Alan Kay SCIx Keynote Presentation (2012)

good evening

I'm Chris Johnson I derived the scientific

computing and Imaging Institute here at the University of Utah better

known as the ski Institute and I

want to welcome you to our second ski X open

house and to the to our keynote presentation

this room welcome especially

for people who are from outside of Salt Lake City

of Utah who have come here from all over the world

as part of this info conference

and welcome also the people from

Utah so it's my great pleasure to introduce Alan

Kay and one of our University of Utah alumnus

and he is one

of the true innovators in computing we

were just talking just now about there were

fables about his dissertation when he was here as a graduate

student and I was getting

some clarification on what really happened so he was one

of David Evans PhD students and

David Evans view was that you

you needed to do first-class research in

order to to prove yourself and get your union

card and move on to do interesting research and

Alan was doing a lot of

interesting research and if you look at his dissertation it

includes hardware design a software design

network design user interface design

and as some of the elements from which he

was able to move on and do some fundamental research

in object-oriented programming and hardware

design and interface design with the Dynabook

with with computer

engineer manufacturing with

many many things that that he

worked on since he left the University

of Utah so along the way he was at Xerox

PARC for about ten years after

that he became a Tori's chief scientist for

three years some of you may know that Nolan

Bushnell was here just last week and

so we were able to hear about some of the

times that's at Atari from Nolan about

ten years ago he founded

a nonprofit organization called viewpoints Research

Institute in which he's continuing

his work on cognition and learning and

programming or with children

Allen has received a number

of awards and maybe I should just note the

2003 Turing Award for

his work in object-oriented programming and the

creation of the Dynamo so please

join me in welcoming Alan Kay thank

so the aim of this talk is to

give you a sense of

what the research community

was like from

whence all of the stuff we today we have

came from this was

suggested by Chris based on a a an

essay I did in

as a tribute to the community when several of

us won the Draper prize and we

all felt that somehow the community

should be getting these awards and I'll try and give

you a sense of that because Utah salt University

of Utah was part of that committee in

one of the Thornton Wilder

plays he has an old

fortune teller one

mechanical fortune tellers and she says I tell

the future it's easy but telling the past is

really hard and the reason is is the

past is so detailed and

a lot of the details actually are important

another part of it as all

of us discovered when we

were asked to write histories some 20

25 years ago is that

many things that

many pathways are taken

are taken not just

because some idea beckons but

also because one has been disgusted

by work

one season round and for instance IBM

back in those days was a constant source

of inspiration to do better and

this makes

telling an honest history

almost impossible because you can

praise somebody in a sentence so-and-so

was great and we got some ideas from them but

when you do the opposite

of praising somebody was saying this work was so bad

that we decided to do this you can't just

do it in a sentence it's not fair you have to

explain why and so the histories we all

wound up writing emitted many

of the main motivations for some

of the the things that we did but so

first I'll give you a little outline of

how this worked some of the people here

I think are old enough to have been alive

when when this stuff started and

this slogan goes

back to the world

two radar effort at MIT

building 20 radiate

radiation lab and many

people don't realize that radar was actually

the technology that won World War two force

because we're in Dane danger of going

under from German u-boats the

British had invented more

radar than we had people were fooling around with

it and for

a variety of reasons they did not have the resources to develop

it so they came over not

just with the ideas but with

the fundamental technology that made radar packed

practical which is a device called a cavity

magnetron yeah and gave

it to MIT

and if you

think about world war ii remember December 7th 1941

was in December so

41 had already happened so it was 42

43 44 and a half of 45 so world

war ii was a big deal but it was only

three and a half years compared to what we're used to

today of things that go on for a long time

and this group of

people in building 20 turned out

more than 150 different radar

systems invented

engineer packaged

and had them built by the route 128

companies around Boston and installed on every

kind of ground installation

seagoing and air going vehicle so

it's one of the most amazing bursts of

combining science and engineering

done in a short time to

make things that actually actually working

were effective and another

somewhat similar effort was at

Los Alamos working on the

atomic bomb all of the atomic bomb

was not nearly as critical to ending

the war as as radar was so

part of the

both of these groups were funded

by President Roosevelt's science

advisor Vannevar

Bush and Bush had been an MIT

engineering

professor and had done some of the early analog computers

and so you can think of this as kind of an old boys club it

really was and these are pretty

good old boys

they're basically gentlemen

and then right after World War two

Cold War and one of the big efforts there was

to try and deal with threats of

Russian bombers

and so this incredible system called semi-automated

ground environment was made those

are displays that those people are peering

into the air and enormous computers

were built

and they were built by many of the same

people some of whom

worked on the radar were now sort of in more of an administrative

fast for instance Jerome

Wiesner was an undergraduate at

MIT during World War two and

later was a head of the department

of engineering then later became president MIT

and then later President Kennedy's science

advisor so these

these things go on and on meanwhile

Bush at

during the 50s created

NSF in order to deal

with a little bit more

look ahead than we had in World War two and

in the 60s

ARPA

actually in the late 50s ARPA was created

because of Sputnik to do something about

what was perceived as a great threat and I'll

tell you a little bit about one division of it that

created in the early 60s called the information processing

techniques office from which

it's not an exaggeration to say most of the technology

we have today got its initial funding

MIT was the first recipient

Carnegie Mellon and in

1965 the University of Utah so they're

about 15 places two-thirds of them universities

and about a third militarily

defense related companies like mitre RAND

Corporation systems Development

Corporation in and so forth and

these places created

an enormous number of inventions and

part of the inventions they created were

PhDs over the six

years or so this was operating and those PhDs went

in the 70s to Xerox PARC and did

personal computing as we know it today so

this is kind of a oversimplified capsule

summary but it's basically this

idea of making progress is more important than anything

something that was carried through in each one of these generations

it was the secret to

making this work because of course being

humans and anybody who's ever spent

any time around a university and gone to faculty

too well how easy it is

for people who have

gotten awarded for being rational to

be irrational in a meeting and

so and of course there were rivalries

and everything else and the thing they decided in

the rad lab was they didn't have time for any

of that so somebody

nobody knows who came up with this ideas hey well we're

is the only thing we're interested in forget about everything

else that is all we're going to work

on that gap passed into the 50s that got passed into the 60s

that's what I learned when I came here into the ARPA

projects here and that was what was

carried into park and the thing that none

of the histories of

these efforts

has really gotten clear enough

I believe is why why

did they work it was because the amount

of cooperation that actually happened

would be remarkable I think to almost anybody

today it's just hard

to believe just

how open how

everything was shared and it was just part of the part

of the deal and so

the

when you have cooperation amongst really smart people

then you get synergy that

is out of this world you can

get 185

different radar systems in a couple of years you

can get nuclear

fission in a couple of years you

can get enormous

computers the size of football

fields running on vacuum tubes that never crashed

in a couple of years it's

just unimaginable and of course I can't tell you

about all of it but I'm just trying to get you into

this era where

the we basically

live in an era today where the components are

really reliable and the people are less so and

back then it was exactly

the opposite the components are like the worst things

you ever if anybody here old enough to do vacuum tubes

and the 50s 60s yeah

so it

was just incredible

doing that but because everybody

cooperated in a way that is very difficult to explain

wonderful things happen so here's

the first exhibit here and

I'll direct your attention to where

it says second floor there

and it says computer a and computer B

and computer

a is the size of a football field and

so is computer B

so that second floor is the size of two

football fields so it's about two acres of

vacuum tube computer

down below is all of the power and

stuff for it up top

so when I when I visited one of these in

the I guess

in the late 60s at Systems Development Corp

they took me into a room that was bigger

than this but it's like a typical

glass house mainframe machine room and

lots of noise and raised floor and all that

hey said well what are you thinking I said well I

thought it was somehow I thought it was larger than this they

said well you don't understand this is just the console

and

it went over this is just like out of a James Bond movie they

went over and pulled these drapes and down

and we were up on the third

floor there and you could look down onto

these double football fields of the

twin Q 32 s there

and there are wonderful stories

about this machine I'll just tell a couple

first first interesting

one is the last one of these

did not go out of commission until the

early 80s and

so some of you might be wondering well

where did they get all these vacuum tubes from

somebody

knows to tell us yes

isn't this great yes

as these systems went on and on

we we ceased making jet vacuum tubes

Japanese he's making vacuum the Russians are still making vacuum

tubes so we started buying vacuum tubes from

them in order to put into these this

defense system against them

Kemp

can't beat it the other interesting thing

was that because they didn't want

the thing to crash they

did several things one is they had two computers running the same computations

and checking them so they had a kind of a corpus

callosum between them but

they also the part of

this huge room that was just the console where

other computers whose job it was to do Diagnostics

on the big computers while they were running and whenever

they detected an instruction failing they would patch

in a subroutine that emulated that

instruction that was made up from the instructions that were still

working so one of these babies

started crashing it took like five or six

days we just get slower and slower

and pretty soon it was almost all software patched

in there's maybe two or three instructions and they

always were able to fix these machines before they completely

went went down in spite of the fact that

they would be having back in tubes going

out every few minutes on these

and you could see that display screens

that they had

on them and that thing the guy is holding there as a light gun

so the way

graphics was done in those days the

segments there actually plotted points

were plotted in sequence and

could register when it saw one in the computer knew

when it drew that point and what it belonged to and would cause an interrupt

and so forth okay so that's from

the 50s so here's another thing from

the 50s this is John McCarthy as he looked

back then and John took one look at

these sage consoles and said well everybody's gonna have one of those in their

house before long and so

his idea was because we've already got

elected electricity

utilities we've got water utilities

we've got gas utilities why not an information utility

what they call it back then so this is a cloud idea

the first time around and

he started thinking about that so he wrote this memo

in the late 50s to the

provost at MIT

trying to get him interested

in paying for

doing a time-sharing operating system for

new computer they were going to get from from IBM and

one of the things he says in it suppose that the programmer has

keyboard the computer then he can try his program interrogate

individual individual pieces of data or program to

find an error and make a change in the source language and try again

ability to check out a program immediately after

writing at save still more time and so on now

actually if this were a history lesson about

back then instead

of about Utah I would show two other

pieces of writing that John did

in the 50s also one of them called

for an artificially intelligent agent

to serve you through

the terminal and the other one called

for the invention of a programming language now

called Lisp in order to program

artificial intelligent agent and John by the way was the guy

who made up the term artificial intelligence but

it came actually from thinking about what

future this guy was

smart and even a few years before

that here's Dave Evans and Harry husky

dave was a an executive

at Bendix and at

various times on this project he was a

staff engineer and I

wound up actually running this project but

this quite a few of these but I

would call this a personal computer wouldn't you

quite a few of these G 15s

were hairy husky by

the way he had worked with touring on the pilot ace in England

and later went to Berkeley with with

Dave Evans so not only had

these acres size machines we had people thinking about

what does it mean to have your own machine

okay I'm gonna pick the Year

62 here now we're in the 60s for a variety

of reasons first it's 50 years ago this year

that's a nice round number second it's

when I started programming my first programming

for money was on this machine the IBM

1401 maybe some 1401

programmers here it was a bit of an odd machine to

put it put it mildly but in many ways it

was completely utilitarian in

the purposes that IBM had

put it out which was to replace

without doing any psychological

damage to anybody these enormous

punch-card accounting machine floors

that's what it was for so

wrote programs to do what the FAK you work from the actual flow

charts back then I was in the air force

doing this so

you think computing is mundane today well it was

mundane back then and that's because they're just a lot of money

people in computing

and partly

because business is so Monday they

never look into the future they always want to find out what happened

in the past so they're constantly doing

accounting instead of doing something like

making probes into the future but

oh well ok so that

is our mundane slide however

there's also the 50th birthday

of what

most of us think is the world's first real

graphics system first

real personal computing system and I've

got a little movie here I hope you can see it looks

a little dim but let's see

so the reason it's twinkling

like that is it's plotting individual points and

to keep you from

getting sick they would be randomized

in memory so about half of

this this is done on one of these acre-sized machines

notice it has a clipping

ability and

if you notice it straightened up that

flange now it's going to straighten up these lines

automatically for you now

he's asking it to be collinear so

he draws these lines they're going to lay down right

on top he's using

those full lines he did as guidelines

for these dashes now he's going to make the guidelines

transparent he's got a hole

in the flange

sketchpad doesn't know anything about

flanges or rivets

going to make a rivet to put it in the flange here and

notice he can just sketch

without trying too hard it's

going to use that as the center for that arc because he can point

at things and tell sketchpad to solve a

make all those edges mutually perpendicular and there

you see sketchpad solve that problem

it's a nonlinear problem

and can do many solutions

and

of course he could constrain it so

that the

edges are fractions

of each other and so forth so sketchpad

had three problem solvers could

solve fairly complicated problems now here's another interesting thing this

is an instance of that master

rivet that he just drew you can

see it can be rotated and scaled he's gonna

lock it into the flange there

little flick and

now he's going to show us he could make some

more instances of those rivets so

this is the first object-oriented system that

I know of he forgot to get

hese Crosse things so he goes to the Masters and makes

them transparent and so the rivets feel

that change

and anything that he makes he can make into

a

into a master

so he's made that into a master

and now he's going

to make instances of that thing he just drew

pretty cool huh so

what sketchpad had

here was real

time interaction it had

masters and objects which we

call classes and objects it had this powerful

problem-solver so

it was programmed not in terms of

procedural programs but in terms

of what you wanted the results to be and

it could do some fairly hard problems like this

bridge a problem here

now the bridge is something we don't have a movie up because this

acre-sized machine was so slow

it would take the bridge about 30 seconds to

solve and it was too slow to make a movie of so in

honor of I would say ask Ivan

by the way how could you this is Ivan's Ivan's

PhD thesis I

still think it's the greatest single

PhD thesis done in computing and

I said huh Ivan how could you have possibly done

the interactive graph he had to program the display

sakes it was just that's just an oscilloscope

that's being used there how

could you have done that the objects and

the problem solvers all by yourself

in one year and he said well I didn't know

it was hard

so in honor of the

of this 50th birthday

we actually have recreated

sketchpad here so

we have the twinkling here and

I can turn on gravity

and of course my my little Mac

Pro here is thousands and thousands

of times faster than the acre-sized machine back then

so watch what happens to notice this

little beam is saying

it has zero stress and strain on it but if I if I

drop it in here notice that not only does it change

but the entire simulation feels

it similarly I can do this here

and

sketchpad didn't know a darn thing about bridges

which

is part of its charm so and on some weights here

and of course one of the

things that this led to was the desire for nicer displays

and we certainly did

and of course if you think about the you know looking for the keys under

the lamppost instead of in the inconvenient dark place you

lost them when you're faced with something like

sketchpad you could either make sketch

pad better which means you're

operating in eivin's range or you could make the display better

so virtually everybody in computing decide

to make display is better so we have better looking

display here's here

it is a modern time we can do

a few few more tricks here so for

instance we can say thanks Ivan

words have weight

and

we did the we did the constraint

solving a little bit differently but basically this whole

bridge simulation just has three lines

of code in it and here

they are they're in the the

bottom weight they're the top

one here is Galilean

gravity constant acceleration gravity this

is the spring constant so one way two simple

way to think about steel is that it

is actually springy you've ever seen

the Tacoma Narrows Bridge come down

it's brought home right right away and so

just putting a vector

strain constant on every every

line in here will do it and then this bottom guy is

the pins that are holding the beams together so

if I get rid of the top guy here

gravity is turned off

and this whole thing should settle down to zero

because just being being drawn by the string

forces okay so I turn it back on and

now we have to think about what

will happen if I undo the pins

okay this is just to make the

point that what you see on the computer

screen is just a costume what's interesting is

what's down below and

we generally don't get to see what's down below the costumes

seem to have fixed purposes here and

I'm gonna repurpose all of these beams

into the user interface of the system I'm

giving this this demo in

and

I don't

really like this steel look here a lot of Steve

so we could try a different color here that's

to Microsoft like

and so this is this is actually the system I'm

giving this talk in here's the sketchpad thing and

it's Turing slide here I'll go back

up to full screen here the stirring slide here is to remind

me to to tell you

that one of the things that was happening around

this time was thinking about biology in

computational terms and vice-versa

some of us had degrees in in

in biology and

Turing was one of the first to work

in both areas and some of us I in fact

read Turing's paper on morphogenesis before

I read his paper on on

Turing machines and one of the

interesting things about biology is the way systems work so here's some

ants and you notice when they wander into food

there they start putting out a perfume which starts

diffusing and one ant wanders

perfume and it doesn't have food it goes immediately upstream

and finds the food very efficiently and

then goes downstream so now all the ants

are occupied as though they've

programmed in some coordinated fashion but

in fact they're all working independently

so this is highly parallel programming

here organized by

sending messages

so we call this particles and fields and

it's something that works everywhere

there are people in in the skee x

exhibit that we're studying some of these

how biological gradients work and

once you start thinking about computing it is very

very difficult to not

start thinking about the system's properties of

biology and this community that I'm

telling you about certainly did

another thing that happened in 1962

was this machine which

is since it has a display is

probably the first machine ever to have all the essential

attributes of a personal computer and

the fun part of it is that this guy Wes Clark was

the architect of the acre-sized machine

that Ivan did sketchpad on and also

did this one for biomedical engineers because

couldn't wait for the University mainframe they want

he wanted to have something in the lab and the fact the first 20

of these were built by these biomedical

technicians Wes organized this machine

into a kit and in order to get

one of these machines you had to go to Lincoln labs and prove you could build it

and that meant you could take care of it when you took

it back so by the way about 2000

of these Linc machines were actually built

and used in the in the 60s so

this is not onesies or twosies another

thing that happened in 62

was the B 5000 by Bob Barton

came out and this this

is still one of the most advanced piece of hardware

ever done more advanced than any of the chips

that we have in our personal

computers or iPads and stuff like that this guy was a

complete genius and we'll meet him again pretty soon

1962 was when angle

Bart sent his proposal

into the

DoD complex saying

we need to augment in human intellect in computers are

the way to do it and this is a great picture of him because

he was very much Moses wanting

to lead the children of Israel out of the

darkness of Egypt this was

his personality and

then things got started

because they had already been started

and I think people have studied the history of the Renaissance

know that the Renaissance happened before the printing

press it antedated the

printing press by 60 or 80 years

so that when the printing press happened

it happened in something that was already starting

and it provided an enormous acceleration

what happened here with Licklider Licklider

was a psychologist who'd gotten interested in computers

he said

the destiny of computers is

become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all people

universally networked worldwide whenever

they asked him what he was doing with this millions

of dollars he had been given to pass out

this is what he would say and

here's a memo he wrote a year

later in 63 to the members and the

affiliates of the intergalactic computer network

asked why are you calling it the intergalactic computer

network he said well engineers always do the minimum

says I can't get them to realize

that I want to connect every person on the

planet so I've been calling it the intergalactic Network

to force them out of doing it the way AT&T

might try to do it

and of course we have that network today he funded

it and here's the nice thing he said if we succeed

in making an intergalactic network then our main problem

will be learning to communicate with aliens and

this

what's interesting about this is we gave

him the first thing but computing

has been terrible at giving him the second because the aliens

means not just communicating with other people means communicating

with other software means software over here

communicate with other software once you scale this thing

up you have an enormous

communications problem which

most people have been afraid to

work on the last 30 years

and another thing that Lickliter

decided was that you couldn't think of

good goals inside the beltway in Washington so

he said I'm gonna fund people not projects so

lot of these people have actually won the the

Turing award the equivalent of the Nobel Prize

and computing and fact all of these this

just from the first five years this is for up to

about 1965 and quite a few

more people who are funded by this funding

agency and want it since

okay

so this is a real picture

I will not tell you where it

was taken the sign there says do not

touch any of these wires

and

this is one of the most honest slides I've ever

seen about how most people do things

and of course software is much worse

because this might have only 10,000

wires and software has hundreds of millions of

lines of code which is tangled very much in this

same way and it's basically

the tendency of humans to be tactical

rather than strategic and to do

things incrementally because it seems rational

you know we won't do something

radical we'll just adapt

what we've got and that doesn't that sound reasonable yeah

except it doesn't scale and

you wind up with this awful stuff here and

a simple way to characterize this

community that Licklider

was funding these 15 universities and

companies was that

they were exactly the opposite of the way IBM

thought about doing things in almost every respect

and

and it was also a much smaller

group of people and they had much bigger ideas and

so in order to do that you something has to

give and basically they decided

that they would give up on performance in

order to get system integrity and

this they didn't have a meeting to decide on this

it just was the thing that was happening I

saw it happen when I was when I was

here starting in 66 and so

the way they would think about this massive

wires is Wow this is just

a communications channel with everything

that wants to be communicated with hung on

it period that

is what it is and we'll we'll make different

kinds of these and this will give us all

the crossbar combinations that we

that you could possibly do but it'll be simple

it just has the the problem if the first order

is a little bit inefficient because the

you have channel contention of one kind or another but

this is just the way this group

thought about things and this

idea that this is a recursive idea

that you can extend all the way down

of the layers of software all the way outward through

all of the layers of networking is something

it was completely out of the way IBM

Burroughs and the other vendors thought at that time

so mid sixties here's

Dave Evans at Berkeley and Butler

Lampson one of the most brilliant people any of

us have ever met it's

frightening to realize the butler wound up as being the principal

investigator for ARPA on this project in

1965 when Dave left to come here in

a 1965 Butler

was 22 years old and he

was always a senior

you know Butler from the moment he lit

his eyes on a computer he got in a high

honors

degree in physics at Harvard and came

out to Berkeley to study physics and went through the wrong door as

he put it and found

this project to do you know a lightweight

time sharing system that could actually be practical

he never came out of that room

and so this machine was called Project

genie back there but it became

a commercial machine called the SDS 9:40

and it actually launched the time sharing industry because

it was the only one that actually really worked

and gave very good value

for what it cost and it

also was adopted by the ARPA community

so here's angle Bart now a few years after

his proposal because Licklider funded him

giving this incredible demo

called the mother of all demos in 1968

in which pretty much everything that we

have today plus a few things that we don't have today

we're shown so this picture was taken back in

at once and talk to each other with video that was shown in 1968 and it was done on

this project genie machine

and of course the

ARPANET was done right around then

so here's Khan and Cerf who

later got the Turing award for the Internet

but they were heavily involved in the

in doing the ARPANET university

of utah was one of the first few nodes

here had this int machine which

was invented by guess who Wes Clark again

how he has never gotten

the Turing Award I do not know except they don't like Hardware

people but this IMP

was West's idea and today we would call it a router

the idea was you need to have routers

because they

can figure things out they can be

independent of the different kinds of hardware that they're connected to and so

forth this is Lenny Klein rock as he was back

then okay

and then Dave Evans came here in 1965

I came in 66 so

I'm just going to pick up my impressions so

the first time I saw Dave he was wearing

a polo shirt remember

this is in the days where everybody wore you know white shirts

eyes and I couldn't find

a picture of Dave in his polo shirt that's all he wore

except when he had I guess when they took pictures of him he

so

he was a 44 back

then looked like he was 25

or so and

when I walked into his office he said take this

and read it and what this was was Ivan Sutherlands thesis he

had a big stack of them on his desk and the

new graduate students had to explain

this to him the next day before they got a desk

so and to me that was the biggest

life changer I had because I really

as a programmer for four

or five years beforehand I

really didn't know anything all I knew how to do

is program a computer and sketchpad

as you saw once you see it you realize oh wait a

minute it's not that

computers can do computer like things the computers

can do anything you can actually make

a computer out of a computer that is not at all like the

computer that it's on that's what was interesting about sketchpad

there was nothing about the tx2

that was remotely like the program

that manifested sketchpad and that means

something really incredibly important

Dave was

his it was a bit of a ploy I

discovered later but his his basic idea

was to be invisible this guy was the

greatest motivator the greatest make

things happen around him person I've ever met I

tried to learn from him and

what was funny is that he

unless he was in a

really important stressful situation

where he would grow like 10 feet tall

but I want

to saw that happen a few times rest the

time he'd be sort of well you remember Dave right so he'd

be sort of chuckling and you kind of stammer a

little bit and everything else and meanwhile things are

just sort of happening kind of miraculously another

great line he had when they were complaining about Barton to him

who was a quite a character

to put it mildly he said to the fact the

fact we don't care if they're prima donnas as long as they can sing so

that was the end of that meeting

talking about Ivan he said now

there's a smart citizen to the graduate

wait until they publish get on a plane so I

flew 140,000 air miles

in my two and two years

and three months as a graduate student here because he

travel budgets for all of his graduate students and we

were constantly traveling to both cut not a lot was

happening out in the middle of the country and far as computing

was happening so we would go to both coasts

and meet all the other graduate students meet all

the other principal investigators and this friendliness and cooperation

allowed us out here

hundreds of miles away

from anything to participate fully in the ARPA

community and then fun thing

was one day said we're almost out of money got to go get some more

and so he took a

graduate students along to watch it happen he

would take us out to when we went

to the Pentagon and we could see what it meant to pitch somebody

there for a few million bucks

because he said this is the real world

and what

Chris was talking about earlier Dave said

a PhD is two years of world-class quality

work if you're working

easy project you should finish if you're working on a hard when you don't

have to just write up a progress report and

Ivan was once asked well

what is a PhD thesis and

Ivan said well it's something that three people will sign

okay

barb Barton completely opposite personality

enormous man Dave was

little Barton was enormous kind

of guy who wins push-up contest with Australians

and he

was incredibly articulate so he's kind

of a left-wing version of William F Buckley

and very literate he

was extremely well-read he was a mathematician he

did not like graduate students

he's not really a professor Dave he

was a computer designer it burrows and

Dave convinced him to spend a few years

here and

so here it comes some of his quotes

one of his quotes of a quote that he loved

we should all share in

the excitement of discovery without vain attempts to claim priority

that was this guy in spades so

he could it was very hard to get him to talk about his

own work systems programmers or high priests of a low

cult that's a good one then

in the first class I taught with him it was on advanced

systems design and he came stomping into this class

and he had a sheet of

paper in his hand and says a few things known about advanced

system design they're all written down in these papers I expect

you all to to read them all and understand

them completely and then he said but it is my job to firmly

disabuse you disabuse you of any

fondly held notions you might have brought into this classroom

and so instead of teaching us what

he did is he destroyed us so

anything we believed in with regard to computing he would knock it

down and we would bring up things

that we believed in from his own work and he would knock that down

there

was total destruction and

because he said look it's not a religion and

you it's

true that some of these things are useful but you

have to you have to start from something

like scratch and you have to admit

these ideas carefully because they will actually rule your

your life so this is best course I ever had in

20-some odd years of school

because he did us the service that most professors

won't do which is to make

us actually bona fide practitioners

and critics in the very field that

we're in something to think about when you're teaching a

class and then this beautiful

one which is used every book everywhere

principle the basic principle of recursive design

is to make the parts have the same powers as the halls and

this works in nature works

in engineering works in

many different ways so so

we had these two guys who are completely different and by the way

I showed up I was graduate student number seven here and

Dave and Bob were

two out of the three professors we had here so

three professors and seven graduate students

and Dave had come here with

some ARPA money because he thought

instead of trying to solve the hidden line

problem you can sort of see what the hidden line problem is by

looking on the scope there and back of John Warnock there's

you draw the edges of things

they show through and the

question is is what if you wanted the surfaces

as though they're opaque what do you have to do and it

was basically an exponential problem in

the early 60s take

minutes and minutes and minutes to just do a

thing with a few hundred surfaces so Dave

was quite sure that continuous-tone graphics using

pixels on a bitmap screen would

actually solve the problem now I have

to tell the story of John here

so John

had a master's in mathematics and he was a very

good programmer and he was working as a staff

programmer in the Merrill

engineering the computer center on

the 1108 he was doing like COBOL

programs for scheduling classes and stuff

like that and not trivial problems

but you know he was a workaday programmer

there in one day one of the graduate

students from the three official 3d project went into John's

office to ask him about handling large arrays and

John said well how large an array and the guy

said well 300,000 misses three hundred

thousand pixels as a is about 640 by

480 300,000

that was a lot in those days and John

said well why do you want to do that and so in

the middle of this explanation of well we're doing this with

graphics John thought of how to do it really how

to really do it and

so he started wrote a Fortran program

to produce these things and

this is one where the power of recursive

to have the parts have the same power of the holes it was a

recursive descent program that turned an exponential

problem into an N log n problem

and he was I think the shortest graduate student we've

ever had here at Utah because

he was promoted to be a graduate student for all of

six weeks I believe and his

thesis was I think probably the thought shortest one still

right 33 pages is like 25 pages of

prose telling

well here's how I did it and here's nine pages of pictures

proving I did it and that was it so

and

of course that the side story

here which John would never say but it was

because John had this breakthrough that Ivan was willing to come

out here and I've been coming

out here changed the entire course of what

YouTube because it wasn't just one first class guy

and Dave Evans there's one of the towering

geniuses our field is ever had brought himself

in all of his graduate students out here in mass

to to make this department

double triple in size and

gain the stature that it did was because of

John's breakthrough

and I did a few things here

too this is a

project that Dave

was kind of the main mentor

on I mean I Bart and wasn't really a mentor

but

you could go out and drink beer with him and

so Barton would actually

had the attitude you have to have to

do hard problems that was what was

tremendous about him you just had to be like him and

you could knock it off and so

nothing Dave did it was he got his graduate students

consulting jobs in industry anybody still do that here

yeah and the reason he did it was he

well industry is the real world and graduate

student is an unnatural state they

paid us almost nothing and I asked

him which I said huh why are you paying us so little he says because I don't

want you to stick around he here as a graduate student I want you to

get that degree and get out of here

so

so this was a so

Dave took me out to meet Edie Cheadle at a

company that was probably no longer exist but it was part of

the link em kovat complex called mem

Corman tech not on the way to the the airport

was an aerospace company and Cheadle was Rollie pollie

Texan who was a genius electrical engineer

and he wanted to do a little desktop

machine and we hit it off and so

the result of that was this thing called the sketch machine it's a

flex machine and you can see it's self-portrait

what it looked like on its own

display the actual prototype looked like that and

it had multiple clipping

windows that had the first object-oriented

user interface

operating system it

had an iconic GUI so it had a lot of the elements of

we're familiar with today and not actually kind of

in 68-69

it looks a little bit like the Apple

computers of ten years later look a little

bit like an apple to there so we

did that and then after

one of these trips to talk

Seymour Papert who is working with children I started thinking

about children's computers and what was cool about the

Flex machine is he could count the transistors in it and

so it's thinking on the plane ride

back Wow I wonder

if you could actually

something that children could carry around because you don't want to children

this would be sitting at a desk so he starts so I sketched this

cartoon of two children

playing a game of space war

which they programmed themselves on

wireless network tablets

and after I got back

here to Utah made this cardboard model and

made it Hollow so

I could fill it up with lead shotgun pellets to see how heavy

you could make it before this is too heavy

by the way we knew that back then so the deal

was about a kilogram is

where you like to be with the

thing and four pounds is the absolute max than

anybody could stand of course you

know these six pounders have been around for a long

time and part of the strength of this was another visit

hat I took to that can't really see that very

well because the the projector is blooming but that

is an inch square flat screen display

from 1968 and

now how did we come to see

that well there was an RPR

Contractors meeting at alt Alta

Lodge in 68

Davis of course took his graduate students along

to this on the ground as long as we didn't

say anything so we've got to watch

all of the leaders of the this powerful

computing community dealing with each other Davis

Dave wanted us to see how the politics worked

and so this is all very interesting all

the stars were there and at the end of

it Bob Taylor

who is the Thunderer at that time

asked us graduate students who are sitting

in a ring around the the back of all of these

famous people if we had any comments and John

Warnock raised his hand and said well

you know we actually do all the work and

we when

we're getting our PhDs and so we're getting out

in the world and you know we do

everything and don't you think there should be something

like this principal investigators meeting

for our graduate students and Taylor

said yes we'll do it this

summer and so that led to many years of

these were the top two graduate students from each place we're chosen

to go to Illinois to

their resume where they did a comp have

a conference center for the University there and span

five days showing

each other what we're doing and forging bonds at left

so this is what that community was like and during that

we went on a field trip to the University of Illinois and here

was this first inch square flat-screen

plasma panel and so you can

you've decided you want to do a computer that can

be carried around and you know how many transistors a

desktop computer has and you know what

Moore's Law is the things

are going to get better over time then you can ask

yourself when is it going to be

that I can put those transistors on the back of a display and

now I will have a tablet

and the answer in 68

was yeah probably around 1980 that was a good

good answer because there's a men

amount of design and invention that had to be

done to to do the

software and the user interface to make these ideas work

okay so now

we're into the 70s and many

of these people that you've met wound

up going to Xerox PARC why because the

US government in its bumbling ways

things responded to some

of the protests about the Vietnam War by curtailing

all government funding on campus including

including the benign ARPA funding that's

when the D was put on our per to make it DARPA and

they've never been the same since and Taylor

who saw what that was

going to means gathered up his favorite graduate

students now who had PhDs and said we kind

of finished this off and so he found Xerox he

was willing to take us on for a few years to

do it and so in a few years four years at Xerox

we had this thing

so this is a 1973 here

like a Macintosh of 1988

or 1989 here's the GUI

desktop publishing

WYSIWYG what

we call real loop these days post

script pages

second laser printer Ethernet

pierre-pierre and client-server and about

Internet committee

and so this all costs in

today's dollars about 10 million dollars a year

so pretty much any place could do

it was done by a grand total of a about 30 people

right so this is cheap gotta

have the right 30 gotta have

the right process we had a legal agreement

with Xerox that they could not interfere with our research

in any way for five years we have to use

that legal agreement because of course they thought

they had ideas also

and here's the interesting thing xerox

made a factor of 300 on

their total investment in Xerox PARC just

from the laser printer alone so contrary

to the urban legend which is not true that Xerox didn't

make anything they paid for Park hundreds of times over

made billions of dollars from the laser

printer they missed the other things but still a return

on investment of you know thirty thousand percent

is pretty good I'm told

the other thing to realize from the standpoint of

the US and the world the return to date from Xerox

PARC is in excess of thirty three trillion dollars

it's an excess of

a trillion dollars a year still just from these

inventions and

so an interesting thing

to contemplate is how come no

government nope

university no country no company will

put out that ten million dollars to fund this way

thing

to think about okay so let's

pass out some hero Awards here so

first Mandarin of course the

Ivan was everything Ivan was

a mentor he was the second funder

of ARPA

he was one of the greatest scientists

we've had these are the mentors who made a difference

Utah in the early days and we give

Dave Evans the main award

because it was his personality that

allowed everything else to function

he could deal he loved crazy people

he knew exactly how to deal

with them and to keep other people from going nuts

because there are crazy people around so he

cannot be helped thank too much and I

tell you if any of his if you wanted to

crossfire any of his graduate students would lie down in it for

him and I'm not kidding

and the grand awards here

are the funding and

the funders these are the four funders of the

ARPA community Licklider Sutherland

Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts

the guys who get domain

awards were both psychologists

Taylor did both funded

the ARPANET and

also it was the guy who set up Xerox PARC

and I believe that

the difference between now and then is as

simple as the difference between how

funding is done the funding then attracted

a particular type of people those people

are still around today but they're there's a complete

mismatch between them and the funding so those people are going into something

else other than computing I

myself would not go into computing today if

I were 25 it's

almost impossible to go to a university and even find

out that it's neat because it's so

intertwined it's been so invaded by IBM ISM but

now in the form of Microsoft and web

and everything else so there's been a complete confusion

between what it means to be a vocational

person in computing and what it means to actually get an education

in and the universities have been generally

the the biggest

sinners in that because universities

with when the baby boom came along pretty much turned themselves

into businesses which they pretty much are today

ok a little joke well

I'm not going to do the joke I'm just going to put those up as an enigmatic

thing here

because I think this is a good time to pause for any questions you

might have because I've done I've done a bit just about an

hour and I think that's all I should should do here

I'll leave the joke until later so

any questions on

this talk which is

mostly about why I think

things worked and why I don't think

they work as well today thank

and

a few questions before the reception yes sir

did the ARPANET help to cross fertilize

these ideas that you talk with others in other places

in ways that were interesting that made things happen

yes it did the

ARPANET cross-fertilize ideas yes

and interestingly

just as much before it was

built as afterwards because

it was these several of these large projects

that require cooperation

between these 15

places got

a lot of the cross fertilization happening in

doing the planning and it took

some years before the ARPANET was

actually as you you know email

existed before we

networks that existed on the time sharing systems

of the 60s and

everybody was very very happy to be

able to have a working email

system that linked colleagues

together and so the

but I think that the you

know for instance FTP file sharing

and other kinds of things were done after the

advent of the the ARPANET which is really an experiment

in adaptive

packet switching many ways the ARPANET

was a little bit more interesting than the way the internet

does it because it actually it

did the ARPANET actually thought to a certain extent

so there's a lot of fun working

in many of us like I was on the ARPANET committee

I was one of many graduate students

who served on that yeah

yes

original

well I think the

the you know I was

willing to settle for Less hardware-wise than

we have today but to me to me the Dynabook was

always a service idea this is something

that most people have still have a hard time understanding about

computing because they you

know we still place a lot of

value in atoms it's

hard to actually monetize things unless

you get something in the mail right

or you find a very low price for it because

don't know how to value those things that

computers are actually undervalued as far as I'm concerned

the average American car cost twenty

eight thousand five hundred and I pay that in a flash

for twenty eight thousand five hundred dollars worth

of computing in a box like this rather than 2k

right but most people don't use the computer

for anything useful it's just no

it's true because people almost

everybody uses the computer almost all the time as a convenience

for dealing with old media

hardly anybody of the billions

who use computer learns about new

things by writing simulations for example so nothing

even remotely resembling a computer computer

literacy exists so this is bait

this is still the Gutenberg Bible imitating

the fonts and

ligatures that the monks did

and a good way to think about computers is to

services so there are actually three physical forms I

came up with for the Dynabook they

were rather different from each other based on

things that were going on but the you

know most of the thinking I did about it was what

services and part of the service

ideas what kind of user interface do you actually

have to have to help

people rather than hinder them and it took us

while at Xerox PARC to come up with one that

was even halfway decent that's the one that's used today

and and it was really a much better

interface for children than it than it has been for adults

I think yeah so

if you look at the services provided by something

like an iPad they're terrible right

because it violates the first principle of

personal computing which is symmetric creation with

consumption so that was one of the

few notice and sketchpad you

with a working bridge or you could make one and

microsoft word which was originally

done at Parc you could present somebody

with a document and you could read it or you can make a document

but notice that symmetry exists

iPad the iPad most of the stuff that Apple has been doing

our consumer consumption devices

and I think they're terrible for people

because they can completely gotten

right price so that people will

buy an app for whatever

it is rather than improving things enough

so that they can make tools as they need

them right so that's anti what this

whole romance of personal

computing was about from this group yeah

so and you know whenever you make something

whenever you make a tool you're you're simultaneously

making an amplifier and a prosthetic

car amplifies us in one way but it

withers our body in another we have

to choose to exercise once we take on a

car and

Socrates you

know complained about writing that it takes away the

need to remember things and

of course this was Plato

being ironic because

Plato was the one of the first great writers of all

time and he would use Socrates as his mouthpiece

so I'm sure he was chuckling like mad while he

was while he was writing this and he didn't

say it but anybody with a brain would

realize oh but wait a minute I don't have to give

up my memory just because I've got writing now

I've actually got the best of both worlds

providing I decide to remember because I

certainly don't want to leave anything interesting out in a manuscript

right it's too inefficient it's

too inefficient to try and find things

you need them on this thing so you might as well when you

learn how to read you might as well learn how to remember and now you're

really powerful because reading is many times more

efficient than oral

transmission and if

you can remember you're now putting enormous

amounts of stuff that can work with each other inside

your head so that was

so these are the kinds of thinking that we were

doing back back then

yes sir

in

today's money

but

you know I've often wondered how

how much of a simple generalization you can

make and get away with on

this but one thing that is certainly true

one contrast that is really

noticeable is that today's

funders like the

funders in the past are responsible they have this money

but today's funders

confuse being responsible

with the need to control and the

funders in the past absolutely did not

that's so

look lighter didn't control the darn thing his

idea was in fact so a

good Licklider story is they

asked him about

failure is

any worry because if you looked

at what these different projects were trying to do they were cosmic

every one of the things had not

there was nothing like them that had actually

been done before so pretty much it was artificial intelligence

it was making a network that could

scale by 10

magnitude without breaking you know nobody done anything

like that Licklider said well we're not playing golf

we're losing a stroke is a

tragedy so this is more

like baseball and Tyco Ty

Cobb had the best lifetime batting average and

it was 367 so two-thirds

of the time you know something

not good

happened when Ty Cobb went to the plate and

if you look at most of the assessment systems that are

set up now by Congress

and in businesses people who fail two-thirds of the time

or gotten rid of but in sports they

understand what the deal is and

Licklider said look if we if we're 30

or 40 percent successful on what

we're funding just that will change the entire world

and they said well what about the 60 or 70

percent I said well that's just the cost of doing business in research

and this is what people don't understand because

this is a phrase that businesses do have

for various ephemeral things like advertising

but they have never been able to apply it

to what long-range research does

in long range research has been incredibly

fruitful but another

reason you could say is down deep these

people don't want to fund anything they don't understand

right and that

is a disaster because it's not their business to understand

that's what they're paying the scientists

for their business is to find

the best people they can and give them the money and take the percentages

on the results if they do that well you'll

always get multi trillion-dollar returns

on the thing so a lot of different reasons that are

somewhat similar right you can work them in

different directions part of it

is Congress was not a factor back

then partly because of Proxmire

in the seventies and other things

happened since Congress has inserted itself very

very deeply in

these Affairs including this turning

ARPA into DARPA which came with a

congressional oversight that makes that requires DARPA

to have goal-oriented proposals

which means

you have to you have to tell the funders what you're

going to do ahead of time and that's not long-range research

long-range researches the

funders are paying partly for problem finding

so I've been working on NSF for the last few

years to get this say look you guys can't keep funding engineering

proposals and getting it you're not doing anything

you know you're you're keeping professors and

graduate students alive but the field is dying

because nothing is happening

and it's not that these breakthroughs we're

and now there aren't anymore breakthroughs and it's

people back then we're any more special than they are today

numerically there are more people

of the caliber of ARPA and Xerox

PARC today than they were back then I mean the field is enormous

so there's more to draw from and

Jesus the computing just

just having

lots of memories

to work with is something

that we would have died for back then

so so

there aren't so this is like a poco Barrett you remember

poco he said we've met the enemy and they are us

this is one of these things where this

is the simplest proposition and

another thing that is astounding to

me is that when

they damped demand rationalization of these things I said

look the best rationalization for investing

is portfolio investing it's proven

mathematically then in portfolio investing

you have to invest some small percentage in

unvetted projects

because you'll get mat the

maximum return that way and if

you go to universities you go to businesses they learn

this in MBA school and they know it yep

yep yeah but they won't do it they want that small

percent to go into their bottom line because

they don't understand so

it's it has to do with the

the different the difference between I

think the regular world and things

that require talent like team

sports right

nobody's going to demand democracy in professional

basketball

all right you get the best they

millions for them a professional baseball and you're

not looking for the same kind of person your

guts the whole point of a team a team is

a multi-faceted diamond that

is put together partly by the coach and partly

by the way the players work off and

whole point is to get synergy so it's not about having

a a party line or a

religion not about any of these things that make

people feel comfortable you know and the

as Licklider said you know what

do we don't worry but like the part

tailor was asked wasn't this going to be expensive and

Taylor said no because I'm not going to hire any good

person and Zurich said what and

he said no because you can't concatenate good people

to do what a great person can do says I'm

only got hire great people and there are that many

of them so the budget is limited

but he says once I have these

don't have to have a management structure with

these people because these people already know what they want to do

so Taylor said my job at Xerox PARC is

to set up the social conditions so

when these lone wolves need to cooperate with each other

they will that was what his job was he

never gave us a directive or suggestion

on any goal we should work on but he worked on the

cology of the system that was his role in the thing

Butler was the brilliant Oppenheimer we

had my group was the lunatic fringe as it

was called and and

we didn't have a party line on the on the thing and we

did cooperate when that when that was a good

idea and it was powerful like two dozen people you

we just did a lot of things in four years and

people are amazed at and I said no with it that was the easiest

hing we ever did in our life it's the one time we ever got to

interference from people who don't know what they're doing

so that's the that's the

hell of it this stuff is really easy

to pull off if

you don't have all these side conditions that

wind up killing things before they ever get started