心（PARC）研究人员被授予德雷珀奖（Draper Prize），这是美国国家工程院为开发“第一个实用的网络个人电脑（the first practical networked personal computers）”而设立的奖项。当然在20世纪90年代,泰勒还运营着帕洛阿尔托数字设备公司的计算机系统研究中心（Systems Research Center in Palo Alto for Digital Equipment Corporation）。此实验室帮助创建了AltaVista，这也是最早的互联网搜索引擎之一。泰勒在1996年退休，他有3个儿子除了库尔特（Kurt）,还有埃里克（Erik）和德里克（Derek），并有3个孙子。

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Computer pioneer Robert W. Taylor dies at 85 - Phys.org

Robert William Taylor (February 10, 1932 – April 13, 2017), known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.^[2]

His awards include the National Medal of Technology and Innovation and the Draper Prize.^[3] Taylor was known for his high-level vision and invention of the "any" key: "The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication and choice, if you want to press any key. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography."^[3]

Early life

Robert W. Taylor was born in Dallas, Texas in 1932.^[4] His adoptive father, Rev. Raymond Taylor, was a Methodist minister who held degrees from Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Austin and Yale Divinity School. The family (including Taylor's adoptive mother, Audrey) was highly itinerant during Taylor's childhood, moving from parish to parish. Having skipped several grades as a result of his enrollment in an experimental school, he began his higher education at Southern Methodist University at the age of 16; while there, he was "not a serious student" but "had a good time."^[5] He then served a stint in the United States Navy Reserve during theKorean War (1952-1954) before returning to his studies at the University of Texas at Austin under the GI Bill. At UT he was a "professional student," he says, taking courses for pleasure. He finally put them together for an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology (1957)^[6], with minors in mathematics, philosophy, English and religion. While Taylor was trained as an experimentalpsychologist and mathematician, his earliest career was devoted to brain research and the auditory nervous system.

He subsequently earned a master's degree in psychology from Texas in 1959^[7] before electing not to pursue a PhD in the field; according to Taylor, "I had a teaching assistantship in the department, and they were urging me to get a PhD, but to get a PhD in psychology in those days, maybe still today, you have to qualify and take courses in abnormal psychology, social psychology, clinical psychology,child psychology, none of which I was interested in. Those are all sort of in the softer regions of psychology. They’re not very scientific, they’re not very rigorous. I was interested in physiological psychology, in psychoacoustics or the portion of psychology which deals with science, the nervous system, things that are more like applied physics and biology, really, than they are what normally people think of when they think of psychology. So I didn’t want to waste time taking courses in those other areas and so I said I’m not going to get a PhD."^[8]

After leaving Texas, Taylor taught math and coached basketball for a year at Howey Academy, a co-ed prep school in Florida. "I had a wonderful time but was very poor, with a second child — who turned out to be twins — on the way," he recalled.

Taylor took engineering jobs with aircraft companies at better salaries. He helped to design the MGM-31 Pershing as a senior systems engineer for defense contractor Martin Marietta (1960-1961) in Orlando, Florida. In 1962, he was invited to join NASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology as a program manager assigned to the manned flight control and display division after submitting a research proposal for a flight control simulation display.

Computer career

Taylor worked for NASA in Washington, D.C. while the Kennedy administration was backing scientific projects such as the Apollo program for a manned moon landing. In late 1962 Taylor met J. C. R. Licklider, who was heading the new Information Processing Techniques Office of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Licklider had done his graduate work in psychoacoustics as had Taylor, and published an article in March 1960, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," envisioning new ways to use computers.^[9] This work was an influential roadmap in the history of the internet and the personal computer, and greatly influenced Taylor.^[10] He met another visionary, Douglas Engelbart, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. Taylor directed funding to Engelbart's studies of computer-display technology at SRI that led to thecomputer mouse. The public demonstration of a mouse-based user interface was later called "the Mother of All Demos." At the Fall 1968 Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart, Bill English, Jeff Rulifson and the rest of the Human Augmentation Research Center team at SRI showed on a big screen how he could manipulate a computer remotely located in Menlo Park, while sitting on a San Francisco stage, using his mouse.^[11]

ARPA

In 1965 Taylor moved from NASA to ARPA, first as a deputy to Ivan Sutherland to fund a few large programs in advanced research in computing at major universities and corporate research centers throughout the United States. Among the computer projects that ARPA supported was time-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of using punched cards or punched tape in a batch processing style. Taylor's office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a terminal connected to the Berkeley Timesharing System at the University of California, Berkeley, and a third terminal to the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.^[11]

Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else, to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal. Sutherland returned to a teaching position, and by June 1966 Taylor was officially director of Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) where he directed the ARPANET project until 1969.^[12] Taylor had convinced ARPA's Director Charles M. Herzfeld to fund a network project earlier in February 1966, and Herzfeld transferred a million dollars from a ballistic missile defense program to Taylor's budget.^[13] Taylor hired Lawrence G. Roberts from MIT Lincoln Laboratory to be its first program manager. Roberts first resisted moving to Washington DC, until Herzfeld reminded the director of Lincoln Laboratory that ARPA dominated its funding.^[14] Licklider continued to provide guidance, and Wesley A. Clark suggested the use of a dedicated computer, called the Interface Message Processor at each node of the network instead of centralized control. ARPA issued a request for quotation (RFQ) to build the system, which was awarded to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). ATT Bell Labs and IBM Research were invited to join, but were not interested. At a pivotal meeting in 1967 most participants resisted testing the new network; they thought it would slow down their research.

A second paper, "The Computer as a Communication Device" published in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, lays out the future of what the Internet would eventually become.^[15] Their paper starts out: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face."^[15] The vision would take more than "a few years".

At some point Taylor was sent by ARPA to investigate inconsistent reports coming from the Vietnam War. Only about 35 years old, he was given the military rank equivalent to his civilian position: brigadier general, and made several trips to the area. He helped set up a computer center at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam base in Saigon. In his words: "After that the White House got a single report rather than several. That pleased them; whether the data was any more correct or not, I don't know, but at least it was more consistent."^[14] The Vietnam project took him away from directing research, and "by 1969 I knew ARPAnet would work. So I wanted to leave."^[14] For about a year Taylor joined Sutherland and David C. Evans at the University of Utah, where he had funded a center for research on computer graphics while at ARPA.

In 1970 Taylor moved to Palo Alto, California for his next historic job.

Xerox

Jerome I. Elkind from BBN was hired by George Pake to co-manage the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) at the new Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox Corporation.^[16] Taylor assumed he would run day-to-day operations, while Elkind assumed Taylor would be associate director.

Technologies developed at PARC between 1970 and 1983 focused on reaching beyond ARPAnet to develop what has become the Internet, and the systems that support today's personal computers. They included:

• Powerful personal computers (the Xerox Alto) with windowed displays and graphical user interfaces that were the basis of the Macintosh. Taylor's team built the computer itself, while a group by led by Alan Kay added the software-based "desktop metaphor.^[17]

• Ethernet, which networks local computers within a building or campus; and the first Internet, a network that connected the Ethernet to the ARPAnet utilizing PUP (PARC Universal Protocol), forerunner to TCP/IP.

• The electronics and software that led to the laser printer and the graphical programs that allowed John Warnock and Chuck Geschke to take off and found Adobe Systems.

• "What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) word-processing programs, such as Bravo that Charles Simonyi took to Microsoft to serve as the basis for Microsoft Word.

Taylor was noted for leading a weekly discussion of computer scientists at PARC, whoi would take turns leading a discussion about a myriad of topics. They would sit in a circle of beanbag chairs and open debate was encouraged.

Elkind was involved in a number of corporate and government projects. After one of Elkind's extended absences, Taylor became the official manager of the laboratory in early 1978. In 1983, integrated circuit specialist William J. Spencer became director of PARC. Spencer and Taylor disagreed about budget allocations for CSL and what was the most important research to pursue at PARC (computer science versus physics for example) and CSL's frustration with Xerox's inability to recognize and use what they had developed. Taylor and most of the researchers at CSL left Xerox.

DEC SRC

Taylor was hired by Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation, and formed the Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. 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; the first User Interface editor; the AltaVista search engine^[18]and a networked Window System.

Retirement and death[edit]

Taylor retired in 1996 and lived in Woodside, California until his death. In 2000 he voiced two concerns about the future of the Internet: control and access. In his words:

There are many worse ways of endangering a larger number of people on the Internet than on the highway. It's possible for people to generate networks that reproduce themselves and are very difficult or impossible to kill off. I want everyone to have the right to use it, but there's got to be some way to insure responsibility.

Will it be freely available to everyone? If not, it will be a big disappointment.^[3]

On April 13, 2017, he died at his home in Woodside, California. His son said he had suffered from Parkinson’s disease and other health problems.^[19]

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, Taylor received a National Medal of Technology and Innovation. The citation read "For visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including computer networks, the personal computer and the graphical user interface."^[20]

In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering awarded him along with Lampson, Thacker and Alan Kay their highest award, the Draper Prize. The citation reads: "for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers."

In 2013, the Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow, "for his leadership in the development of computer networking, online information and communications systems, and modern personal computing."^[21]

References

• M. Mitchell Waldrop (2001). The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking Penguin. ISBN 0-670-89976-3.

• Michael A. Hiltzik (April 4, 2000). The Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-88730-989-5.

• "In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider 1915–1990" (PDF). Palo Alto, California: Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center. August 7, 1990. Reprints of early papers with preface by Taylor