Alan Kay at the Internet 50th event in London

English (auto-generated) Click for settings

thanks for coming

everybody I'm Jim we're

very lucky that we've got four fantastic speakers I feel

so privileged and and been so lucky one of the reasons

Leonard said that we should put on an event in London is because

London played a key part that the in the early days of

the internet and particularly this next gentleman peter

kirsten CBE notice and

Peter's still a professor of computer science at

UCL who of course got departments based

here and Peter was the first person to

put a computer on the ARPANET outside of

the u.s. in 1973 as

well as other claims to fame he was is a key part

of creating if the Internet Protocol suite along

with Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and implementing

it in the mid 70s so we're going to show a short interview

that Peter and I did together last month and

then we're going to sit down with Peter and get some of his observations

we've

got a friend of mine an inspiration a

the Pasco serial digital entrepreneur

who set up the first internet cafe in London

in 94 I think it was supper digital think

tank cyber salon 97 really early in to ecommerce

she's going to be talking to us about the difference the web made

when it when the web became part of the internet

landscape and a broader set of people came on board

we're finishing

with plexus very own sage hug he's

the program director of lorca which is a cybersecurity

research team here at here

at plex all he's going to be talking about the opportunities

and challenges that total connectivity

bring along especially in the age of mistrust so really

looking forward to that but

starting off with Alan Cain he was a personal

computing pioneer and a bit of a legend

he's he's best known for creating the

Dynabook which was a carry-all device

a personal computer for kids of all ages but it's

kind of familiar and he came up with this concept

this idea in the late 60s while he was at the University of

Utah and he was

actually there when Utah became the fourth node on the ARPANET

after the University of

Utah I believe he went to work at Xerox

a huge amount of pioneering breakthroughs

the Dynabook came to life in the form of the alto but

hey created the ethernet they created laser printing

graphical user interface object orientated programming

modern computing as we know it

what thing people don't necessarily realize is

the overlap between the our community and Xerox PARC a lot

graduate students that were were sponsored by the

ARPA project ended up finding jobs at at

Xerox PARC and indeed the leader of up

to the information processing techniques office at

ARPA Bob Taylor ended up running Xerox

PARC so there's a big crossover and it's almost like

one one community so Allen's

going to be talking about the culture at Xerox PARC and

in the oppor community that led to such fantastic

breakthroughs in such a short period of time

the other thing people might not know as well is that

Alan is Tron and after

that kind of visit to Xerox

PARC bonnie mcbride the scriptwriter of of

tron basically made

alan the the the main character and here he is in

action and actually if you watched ron for the you

know the people are familiar with the film it's actually a metaphor

object orientated programming so what should again with that

with that in mind and the main character Tron is

actually user name is Alan one which was Alan's user

name at Xerox PARC I believe we're

not talking we're not a so much Tron and although

I'd like to we're here to talk about the culture at

Xerox PARC and and the ARPA community

that led to such a huge amount of innovation in a short period of time and

what we can learn from it and on that note I'm

gonna pass you over to our keynote speaker Alan

so

Jim asked

me if I could talk about the internet and also

about our current Park as he as he mentioned and could

o in just a couple of minutes please and of

course my reaction was well okay so

here it is in one

second

because I actually like history

and this is the minimal just for an exercise I put down the

minimal number of things that

need to be talked about too that got us to

the Internet and personal

computing and of course that's way

too much and this leads us to two ideas which

is this whole fortune teller

says I tell the future nothing easier it hasn't

happened yet so you can say anything you want and

by the way if you're feeling creative that's a good way to start just

tell a future you'd like to see happen and

you can make it happen but she also asked

who can tell the past and the reason

the past is hard to tell is it happened

in real time across an entire world and

what it means is any kind of compression

of that past is almost certainly

going to leave out something important including

as Goethe pointed out most

of the people who actually participated

in making something happen and this

is why we don't in in

my research community we have superheroes

or like most valuable players in sports but

in fact it's all of

the stuff that we did was done by teams

of various size and so

we try not to claim

this got invented first and that got invented

first it actually doesn't work very well

for instance most people here may not know because in

both television both America and the United States

claimed

to have invented television most

people don't know that the first image

television image ever put on a CRT was

actually done in Japan in the early

20s by a Japanese guy he understood

what a CRT could be and made

one that could show a television image

so having said that we

can start isolating different parts of

this thing for instance this is the radar part of it and

British radar is on the left hand side and American radar

is on the right-hand side the key idea here is

there are a couple of really important people Henry

Tizard was the most important person if

you want to know who was most directly

responsible for this country

not being lost in the Battle of Britain it was

Henry Tizard because in the early

30s he started worrying about Germany

when Hitler came to power he was a physicist

and he started poking

at people first looking for a death ray or

a directed-energy weapon and

the people he talked to said well that's too much power

but we might be able to detect planes coming and

so the

result of that was long before while

chamberlain was still appeasing and all of that where

a series of coastal stations all around the

eastern part of this island from the tip-top

of scotland all the way down the

bottom and when the german planes came over

they were detected and they could scramble the

raf to take care of them and

britain wound up winning

those battles and radar also

was the key technology for deep defeating

submarines and night bombing

so it was the key technology

that won the war for the Allies

and a lot of it happened here the

bosses of these two physicists let them do

what they wanted and they wound up inventing the cavity

magnetron which was the first electronic

device that could actually put out enough power at

a small enough wavelength to make

very even the

the detection of a periscope of submarine possible

and Tizard again

got together with Vannevar Bush in the United

States and Tizard convinced

the British government that the secrets

that Britain had instead of being barded

with the Americans they should just give them all to us and

expect that

goodwill and trustworthiness

would take care of everything else and he was completely right

so it just cuts through an enormous amount of

that you would see in almost any other

time and the magnetron was bought brought

to the United States and that set up this

enormous research and development effort at MIT

that made almost all of the radars that were

used in world war ii which were manufactured by

American companies and distributed and this was

set up in part by having British

scientists come over there and there's

one other little benefit at the very end

of the the war that Bush had been thinking about how

do you organize all of this stuff and he thought everybody

who dealt with knowledge should have a desk

like this a desk that holds

the equivalent of maybe

10,000 books worth of stuff that has scanners

as pointing devices

has hyperlinks this was called mimics this

look familiar today okay so this

is 1945 and many of the inventors

of the stuff that we have today read

what Bush wrote in 1945

so this is a direct this is an image

of something that everybody wanted to have

and people started looking to find out about it

okay British computing Turing

of course going all the way up to

Babbage and ADA at the top Bletchley Park which

they couldn't talk about but in fact the people at Bletchley

Park remembered what they did and that led

to a number of computers particularly the

Manchester computers and

the Brits were way ahead of the mayor during

the late 50s in the early 60s and unfortunately you

let IBM in and they kind of bought

out all the good stuff that was being done over

here and for as part of our story we

could just as well in 1969

and should be celebrating

Don Davies the National Physical Laboratory

Network because that started

working in 1969 also

and the

people working on network being were friendly

the u.s. got more of the credit than it deserved

in a way because there

are the resources to develop the stuff it into

the internet and make it larger but

intellectually it was kind of an even-steven thing and

there was a wonderful character by the name Louie

Azam in France who was also

instrumental and this here's Peter

we'll hear from him a little bit later he had a lot

do and I'm hoping he will tell the v80 story

what Jim calls ARPA

is basically open-ended

government research in the public domain most

of which was ARPA so this is a little bit

too complicated to

talk about and here's Xerox PARC he said he said a few words about that dark

spark was really an integral part of

this community everybody at Xerox PARC have gotten

their PhDs paid for by ARP and we'll talk about

that in a little bit and this whole

thing started out because this one guy Licklider said

early on computers are destined to become interactive

intellectual amplifiers for

everyone universally networked worldwide

so he said that in 1962 and

he got money

from the government because they liked him and he

started all of these things happening now if we

look at just the network aspects here and

combine the British and the American we

get something that's a bit like this that in the 50s

there were air defense systems

done in the u.s. that had displays

and pointing devices on them Lickliter saw

those and said what he just said

he decided to fund MIT to

make a computing utility because

this wartime system

was the kind of thing that pretty much everybody could

make use of it was networked together there are 25

different places and

that led like to say well we need an

intergalactic Network we want to connect up

everything and that got the romance that turned

into the internet started and Len Kleinrock never

been called Leonard in his life from

New York so Lenny

and California's called

Len he did some

important early work showing that you

could cue messages without congestion

he did not invent packets

but his messages were

were like what packets

eventually came to be and packets were

invented more or less independently by

Paul Baran and Don Davies one in the

US and one in the UK and this

led to two networks the ARPANET and NPL

net and as was mentioned oh

then in a wonderful

network called Aloha net which dealt with

the problem of how do you have the University of Hawaii

work over all the islands back

in the days when telephones were incredibly expensive and

the idea as well.you broadcasts it into the air and

Xerox PARC took that idea and made the

ethernet because a coax cable is actually

like what you broadcast rate

if you broadcast radio inside of a of a

cable you can do something like Aloha

net and then as was mentioned these

networks were connected for the first time in

1973 that Peter had a lot to do with

and then there are a lot of work

on internet working what we're celebrating not

internetworking we're celebrating

packet networking

in both places and

we can celebrate internet

working in a few years but

why not celebrate it now also

so they're Park it had its own

internet little-known fact and worked

on it and many people worked on it and then

there was the SR I bread truck what

doing here and I'll show you right

now so in 1976 this

is an outdoor beer garden near the Stanford

campus out in the woods still they're

called Zots rose Oddie's and in

october

this red

truck which inside had

a couple of pdp-11 s and radio

transmitters and it had a Mickey Mouse phone

and reason they had this is so they could prove

to the people in Washington that was using a standard telephone

so this is the maybe the first voice

over IP and the connection

was radio net linked into

the Bay Area packet radio network going

to s RI and then across the country on

the ARPANET to the to the East Coast and

why were they at this beer garden well of course

so they could drink beer while doing

their monthly report so here

they are with a teletype machine quaffing

the golden liquid trying to figure

it is that they should tell to the government sponsors that

the other and I happen to be there for

this and everybody had a very Merry time

that day because it all worked

so this is an early

example of internet working because it had to go

through a bunch of different networks in order to get to

Washington and maybe the the

date we really celebrate as the start of the internet

was the next year in 1977 which also

involved the bridge bread truck and it also involved

things that Peter did

over here to connect up several networks together

by satellite well there were these sponsors

so in the u.s. we have a Congress and we

have the Pentagon and Russians

gave us a gift in 1957

which is to get Americans

to do things for the only reason they do them which

is they were scared by

the way that's what happens over here so if you are

interested in why all this stuff happens at some

times and not others it's because regular people

don't want to do anything with boffins

unless they're terribly scared

because they really don't want to deal with

unusual people it's only when there's

a real threat of war that they start looking for unusual

people to try and find more ways

out of the dilemma so the Sputnik caused

ARPA to be created and in

the 60s the for our protectors were these guys

the first one of those funded

Licklider over here and

then a line of one guy

every year every two years through

the 60s and of course Congress wasn't

as bad as our Congress is now but you

can route how is this relevant tell me why this work

you're doing at ARPA is relevant to the Department of Defense

why are you spending this money and

what these guys would say these guys are

all scientists they weren't administrators these

were all scientists so what they would say is oh that's not

the right question to ask the right question to ask

is this going to help the United States or

this technology or our society or our culture generally

that's the question well if you

ask us those questions will tell you and Bob Taylor who

was a bystander there said

these are projectors would stand up to these guys in

a polite civilized way attack their

myopia because these are

per directors were scientific statesmen and he says

we have had too few of these people in that job since

then and an example it's

relevant to our story today is that in 66

Charlie Hertzfeld to ask Bob

well what do you want and Bob said well this

network is what I want to do and here's why and

Hertzfeld said okay you got it and that

conversation was a 15-minute conversation

and then Hurstville said well how much money do

this thing going and Bob

so about a million dollars which is about six

million pounds today you give it give us six

million pounds which will get it organized and

off the ground in Hertz

field said okay and Bob

said there was no ARPA order

anything for months maybe even a year they just started

doing it and started spending this money that is

how the internet got started

imagine trying to do that today imagine

how many reasonable people would be

put in the path of progress

and when the

Vietnam War started shutting this

funding down Taylor went to

find other funding which he found at

Xerox and he set up Xerox PARC and so this is

the lineage of the people who made our technologies

today possible not just the internet but also personal

computing and

if you want to read about this there's a website

the website of this meeting

that we have and you can just go to Internet at

50 comm and there's a link to

the Alan Kay references so

I have downloadable stuff and references to

read about this nobody should

escape the next

without reading about the Tizard mission of radar

in this country this is the book

about ARPA and Xerox PARC and

and there are some documents

also on the website that are written

at the time for instance one

of the great books of all time is this book written in 1953

about British computer so

if you want to know what was going on in 1953

this book has papers by everybody

who is important it has a paper by Turing

as a paper by Christopher stray key

it has papers by the Manchester people

it's got a paper in there by Maurice Wilkes my

old hero just a great thing

I

have to promise myself not to digress

so if you're interested

in this stuff go there and read this ok

now I want to talk about

the problem that most people have today in

dealing with the past it's not just the old

fortune-teller problem the problem

is is that the words that we use today

we're used in different ways in the

past and so when we

something in the past when we see something in the past we

tend to evaluate it in terms

of the present and a

good example of this and a great complaint

what happened when angle Bart who's

known as the inventor of the mouse and other

things died the

modern day Englebart wrote a great obituaries

and here's the most telling

when I read tech writers interviews with Engelbart

I imagine these writers interviewing George

Orwell and asking in-depth probing

questions about his typewriter that's the

problem the mouse was nothing

it just happens to be visible

it's the invisible stuff

you have to look at similarly the shopping list

thing well yeah it had hypertext

shared screen collaboration blue Globa and as

brett victor says the flaws you

don't want to treat the past as like

today except cruder that assumes

that today is some refinement of the past in

fact in many many cases what we have is

a much cruder present from

uch more refined past and if we

had more time I would demonstrate this to you in ways that

would astonish you and the reason this is true is

because angle Bart was special and almost

nobody who followed him was as special so we

got these special ideas early on from this genius

and Engelbart himself said hey

the mouse that's just a button on the radio we

invented a whole car

you're spending all this time worrying about some knob

on the radio

okay so the problem

with invention and even innovation

which is just

something incremental on something that's already known is

people don't

even reinvent the wheel they reinvent the flat tire and

if you don't know about wheels

this sort of works right have you ever had a flat and had

rive on it anybody sorry

works and if you don't know about something better

you might think that's what a wheel is similarly

full glass of water holds

a half glass

and so

for the creature that's comfortable in the half glass the creature

can swim in that but also has the opportunity to go up to the

top there but if you give only

give the half-full glass out that

creature has no opportunity to explore the top and might

start thinking that that's reality

so a very important thing

to understand about today is that a many important

respects normal has

been redefined downward

so the things we take to be normal

today in many ways are just shadows

of better ideas

in the past and of

course people are curious about went

on the net to see if people were curious about Orwell's typewriter

and boy they are here it is and because

it's so much easier to talk about a typewriter than it is

to wonder what he meant by this so we really

to ask what was he trying to accomplish how did he go about it

and eventually we'd get down to his typewriter it

actually is important printing is important

but we have to go for the top

ideas and similarly in the

mid-50s we had these

there were 25 centers in the US

each one of which had about a hundred and fifty of these interactive

terminals with pointing devices but

you didn't realize that and

they were all networked together

what this turned into by the way was

our air traffic control system

developed directly from

this back then it was the air traffic control system

for Russian bombers

and we want to

do the same kind of thing what were these people actually thinking

about because that's the typewriter we

know what were they trying to accomplish how

are they able to make it happen and eventually you can get down

to some questions about the technology so

just a quick sample here we saw what Bush was interested

in with something like

a super version of Wikipedia the head

of ARPA wanted to keep track

of everything Lickliter was more lofty

he saw that the combination of humans

and computers would think together as no humans have ever thought

before McCarthy looked at it

and said every home will have one one of

these every home will have one because

they thought of this as an information utility like

our power utility or our water utility

or gas utility Ivan invented

computer graphics which is used today

and Engelbart wanted to deal

with humans capabilities for

dealing with complex urgent problems like the climate problem

like education

like energy like water

inkelaar is a very serious guy and this is what

he wanted to do and in the short talk I'll just look

things so here's

Lickliter memo in 1963 to

members in Affiliate of the intergalactic

computer network they

asked him why do you call it intergalactic and he said well engineers

always give you the minimum and

I want a worldwide network

so I'm asking for an intergalactic one

and he said if we make

an intergalactic net Network then our main problem will

be learning to communicate with aliens and this

important idea it's an idea that hasn't been grappled

with in today's commercialization of the technology

that once you scale up the

most points in

a scaled-up network are going to be alien

to you in a variety of ways and

one of the papers I put online for you to

is this paper called the computer as a communications

device you'll find it very interesting because it is almost

absent from the communication

devices you're using at this very moment

almost no good ideas are in

the mobile phones that you have

so the key thing is

if you can't share context

it's hard to agree on something so if

the subject is a vein and hooves and

tail one person could be thinking of a horse and another of

a zebra they might agree on a hamburger

if you're trying to communicate with

computer what shared context could you possibly have

what could you do with its thought cloud to get

it to intersect with yours if it's an AI these are

all illustrations by the way from this paper

back then and I've added a

couple to them in the same style so

the salesman wants money the computer is not

about what humans are but knows to protect

the boss there's the problem of the chocolate

and the Apple even inside our own heads so

we have this problem of humans

and groups communicating with themselves to

each other individually in groups as one

example of alien problems

once we add computers in we've got the

problems of human communicating with computers that's the

user in Faye's problem we've got the problem of different

computers communicating with each other both in hardware

and software that's half of what the

internet tried to work on and then we have real aliens

that we should think about every once in a while what does that mean

now important idea here is that one

of the ways we help to communicate with ourselves and

others is through media and so we can

put me on the computer but as soon as we do the biggest

sin would be just to imitate the

physical media that we've been using that is the number

one problem with these devices that you have they

are all conveniences for media that happened

before you know they're all about

movies they're all about recordings they're all about

photographs they're all about text

all the things that people have gotten used to

that you can sell without a learning curve are

in the normal of today almost

hat's important about computers has been left out

of the normal and so if you think that what you're doing

is just normal reality you're missing

entirely what the computer is all about and in fact

what these guys we're all about so

here they are collaborating on something important

like making a bridge designing it testing it

and this cartoon was taken from an actual

meeting of the Engelbart group because

their system was so important to them and the

sharing was so deep in their system for

instance no matter what you did in the Engelbart system

any number of people could

get in there and they each had their cursors so

it wasn't a sharing cursor it wasn't just seeing a

picture you were actually all able to interact on

the same stuff and

to communicate about it they thought about what are tools

so here's a simple tool that goes right to

something that's genetic in humans if

it doesn't work bash it

so you her goal this

is what angle Bart called an a process and

the B process is improving her

a process she's getting better at hitting these

things and an important thing too and

about tools is they actually trained

us while we're using them she's thinking

more and more hammer like thoughts as an adult she might think

of using a nuclear weapon on somebody it's a natural

thing if people don't do what we want hammer

them the favorite hammer of today is starting to be AI

dangerous this is to

have a place to seem brain with

nuclear weapons

well most people don't worry about this today

but these guys did

but

there are also inward tools

so here's a tool that actually

changes her perceptions and

again we can use an agent a servant to

do things for us that gives us a view of the

can also use an agent to help our internal growth

use a teacher we can hammer people affect

people through teaming but

we can also put teams together to grow so

all of these things I'm telling you here were things that

were thought about back then and of

course what they thought about is what with these modes of

use what if we replace parts of it with computers

now and what does that mean in terms of

communication what does that mean in terms of agencies

so if we take that idea and this

angle Bart meeting here's what they thought of

is that this diagram which is

the one that we have today humans controlling

powerful agencies is not what you want

you have to include education

the thing that doesn't happen today and with that

can use new methods you can use use new languages

and you've created a system that includes

the human this is what Engelbart meant by augmentation

didn't mean just adding a tool and

that system is kind of

a thinking unit and if you put together a group

you're putting together groups of these so

this is a big idea almost nobody who

reads about Engelbart reads far enough to

driving I think this

might help some of the discussions

later on in this in this meeting

okay so I hate bullet

lists so I'll just

mention a couple here so why did this stuff work well the

funders funded visions not goals they

think they were wise enough to pick goals

what they wanted to do is to put

out a vision and let people different people

find different ways of realizing the vision they

didn't want to fund just problem-solving because if

you make up a problem from the current context it's probably

not the problem you should put your work into you

need to find problems they pay money for that

fund people not projects

the top people the ones are going to make a difference

only fund the very best people because they're

qualitatively different than the next levels down

and this is a

long-term venture so part of our research

ave to be the next generation researchers and

our Pro was one of the few groups ever to

build in a very

large amount of money to

create the next generation of researchers every researcher

at Xerox PARC have been created

by ARPA I was the oldest one there and I was

30 Butler Lampson who was the

Oppenheimer of Park was only 27

and Taylor at Park was only 38

so you need unusual people but this

least thing to worry about because they're just way

out in the bell curve and if you have a couple hundred million to

to choose from if

you want a championship football team get Beckham

Juwan Xerox PARC get Butler Butler

Lampson in this case and who knows

how rare they are but if you need one in a million

there's going to be 200 if you need one in 10 million there's

going to be 20 you can find

these people Xerox PARC was only 25 researchers

only 25 you

can find them the problems you can't find the funders

so what did these guys look

for well they were just trying to get the best people

who are interested in this and let them do their

thing the people you want to get also want to choose

own problems and methods sure because they're artists you

want to work on their own conceptions of the

problems Taylor said my job is to organize things so

that when the lone wolves need to cooperate they will and

he was very successful at that

this man right here is my great-grandfather he's

the first cat herder in our family's

burden cats don't

let anybody tell you it's easy

anybody can hurt cattle hold them together

10,000 1/2 mile short hairs that's another

thing all together being a cat herders probably about

the toughest thing I think I've ever done I got

this in this morning right here and

if you look at his face they just

ripped to shreds you know to see the movies yet

here the story is I'm

living a dream so

the

thing about this is this is the way management

thinks about dealing with these top

researchers it's completely wrong

100% wrong couldn't be more wrong

if you tried but the only thing they think

their job is actually to manage to control

and you can't control cats

but here's a much

younger set of research funders who really understand

come ajar fellows all the names

of the toys we have sitting right next to us they're gonna take

me to her one by one open up these toys would

you like to go first picking something funky John alright

what an ounce on his spring

right

here so this is this little mouse on

and is gonna up and down a cat so we're gonna try to catch it I'll

catch really like having Mouse's but they keep on

tearing apart cuz they have ambitious everyone

okay I got and this is it

boy

what does this mysterious item

so easy if

you actually understand who you're dealing with

so

here's why this stuff work this is the number one

reason here

because a great vision is not a set of goals a

vision has to be nonspecific enough it

has to be romantic but it has to be something

that can be filled in by the people who hear the vision

and lick lighters as I mentioned was computers

our destiny become interactive intellectual amplifiers

for everyone universally network worldwide he

tied that to a magnet and he hit it over the

horizon and it attracted hundreds of iron

particles in different places they

all pointed to north they

what North was and neither did look lighter

but they all got to north so

ne principle here is the goodness of the results

correlates most strongly with the goodness of the funders

thank you