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TL;DR: How the modern computer came to be, courtesy of the visionary JCR Licklider. Incredible. None of this was an accident.

## Notes

• At dinner every night, Lick asks his kids: “What have you done today that was altruistic, creative or educational?”

### 1: Missouri boys

• Lick was quite the character
• Bringing psychology/acoustics background to computing set him apart from others in the field
• Deep appreciation for how humans can perceive, adapt, make choices, etc.
• Studied psych at Wash U, Rochester, Swarthmore
• Worked at Smitty Stevens’ psycho-acoustics at Harvard during WWII
• “No one was a stranger to him”

### 2: The last transition

• Claude Shannon writes “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” in 1937, first use of relay circuits as logic gates which could decide
• “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” has just the kind of cerebral exuberance you’d expect from a very bright twenty-one-year-old. Shannon’s thesis is downright fun to read—and strangely compelling, given what’s happened in the six decades since it was written.
• Arguably most influential master’s thesis of the century, laying the theoretical foundation for computer design
• Introduces the idea of logic via relays and switching circuits
• At MIT
• Switching is a method to forward data packets coming in from the sender to the receiver at the destination address. Circuit switching and packet switching are the two most popular methods of switching. In circuit switching, data is transferred on a dedicated channel that is to be established between the sender and the receiver using a dedicated point-to-point connection. In packet switching, data is split into small units called packets with each packet being associated with a header containing signaling information about the source and destination nodes. The packets are transmitted independently and are processed at all intermediate nodes before reaching their destination. At the destination, the data packets are extracted and reassembled to get the original message.
• Grace Hopper finds the first bug in the summer of 1945. A moth had gotten crushed by a relay switch in the Mark II (IBM)
• von Neumann is the Einstein of mathematics: father of game theory, logic, and more
• Crazy memory: could recite the entire opening chapter of A Tale of Two Cities
• VN interesects with Turing
• 1936: Turing publishes his paper on Turing machines
• If a human mathematician can get there, a machine can get there. No matter how clever its design, no machine can do more than Turing’s. Given enough time and memory capacity, the lowliest handheld PC can do anything the mightiest supercomputer on the planet can.
• 1943: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts come up with the neural network model at University of Chicago: model the brain as a big circuit made of neurons, each neuron receives input from other neurons, if total stimulation passes a threshold, neuron will “fire”
• VN starts sketching his architecture and is influenced by McCulloch and Pitts
• Uses their notation
• Five functions: input units, output units, CPU, memory, ALU
• Von Neumann architecture is a concrete implementation of a Turing machine
• Simplest scheme possible: fetch, execute, return.
• EDVAC/ENIAC in 1947 introduce the concept of the stored program. Just treat propgram instructions as another type of data. Separate problem-solving from hardware
• SOFTWARE

### 3: New kinds of people

• Vannevar Bush introduces the Memex
• “Memory index”
• Hypothetical proto-hypertext system
• Users copy and exchange trails of data
• Also hires Claude Shannon to maintain the Differential Analyzer which sparks the following
• This thing solves differential equations
• Claude Shannon has a fundamental theory of communication
• Information source: thing generating message (person, computer)
• Transmitter: changes message into signal (voice->sound wave, telephone-> electric signal, etc.)
• Channel: medium conducting signal (air, telephone wire, etc.)
• Receiver: instrument that take signal and tries to reconstruct message (ear, other telephone, etc.)
• Destination: thing the message is intended for
• Norbert Wiener: first “skeptic” of new computer technology. Cautious optimist
• “The first indsutrial revolution, the revolution of the dark, satanic mills, was the devaluation of the human arm by the comptetition of machinery. The moderd industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions.”
• Vision of information age: it tied together communication, computation, and control
• This is “cybernetics”: study of control and communication in the animal and machine

### 4: The freedom to make mistakes

• 1950: MIT physicist George Valley committee to upgrade Pentagon air defense strategy
• Two recommendations: sub-contract to a technical organization. Use digital computers to cordinate surveillance, target tracking
• Project Lincoln’s goal of understanding how machines and humans could work together as a system was just an extension of Lick’s own inner quest: understanding how the human brain itself worked as a system.
• Got the best psychology students in the country
• Indeed, Lick was already honing the leadership style that he would use to such effect a decade later with the nationwide computer community. Call it rigorous laissez-faire. On the one hand, like his mentor Smitty Stevens, Lick expected his students to work very, very hard; he had nothing but contempt for laziness and no time to waste on sloppy work or sloppy thinking. Moreover, he insisted that his students master the tools of their craft, whether they be experimental technique or mathematical analysis. On the other hand, Lick almost never told his students what to do in the lab, figuring that it was far better to let them make their own mistakes and find their own way. And imagination, of course, was always welcome; the point here was to have fun.
• Lincoln Lab + IBM collaborate on SAGE, the Semi-Automated Ground Environment, in 1954
• Enormous impact on the history of computing
• Brought brightest computer minds to MIT
• Billions of $of Pentagon money helped IBM become the biggest computer manufacturer in the world • Brought real-time computing to the business world • Planted the seed of the idea that computers and humans could work together and be more effective than working separately • Turing writes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950 • Thinking machines: what does it mean to be a machine, and what does it mean to think? • Turing test: if a computer is indistinguishable from a human via chat interface, it is thinking • Accused of being gay, put on estrogen treatment, commits suicide in 1954 • von Neumann gets bone cancer and dies in 1957 :/ • Surrounded by 4 members of the cabinet and all military chiefs of staff at time of death because he was so important to the country’s nuclear weapons program • George Miller is a psychologist who worked with Lick • Disagreement with the behaviorist movement. Behaviorists say that any internal states are inaccessible to outside observers, so the only way for organisms to be understood is by cataloging observable inputs and outputs • Miller focuses on cognitive processes. Starts the field of cognitive psychology with Noam Chomsky, and this replaces behaviorism. Invented the term “chunk” to apply to units of things you can remember • Chomsky attacks behaviorism using language: how can you avoid talking about mental states when the whole point of language is to communicate things like ideas, images, feelings? • Language has almost infinite combinations of expression • There is a structure to sentences, which behaviorists cannot account for • The pinnacle of all possible mathematical machines – the Turing machine – is also the baseline, the minimum for human cognition. This is part of a hierarchy • Allen Newell and Herbert Simon work on the Logic Theorist in 1955 • Solve mathematical proofs • Have to use heuristics because there is a combinatorial explosion of possibilities • The unique power of heuristic reasoning lies in its ability to cope with the complex and the unexpected, to make acceptable choices when there isn’t enough time to make the ideal choice, to hunker down and keep on going when a precisely defined algorithm would be overwhelmed by the combinatorial explosion. In effect, heuristic reasoning is what allows us to go through life in a chronic state of controlled panic. (L3380) • Trace the progression of ideas: • mid-40’s: after cybernetics, we understand that a computer can have memory through the mechanism of feedback • After McCulloch and Pitts, we can understand that the brain uses neuron activations to process information • After Chomsky and Newell and Simon and Miller, we know that reasoning can come from information processing through heuristics. This is the birth of cognitive science • “Logic Theorist was a demonstration that you could have artifacts that would behave intelligently. Even if you didn’t believe the further assumption that the way the computer did it was the same way we do it, this in itself was enough to free the psychological imagination. If you talk about the computer’s having a memory, then certainly the behavioristic ban on concepts like memory was no longer necessary. And if a computer could be prepared to anticipate any one of n alternatives, then certainly the ban on expectations was no longer valid.” - Miller • Wesley Clark working on a computer called the TX-2 at MIT in 1957. Invites Lick to check it out ### 5: The tale of the fig tree and the wasp • TX-2 group realizes in 1955 that if computers are going to ever go mainstream, must replace vacuum tubes with transistors. Smaller, faster, cheaper. Vacuum tubes are too large and gave off a ton of heat and were unreliable • Transistors were new • Clark sketches TX-0 • Ken Olsen raises money to take transistor computers mainstream and starts Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) • Working with the TX-2 sparks idea for Lick • So, Lick wondered, what would happen if you put humans and computers together as a system? What would happen if you let the machines take over all those dreary, algorithmic chores they were so good at? How much of your time would be opened up for real creativity? • Empirically, he spent 85% of his “creative” time on clerical work • Could this be turned into some sort of symbiosis? • In 1956 Lick is persuaded to join a firm called BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman) as the director of psychoacoustics and engineering lab • He is given a lot of autonomy and set about building a dream team • “Lick collected people,” says his former student Tom Marill, who was struck by the way his mentor always tried to bring his favorites along as he moved from place to place. “He was very bright, he was very articulate, and because of that he was able to get very good people. They liked being collected.” • He buys a new IBM card machine to learn how to program • The IBM computer is woefully insufficient. Around the same time, DEC releases their first computer • It’s the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor) and BBN got the first one • Finally a serious cmoputer. 2x the price, 1000x the performance of the IBM LGP-30 • “There had never before been a machine that was this much in front of the competition. And never since. It was a singular event.” (Ed Fredkin) • Lick uses this computer to write educational software for his children • John McCarthy joined BBN • Never impressed by much :) • Invented the field of AI • 1956 6-week conference: “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” • Thought the Logic Theorist was sloppy. Wanted to build an Advice Taker that draws from a database of propositions etc. • Invented Lisp, interactive symbol-processing programming language • Static resource allocation wouldn’t work for AI because it is so dynamic • Lisp = List Processor • Functional programming. Most powerful and compelling feature • Introduced the idea of an interpreter • Allowed for composition of complex programs • Invented time-sharing • Idea “just popped in his head”. Seemed obvious to him. • Lick writes a paper called “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in 1960 • Incredible paper. Laid out the entire vision for US computer research • “The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorum [the fig wasp]. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative ‘living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms’ is called symbiosis. … The purposes of this paper are to present the concept [of] and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbioses.” • A relationship like having a colleague who can help you think when problems get hard • Knew way too much about the brain to be an optimist about AI. Pretty ambivalent. • Viewed programming as a profound activity. Solving programming problems can hint at the nature of intellectual processes • Loved the idea of a model: “any convenient simulation of reality” • Ok so let’s dive into MODELS • “Ordinary mathematical models are static models. They are representations in symbols, usually written in pencil or ink on paper. They do not behave in any way. They do not ‘solve themselves.’ For any transformation to be made, for any solution to be achieved, information contained in the model must be read out of the static form and processed in some active processor, such as a mathematician’s brain or a computing machine. A dynamic model, on the other hand, exists in its static form only while it is inactive. The dynamic model can be set into action, by one means or another, and when it is active, it does exhibit behavior and does ‘solve itself.’” The Curtiss Robin was a dynamic model in this sense, he explained: once the fan was turned on, it flew. It was active. The same was true of the analog electronic simulations he had once experimented with at the MIT acoustics lab. • In richness, plasticity, facility, and economy, the mental model has no peer.” Included among those mental models are images recalled from memory, expectations about the probable course of events, fantasies of what might be, perceptions of other people’s motives, unspoken assumptions about human nature, hopes, dreams, fears, paradigms—essentially all conscious thought. Of course, Lick and Taylor would continue, “[the mental model] has shortcomings. It will not stand still for careful study. It cannot be made to repeat a run. No one knows just how it works. It serves its owner’s hopes more faithfully than it serves reason. It has access only to the information stored in one man’s head. It can be observed and manipulated only by one person.” But if you could join mental models to computer models, Lick reasoned, and if you could get the two of them into just the right kind of symbiotic relationship, then you could overcome every one of those limitations. • Addresses complexity limitation by being able to handle huge amounts of data and represent knowledge as programs • Addresses the limitation of confinement of knowledge to a single head by allowing data to be displayed on many screens and viewed by many people • In addition, Lick wrote, this computerized system system would be of enormous help in meeting the challenge of “ordered information”: finding and applying the relevant research results, utilizing the expertise of outside consultants, coordinating the efforts of design engineers, analyzing a flood of test data, scheduling routine maintenance, planning for continual evolution and growth—and on and on. • By the beginning of the 1960s, then, a decade and a half before the microcomputer revolution began in the garages of Silicon Valley, and a full thirty years before the dawn of the Internet Age, the air around Cambridge was already alive with the essential ideas: • graphics-rich personal workstations and the notion of human-computer symbiosis • time-sharing and the notion of computer-aided collaborative work • networks and the notion of an on-line community • on-line libraries and the notion of instant, universal access to knowledge • computer languages and the notion of a new, digital medium of expression. • MIT Model Railroad Club become the first “hackers” in Spring 1959 after participating in McCarthy’s first-ever programming class • “hack” comes from MIT slang for a practical joke • Wrote little software like number converters, audio playing, etc. ### 6: The phenomena surrounding computers • Eisenhower consolidates all space research under ARPA in 1957 (Advanced Research Projects Agency) • In 1962 Lick becomes director, one year leave of absence from BBN. Came with System Development Corporation contract ($6M), so his budget was $10M. Moves to Washington • Didn’t like the SDC batch processing approach, needed them to buy into time sharing • Brought MIT folks to Santa Monica in November and convinced them time sharing was better • Starts assembling the TEAM • Traveled around everywhere trying to get talent together from universities • Wanted proposals for computer research. Carnegie, RAND, Stanford, Berkeley • One proposal that ended up on his desk was from Douglas Engelbart • FLASH-1: The difficulty of mankind’s problems was increasing at a greater rate than our ability to cope. (We are in trouble.) • FLASH-2: Boosting mankind’s ability to deal with complex, urgent problems would be an attractive candidate as an arena in which a young person might try to “make the most difference.” (Yes, but there’s that question of what does the young electrical engineer do about it? Retread for a role as educator, research psychologist, legislator… ? Is there any handle there that an electrical engineer could … ?) • FLASH-3: Aha—graphic vision surges forth of me sitting at a large CRT console, working in ways that are rapidly evolving in front of my eyes (beginning from memories of the radar-screen consoles I used to service). • Within a few days, he said, the imagery of FLASH-3 had evolved into a vision of a general-purpose, computer-powered information environment. It would include documents mixing text and graphics on the same CRT display. It would include whole new systems of symbols and methodologies to help users do their heavy thinking. And it would include network-assisted collaborations to allow people to work together in ways that would be more effective than anything anyone had ever seen before. Within a few weeks he had committed his career to this vision, which he now called “augmenting the human intellect.” • Spoke about phases of human evolution: • Concept manipulation: non-verbal mental concepts • Symbol manipulation: words and numbers • Manual external symbol manipulation: graphic representations of concepts • Computers introduce automated external symbol manipulation: computers can run programs on their own • Bob Fano, Minsky, and McCarthy need a proposal to get money from ARPA to MIT. They come up with Project MAC for Multiple-Access Computer • This was a time-shared information utility • Needed to do it in 6 months. And without any ARPA funding yet • Corbato, Dennis, Greenberger, Minsky, Ross, Selfridgbe, Teager • Galactic network in April 1963 • Lick dictated to his Principal Investigators (Fano, McCarthy, Uncapher, Engelbart, Feigenbaum, Perlis) that they would have to join up with Arpanet • In short, he said, the various ARPA-funded sites would have to take all their time-sharing computers, once they became operational, and link them into a national system. “If such a network as I envisage nebulously could be brought into operation,” Lick wrote, “we would have at least four large computers, perhaps six or eight small computers, and a great assortment of disc files and magnetic tape units—not to mention the remote consoles and Teletype stations—all churning away.” • MIT time-sharing becomes a huge success because people begin sharing programs with each other • Tom Van Vleck writes the MAIL command • Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and thereby effectively gave it to the world. “Immediately,” says Fano, “people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other’s work.” • Lick decides to stay at ARPA • with rare exceptions—notably that first encounter with SDC—Lick was much more interested in being a mentor than in being a micromanager. As long as people made reasonable progress in the right direction, he would let them find their own way. • Things keep humming. He funds Newell, Simon, Perlis at Carnegie • Mouse invented at Stanford Research Institute • They were working on interactive computing • Needed a screen selection device • Finally, as they were all sitting around brainstorming one day, Engelbart came up with the idea of a little gadget that the user could roll around on the desktop with one hand while the cursor tracked its motion on the screen. Since it didn’t seem any sillier than some of the other things they had tried, Bill English went off to the SRI machine shop and made one. It was essentially just a block of wood about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with some rollers set into the bottom and a wire coming out the front end to communicate the motion of the rollers to the computer. Engelbart wasn’t totally satisfied with this contraption, either. And yet when the NLS team hooked up all the selection devices to their computer and gave users a choice, they discovered that people were consistently choosing the little gadget. The preference was so strong, in fact, that they eventually abandoned everything else; the gadget had become their standard. And by that time, of course—though no one on the SRI team can now remember when, or how, or why it started—they had all taken to calling the thing a mouse. It was more of a joke than a name, really. They would surely find a more dignified term in time. But until then, well, it just seemed to fit. • Around here, Lick sends out Intergalactic Network memo. This was the precursor to Arpanet, which was the precursor to the internet. • In short, he said, the various ARPA-funded sites would have to take all their time-sharing computers, once they became operational, and link them into a national system. “If such a network as I envisage nebulously could be brought into operation,” Lick wrote, “we would have at least four large computers, perhaps six or eight small computers, and a great assortment of disc files and magnetic tape units—not to mention the remote consoles and Teletype stations—all churning away.” Lick went on to discuss many examples of how people might use such a system, as well as the technical challenges of bringing it into being. At one point he even described something strikingly similar to the migratory Java applets that would appear at the turn of the millennium: “With a sophisticated network-control system, I would not [have to] decide whether to send the data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or bring in programs and have them work on my data.” The computer could make such decisions automatically, he said—meaning that software could float free of individual machines. Programs and data would actually live on the net. And so it went for seven pages, in what was arguably the most significant document that Lick would ever write. It’s true that his proposal was just an elaboration on the network of “thinking centers” he had envisioned in his 1960 “Symbiosis” paper—enriched, perhaps, by the more recent speculations around MIT about citywide information utilities. But in just a few years, this memorandum to the Intergalactic Network would become the direct inspiration for the Arpanet, which would eventually evolve into today’s Internet. • Meanwhile, things humming along at Project MAC • Working on an operating system called Multics • Could run without interruption, multi-processor • In the meantime, System/360 by IBM is a batch-processing disaster • So IBM commissions a time-sharing approach. They hire Lick • “When you look at Lick’s legacy, two very distinct things stand out,” says Bob Fano. “One is that he was a very imaginative, creative psychoacoustics man. Second, says Fano, when Lick was presented with a miraculous, never-to-be-repeated opportunity to turn his vision into reality, he had the guts to go for it, and the skills to make it work. • Lick: It was more than just a collection of bright people. It was a thing that organized itself into a community, so that there was some competition and some cooperation, and it resulted in the emergence of a field.” ### 7: The intergalactic network • Bob Taylor is Lick’s biggest fan. Works for NASA. Helps Lick a lot when Lick is at ARPA • In 1965, Taylor proposes linking all 16 IPTO contractors together in one network • Timing is right because they are just starting to become operational • Obviously some pushback • Taylor was willing to let Roberts and the rest of the world believe anything they wanted—so long as the network got built. • ARPA would make a series of massive long-distance calls and just never hang up. More precisely, the agency would go to AT&T and lease a series of high-capacity phone lines linking one ARPA site to the next. A diagram of the resulting network would thus look something like a road map of the interstate highway system, • The farther a message traveled, the greater the chances that one or more bits would be garbled by static and distortion on the line. And in the digital world, one erroneous bit might easily spell disaster. Thus the digital postcards, or “packets,” in modern parlance. • So in sum, said Roberts, that was the plan: full-time access, messages divided into packets, and distributed control. Now, who wanted to help? • How to route stuff? • Wes Clark: routing computers are responsible for moving stuff • IMPs: Interface Messaging Processors • Simplify life for everybody. ARPA could take responsibility for designing and implementing the network proper—meaning the information highways and the digital interchanges—without having to worry that some contractor somewhere would mess up his site’s programming and thereby bollix up the whole system. And the contractors, for their part, could focus on one comparatively simple task—establishing a link from their central computer to the routing computer—without having to worry about all the ins and outs of all the other computers on the network. • The first RFC comes from SRI/Utah/UCLA/Santa Barbara meetings in ‘69. They were the first 4 members of Arpanet. • Around same time (1968) Engelbart gives the first demo of interactive computing at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in SF • BBN wins the right to build Arpanet • J. C. R. Licklider again and again took jobs that required him to be an administrator—and then was almost contemptuous of the skills it took to do those jobs right. • Made Project MAC almost go off the rails • Multics comes out in 1970 • Witness the fact that the Association for Computing Machinery would award Corbató its 1991 Turing Award, computerdom’s most prestigious honor. For all its complexity and delay, Multics gave living proof that a grown-up operating system was possible—that sophisticated memory management, a hierarchical file system, careful attention to security, and all the rest could be integrated into a single, coherent whole. In that sense, Multics was a prototype for virtually all the operating systems to follow. • Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie launch Unix in mid-1970s from Bell Labs • In 1972 Arpanet is released to the world at large at ICCC, International Conference on Computers and Communications, in Washington • A BBN engineer named Ray Tomlinson adds email as an add-on to Arpanet and it takes off • There are tons of ways Arpanet could have failed, but it didn’t • ARPA directorship style: progress, not progress reports • Larry Roberts starts the Network Working Group • Most democractic forum!! • These young researchers who built hardware, debugged software, got hands dirty, made the whole thing happen • People start leaving ARPA for Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) • They join Bob Taylor there ### 8: Living in the future • George Pake hires Taylor to run the lab • Taylor’s motto was “Never hire ‘good’ people, because ten good people together can’t do what a single great one can do.” • “Taylor is very good at getting … a collection of extremely intelligent and opinionated egomaniacs to work together reasonably well without fighting each other,” he noted. “Damned if I know how! I can’t do it, but he does.”2 • All of the various gadgets had to be part of that system. And to achieve that goal, Taylor knew, he somehow had to get all these maverick geniuses moving in the same direction, without forcing everyone to move in lockstep. Somehow he had to give them a sense of purpose and group cohesion, without crushing spontaneity and individual initiative. Somehow, in short, he had to set things up so they would freely follow their own instincts—and end up organizing themselves. This is arguably the fundamental dilemma of modern management, not to mention the fundamental political challenge in any democracy; leaders have been grappling with it for centuries. • And when the arguments got heated, which they often did, the minister’s son would do his best to convert a “class-one” disagreement—one in which the combatants were simply yelling at each other—into a “class two” disagreement, in which each side could explain the other side’s position to the other side’s satisfaction. You don’t have to believe the other guy, he would tell them. You just have to give a fair account of what he’s saying. And it worked. • LOVE THIS!! • Bill English. Alan Kay • Kay was a very insubordinate person • Had the idea to include procedure for unpackaging data with the data itself • Object-oriented programming!! From a system called Simula where everything was described in nouns and verbs • “For the first time,” he recalled, “I thought of the whole as the entire computer and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers, as time-sharing was starting to? But not in dozens. Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?” • Kay: Dynabook • Cerf and Kahn: TCP/IP ### 9: Lick’s kids • Back in his natural habitat of Tech Square, meanwhile, he had reverted to being Lick at his best: not functioning as a manager and paper pusher, a role in which he was a disaster, but serving as visionary, teacher, mentor, and friend. Around the late 70’s • In the mid 70’s, the “whitecoats” start to get overrun by the hobbyists • Hardware: could buy cheap, less-powerful computers and run them all the time (PDP-8, PDP-11, etc.) • Software: Unix!! Built with hacking in mind • A response to the complexity of Multics • Sweet, quick, and clean • Then they released C as well, and all of a sudden, tons of people could program • Then began the Usenet migration • Started having user groups • “Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.” - Taylor and Licklider, 1968 • They were the spiritual brothers of the MIT hackers and the freewheeling Unix mavens. They were the people who had been ham-radio operators and/or stereo buffs since they were teenagers, often using equipment they had built themselves from mail-order kits, or from scratch. They were the guys who had gotten intrigued by the minicomputers they’d encountered at work or at school. And for no “logical” reason whatsoever—certainly none that they could explain to their spouses—they were the people who wanted computers of their own at home, to play with, to experiment with, to experience. Enter the Altair. • Altair was the first commercially successful microcomputer • Received over 10k orders, expecting only a few hundred • Bill Gates and Paul Allen write Altair BASIC • Eventually the founder, H. Edward Roberts, sold out to a big hardware company because he was so exasperated with the “soap opera”. He became a doctor • Apple Computer Company was next in line • Founded by Homebrew Computer Club members • Apple II had a ton of commercial success • On the software side, Microsoft releases MS-DOS operating system • Microcomputer revolution goes huge into the 80s • So there it was: the “personal” part of the personal-distributed-computing paradigm was diffusing outward in the form of workstations, while the “distributed” part was doing the same in the form of Ethernet. • Ethernet standard is an agreement licensed to Intel and Xerox. Initially proposed by Gordon Bell at DEC • That left the Smalltalk graphical user interface, together with all the other Alto software—the embodiment of computing as a medium of expression and exploration. But this idea was making its way into the world, too, thanks to a fateful show-and-tell at the very end of the 1970s. • Steve Jobs’s visit to PARC has become something of a mythology • When Jobs and his top engineers finally showed up for an afternoon visit in December 1979, the presentation was as minimal as Goldberg could make it. She and her Smalltalk colleagues gave Jobs and company the standard visitor’s tour: the Alto, the mouse, Bravo word processing, some drawing programs—nothing that the whole world hadn’t seen before. And afterward their guests departed, apparently satisfied. Two days later, having realized almost at once that they’d been shortchanged, Jobs and his crew showed up in the PARC lobby with no advance warning. They wanted to see the good stuff, they said—now. There ensued several hours of argument between the Smalltalk team and its bosses. But in the end, after a direct order, with Xerox headquarters’ backing up XDC, a red-faced Goldberg did indeed show Jobs and his people the good stuff. This included education applications written by Goldberg herself, programming tools created by Larry Tesler, and animation tools cooked up by Diana Merry for combining pictures and text in a single document—all of it increasingly irksome. • And that was the essential tragedy, he says: whereas headquarters understood marketing but not computers, the wizards out on Coyote Hill Road understood computers but not marketing. They had gone into the design process believing fervently in the PARC vision, in personal distributed computing as a whole, integrated system. They knew that it far transcended anything else on the market. And they couldn’t imagine that customers would want anything less. They’d also been given to understand that cost was no constraint: their target was the corporate world, the Fortune 500—scale customers that were used to shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for computer equipment. The result was an unfettered exuberance that led the Star’s designers into at least three critical errors. The first and most obvious was a rampant case of feature-itis: they loaded up the Star software with every neat thing they could think of, until it had grown to roughly a million lines of code and was at the ragged edge of what the 1981-vintage hardware could support. Indeed, that was the first thing users noticed: the Star was painfully, maddeningly sloooow. • Also: made it a closed system • All software and hardware had to come from Xerox • Had to guess what customers wanted instead of tapping into wider community. No spreadsheet program on the STAR. Nobody at PARC ever thought to write one because nobody in a research lab ever needed one. Inverse of priorities of the business world • No inexpensive, low-risk entry path for customers. Minimal installation cost$100,000. Apple II was \$1500
• Passed up tons of chances to make something simpler