[ Silence ] Victoria Rodriguez:
Good evening and welcome to the first
of several special events to commemorate
the Centennial of the Graduate School. I am Victoria Rodriguez, the Vice Provost
and Dean of Graduate Studies, and I am delighted that all of you have joined us today. This event is a partnership of the Graduate School with the Department of Computer Science,
and the Dell Distinguished Lecture Series,
as well as the LBJ School of Public Affairs And I want to thank our co-host for
helping make this event possible, J Moore, former Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Gary Chapman, my colleague at the LBJ School
and Director of the 21st Century Project. I also want to thank each and every one
of you for coming this evening... ...especially members of the 1910 Society as
well as our distinguished guests including Steven Leslie, Executive Vice President and Provost,
and the many faculty, deans, vice presidents, and other members of the university's administration. As graduate dean, I am responsible for overseeing all of the
university's graduate programs and for providing financial support to graduate
students across all disciplines. I also have the honor of recognizing those very exceptional
individuals who earn their graduate degrees at UT. At the University of Texas we say that
what starts here changes the world. And this evening, we have a superb example
in our very special guest, Robert W. Taylor. Mr. Taylor earned his Master's Degree in Psychology in 1964,
and from there, he went on to literally change the world. We are so pleased that Bob is here with us today. On this special occasion and in recognition of his
remarkable achievements, I am deeply honored to bestow
upon him this year's Outstanding Graduate Alumnus Award. This prestigious award was established by the Graduate
School to recognize distinguished contributions of
its alumni since graduation from the university. Achievements may be in academic or professional careers,
outstanding service in the public or private
sector or other significant contributions. As part of this award, the Graduate School will give two
5,000-dollar fellowships in Mr. Taylor's name, one to a graduate student in psychology and another to a graduate student in computer science. Please join me in congratulating Mr. Taylor as I present
him the Graduate School Outstanding Alumnus Award. [ Applause ] Before we begin the program, I would like to tell you a little more
about the Graduate School Centennial Celebration and the 1910 Society. The Graduate School has a long history of excellence at the
university and we are rapidly approaching our 100th birthday. Graduate work was included from the very beginning of the
founding of the university in 1883, although, the Graduate School was not officially established until 1910. Today, the total number of graduate students in our
university is nearly 12,000 and we confer about 3,000
master's degrees and 800 doctoral degrees annually. You might be interested to know that UT and UC Berkeley
are the two largest producers of PhDs in the United States. But our Graduate School is not only one of the biggest
in the country; we are also one of the very best. Over 40 of our graduate programs are ranked in the top
10 nationally and another 53 are ranked in the top 25. Graduate education plays a vital role in the success of the
university and graduate students are integral
to our core educational and research mission. They work alongside the finest faculty, they inspire
undergraduate students in the classroom, and they design research projects and develop new ideas
that will, in time, also go on to change the world. The Graduate School has also become central to the goal that
President Powers established for The University of Texas
to become the top public institution in the country. As you have undoubtedly heard the president say, this cannot
happen without stellar graduate programs, and this
means we must have not only the best faculty, but also the best students in the nation and in the world. The most promising graduate students are attracted by our
top notched faculty as well as other things
the university has to offer, of course. We have great libraries, wonderful art collections, state-of-the-art laboratories and computing facilities, and even a pretty good football team. We also make every effort to attract and support as many
graduate students as we can by awarding them fellowships. The Graduate School distributes about 10 and a
half million dollars in fellowships each year. And while this may sound like a comfortable sum of money, it
is only a fraction of what is needed and pails in comparison
to other highly-ranked universities in the country. We need to do better and we will. In fact, we have a plan. When President Powers kicked off the university's capital campaign, the Graduate School set a goal to raise
100 million dollars for graduate student support. 100 million for 100 years of graduate excellence
is a fitting tribute to our centennial. To help us reach that goal and to recognize a superb
achievements of our graduate alumni such
as Mr. Taylor, we created the 1910 Society. Our quest is to energize alumni and friends to join the
1910 Society by making a pledge to give 1,910 dollars
or any multiple thereof. [Laughter] All of it exclusively, exclusively for graduate student support. Many members of the 1910 Society are here with us this
evening wearing their lovely 1910 lapel pins, and I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their generosity. Please join me in recognizing the members of the 1910 Society. [ Applause ] Now, on with the program. It is my great pleasure to introduce my colleague, Gary Chapman. Gary is a senior lecturer at the LBJ School where he teaches
classes on Internet Technology and Information Policy. He leads the 21st Century Project which is a program of
research and education on civic engagement
and science and technology policy. He is Associate Director of the university's
Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute, and he serves as an adviser to the
State of Texas and the City of Austin. Gary has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Time,
The Austin American Statesman, and Texas Monthly magazine - writing about technology and society. He has been awarded the Texas Excellence in Teaching Award
and the City of Austin's Distinguished Service Award. And in the year 2000, Texas Monthly named our very own, Gary
Chapman, one of the 25 Most Powerful Texans in High Tech. Gary. [ Applause ] Gary Chapman:
Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure
to see this event happen after a long time planning
and hoping that this would happen. And it's wonderful to see so many friends here.Thank you so much for showing up including my friends here on the stage. We're marking the 40th anniversary of the internet and the
beginning, as Victoria said, of this observance of the
Centennial of the Graduate School, and hosting Bob Taylor. He is probably the best where I can think of to
celebrate both these anniversaries at the same time. I wany to thank very briefly all the people who have been
involved in putting this event together including Cathy White, Kathleen Mabley, John Dalton,
Maria Ramirez-Romo de Vivar, Susan Binford,
Kerri Battles, and Nancy Hatchett. And particularly thanks to my friends and colleagues,
Professor J Strother Moore and Dean Victoria Rodriguez. I also want to thank Mitch Waldrop and Mike Hiltzik
for coming out here to Austin to join us, and my old friend, John Markoff, from the New York Times. And of course, we wouldn't be here if
Bob hadn't said yes, which was by no means a sure thing. So I want to thank him for coming all the way out here from
California to share his time and his life story with us. I arrived in Silicon Valley in the late 1970s to attend
graduate school at Stanford University and Bob Taylor was already a legend
in Silicon Valley when I got there. He had co-written this famous paper with J.C.R. Licklider
with the straightforward and historic title called the Computer as a Communications Device,which I
think all of us now recognize as one of the most significant
and signature intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century. Bob had launched the ARPAnet when he was at the Pentagon and he created and led the computer science
lab at the famous Xerox PARC where most
of the elements of the PC revolution were born. One of the things that started the PARC was a national
public interest organization of computer scientists, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, which we're pretty sure is the first public interest
organization to have been built on the internet. CPSR hired me as its first national executive director in
1984 to run a small and somewhat dingy national
headquarters office on High Street in downtown Palo Alto. As an organization, we needed internet access because that
was our principal means of communicating with
people and it wasn't easy to get back in those days. And we didn't have very much money to spend
and computers were really expensive then. So, Bob lent us a Xerox Alto which looks like this. Now, the Alto was never available to buy so the opportunity
to use one of these every day when I went into the office,
even in the mid 1980s, was a pretty rare experience. It had a Word Processor on it called Bravo that would
eventually turn into Microsoft Word and it had an email program on it
which was something new that most
people had not yet discovered. The Alto heated up my office when I turned
it on but it fascinated me nevertheless. It felt like I was seeing the origins
and the creation of a new world. Now Bob left Xerox about that same time but he started
Digital Equipment Corporations Systems Research Center in
a building that was just around the corner from my office. And since many of CPSR's leaders went with him to DECSRC, I
wound up hanging around DECSRC a lot listening to the talks that were being given and pretty much just standing
around in awe of the people who were there, most
of whom were the smartest people on the planet. And Bob was perhaps most famous for that, finding the most
brilliant people and organizing them into world changing teams. Out of DEC's Palo Alto labs came the first search
engine, AltaVista, on top of which Yahoo was built. So chronicling this really remarkable story were
our three journalist guests this evening whose
career has covered all of this period of time. And they'll begin by reviewing some
of Taylor's career highlights, especially our two authors here who have each
written books about different stages of Bob's career. So, Dr. Mitchell Waldrop is the Editorial Editor of
Nature Magazine which is one of the oldest scientific
publications in the world. It started publishing in 1869. Dr. Waldrop has a PhD in Elementary Particle Physics from
the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a master's degree in journalism from the same university. From 1980 to 1991, he was senior writer at Science Magazine
where he covered physics, space astronomy, computer science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology,
psychology and neuroscience, believe it or not. He is the author of three books. One called Manmade Minds about artificial intelligence. A book called Complexity which is a book about
the Santa Fe Institute and complexity theory. And perhaps the most relevant book for this evening called
the Dream Machine, a history of the early days of interactive computing. Michael Hiltzik is the author of the book called Dealers of
Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age ...which chronicled the invention of such pioneering technologies
as the personal computer, the laser printer, Ethernet and graphical displays at Xerox PARC, much of this
under the personal direction of Bob Taylor. Mike and I were once fellow writers at the Los Angeles Times where he still has a column on business issues and for his work in covering business technology
and public policy he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His fourth book, a history of the building of Hoover Dam is
entitled Colossus, which is coming out next year and he is at work on his fifth book, a history of the New Deal. So first, I want to turn it over to Mitch Waldrop. Mitch Waldrop:
Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you very much and thank you all for coming. Well, this as was mentioned is this year is the 40th
anniversary of the ARPAnet, almost exactly 40 years
ago this month. But when I started thinking about this, I decided to cast my
memories back a little bit further than that... to the fall of 1966, and that's when I was starting my sophomore year
at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. As many sophomores, I was still floundering around trying to
figure out what my major was going to be, but I did need some elective courses so I decided on
computer programming which was then taught
in the mathematics department. This was before many places had a computer science department. Computer science almost didn't exist in those days. So, I found the math building, found the room the class was
being taught in and as was my want, I grabbed a
seat right next to the prettiest girl in the class. And one thing led to another and by and
by she and I were going on study dates. In the case of programming class, a study date consisted of
going down to the basement of the math building where there was a room full of tables and around the side
of the room were these IBM punch-card machines, and these are big gray machines, had all these
blank punch-cards you could load in a typewriter and having written out your program in paper that
was marked off on a grid, one letter per grid square. This was in PL1 which was then the cutting
edge programming language of the day. You would then take that and go over the machine and punch
it out, one program statement per card and hope you
didn't make a mistake 'cause you couldn't erase. Okay. Once you were finally done with all this, you
would take the deck of cards, hopefully not dropping it. If you're smart you'd put it in a box. You would then go down the hall to a window where there was
a clerk who would take your deck of cards... ...and you could just in the background see the
school's IBM 360 mainframe, back there. And they would feed this thing, it lined it up and feed it through. It was called batch processing.
It does batches of these things at a time. And hours or more likely days later, you would
get results as fanfold printout and it would invariably say error in line 46,
which means you had to correct the card
and do it all over again. Now, this was incredibly tedious as you might imagine but you know we accepted it because for me and for almost
everybody else in the world including my girlfriend
who was soon to become my fiancee, that's what computers were. They were big.
They were expensive.
They were mysterious. They were off somewhere else in a back room you could
not get near it unless you had a special tour. They did take us back once to look
at it, not touch, just look. And the computer got the air conditioning when we didn't. And let me emphasize this.
This was not just, you know, the kind of hardware we had. This is not just how computers operate. This is what computers were in some
deep conceptual sense in our heads. Now, what I didn't know in that fall of 1966 was that
there were a fair number of people, not a huge number. There were a fair number who were struggling to come to
terms and understand a different concept of
what a computer was, what a computer could be. This was a radical minority view. It had emerged in the MIT area, in the Cambridge area in the
1950s and for reasons I don't have time to go into here
why it was MIT though that's a fascinating story in itself. Suffice to say there
were a lot of really smart people at MIT. And it had become the official policy of the Information
Processing Techniques Office in ARPA, the vast research projects agency which
operated in the bowels of Robert McNamara's Pentagon. This was of course the Vietnam
era, the start of the Vietnam era. And that's another fascinating story of
how that happened, but again, moving on. The notion, this vision was that computers
could interact with you, that you could give it a command by keyboard or some other means
and it would respond to you right then and there. This was an incredibly radical idea. And more than that, it wasn't simply that it would respond to you, but because it could respond to you in real time, you could
begin to start using it in fundamentally different ways. Instead of just as a fancy calculator, a much faster
version of the desktop calculators,
mechanicalcalculators you had even then, a computer could be a device to enhance human creativity. It would do this by getting rid of all the mental drudgery
of plotting data points or sorting lists of things or, whatever, all these mundane mindless stuff - doing your arithmetic. And it would leave the human being free
to do what humans do best, which is recognize patterns, you know,
think of the next thing to do, imagine stuff.
It would just offload all the drudgery. The computer could also democratize access to information. It would do this in two ways, one, by putting whole
libraries of knowledge at your fingertips. It would have access, you know, to all this knowledge.
And just by with a few keywords, you could
call it up and it would be right there. And more than that-- and just as important,
it would have a screen and it would be able to display this information
in humanly meaningful form, not just as lists of numbers, not just as fanfold printout but as, you know, graphics, as
pictures, as text that would be meaningful to
you, and with all these different thoughts. I mean, all sorts of things that you could do. You could even imagine having an image of
something that would rotate in 3 dimensions. And finally, this new concept of a computer was that it's
something that can able whole new kinds
of communication and collaboration. People could communicate through the computer. They could trade files back and forth. They could meet each other, you know, through the
computer and, you know, work together from a distance. Okay. Now, again this all sounds so matter of fact and of course that it's hard to remember now unless
you're as old as I am, just how radical it is. At the time, in those days, IBM and the other mainstream
computer manufacturers -- CDC all those guys, IBM in particular, which was the leader, was investing, making a venture company investment
in batch processing as the System/360. That was the machine my school had. And, you know, that was going to be its standard
thing and that was the future for business AT&T which handled communication,
had a monopoly in communication, was so totally oriented around voice it was hard
for their engineers even to imagine sending
data over those lines. I mean they could do it but, you know,
it's just a trick and it . . . -- the whole architecture of the system -- was oriented towards putting through voice calls period. But ARPA persevered as only a huge government boondoggle
can; [laughter] and it kept pushing this vision. Now, this was 1960s. This was before microchips,
Intel was just getting started in the mid '60s, actually hadn't even started at that point. So, nobody was talking about personal computers. That would have sounded like science fiction, but they were certainly thinking in terms of personal
computing, slightly different concept. And they were-- the idea was to do it through something
called time sharing where you would have some big massive
computer sitting off somewhere in an air conditioned room. just like it would look much like the standard batch processors
except that people would be able to tap into it from remote terminals, over telephone lines or whatever, and send their signals back and
forth and be able to interact with it that way. It's not totally unlike how you interact with Facebook
or Google right now though it's somewhat more primitive. But the idea of timesharing-- in fact, there was this
whole concept coming out of MIT again of
something called a computer utility. And the idea there very much in analogy to electrical
utilities is, you know, computers are
fantastic and one day every city would have one. [Laughter] And people would tap in and they would buy
computer power as needed and, you know, it would be great. Today they call that cloud computing, but you know it was
sort of-- they were thinking of it as one huge machine. It was basic idea. And ARPA implemented a fantastic experiment in this called
Project MAC at MIT, which was a very
pioneering thing to do large-scale timesharing. ARPA also-- that office in ARPA also funded a research into
graphics, displaying things and graphing them meaningful ways. Even early on-- a little bit later than what I'm
talking about, they were funding virtual reality, artificial intelligence and, of course,
early experiments in networking. Now, this is the point in which I remind you that
one of the most enthusiastic proponents of
this vision was a fellow named Bob Taylor. Now if I remember correctly, Bob, you first encountered
this idea-- well actually in 1960 when you read Licklider's first article. But you met in 1962 when you're at NASA as a program officer, you had met a fellow named J.C.R. Licklider
who was an MIT psychologist, a psychologist like Bob, and Licklider had been asked through
another series of historical flukes to create this information processing techniques
office at ARPA to study command and controls,
what ARPA was interested in. And it was in 1962 that he founded this office
and started introducing himself and forming a group of like-minded people
in Washington -- and that's how Bob met him. Licklider-- Lick, as he was known to his friends, had
brought that MIT vision to ARPA
and made it ARPA's official policy. He was by far the strongest proponent of
that vision and convinced lots of other people. And while he was at ARPA, actually it was in 1963, he wrote
a very famous memo to his PI's he was funding, the personal investigators he was funding entitled
To the members and affiliates of the intergalactic computer network, the intergalactic network in which he laid out a vision
for a network that would connect all the ARPA centers. I think it's significant that if you
look at in context by network, he meant the people and not the
wires, but the memo was mainly about the wires. And the technology wasn't ready for it then, but the idea
was around and certainly it resonated strongly in Bob Taylor. He and Lick talked a lot about what you could
do with such a network, and it led to the famous paper
which was already been mentioned, 1968,
the computer's communication device. We've seen-- not that.
That's the world's ugliest book cover. [Laughter] But we've seen illustrations
from that paper, the introduction. In 1966, Bob had come to ARPA by that point and then became
one of Lick's successors as head of the
information processing techniques office. And there, about the time I started to
romance that young lady in my programming class, he went to the head of ARPA, Charlie Hertzfeld,
and said, I need some money to get this network going.
We really need to connect up all these centers. The time has come. And indeed it has -- Charlie, was
it 20 minutes, a million dollars? Yeah. Got a million dollars in 20
minutes, which was pretty good. Charlie Hertzfeld is another guy
who's worth knowing, by the way, but. . . So the ARPAnet, that whole project got underway and,
yeah, a long fascinating story about
how that got architected the way it did. But, it finally got going in the fall of 1969, which as it
happens was a few months after
that young lady and I got married. Now that experiment as it happens was a temporary success. [Laughter] But the ARPAnet was certainly not temporary.
As we all know, it is still going today. Once the bits started flowing, they haven't stopped since.
It is now the internet. What are the lessons we can
take away from all this as well? Government boondoggles are sometimes
can do or can end up doing great things. That-- well, the technology is a challenge but, you know,
the hard part about what ARPA did
in those days wasn't the technology per se. That was a challenge. It was coming up with pushing an entirely different conception, an entirely different mental framework
for thinking about what computers could be. A computer wasn't one thing that everybody had assumed it was.
It could be a very different thing. Now I don't know exactly how we
apply that to what's happened today. I would just simply observe and end here by saying that
right now, we have a thing, this this online digital space, the clouds,
the web, whatever you wanna call it, this online information commons
that we're struggling to understand. It started out as one kind of thing, sort of like this
global bulletin board you could post information on. It's becoming something very different. Jargon like Web 2.0 got augmented,
reality coming on and there's some cloud computing. Last week, there was a conference at Government 2.0,
see ifwe can reform the government in radical ways -- who knows. But the challenge is to come up with a different
way of thinking about what this thing is. So I'll end there.
Thank you. [ Applause ] Michael Hiltzik:
Well thanks, Mitch, for that great
historical review of ARPA and its
role in interactive computing. And I'd like to also express my thanks to Gary Chapman and
J Moore and the university and Dean Rodriguez for putting
this event together and to Bob Taylor for bringing us together,
because obviously this could not have been done without him. It's been probably 10 years since the last time I saw Bob. And that occasion, if I remember correctly, I came up to
Bob's house in Woodside in Silicon Valley For one of the two or three very long interviews
and very fascinating interviews
we had for my book about PARC. And over dinner that night, I remember he told me one
of the most important secrets to how to manage a team
of brilliant independent-minded engineers, each one the smartest guy in the room. And I'm gonna get to that in a couple of minutes, we're just gonna leave that hanging out there [laughter] But I'll get back to it, I promise. But in general, since Mitch has brought us
to the ARPA years of Bob Taylor,
I'm gonna take us very quickly through the PARC years, and then Bob with John's help obviously
will take us the rest of the way.
But I'm gonna start with the first time I heard Bob's name, It was when I was in the feasibility study
stage of my book on PARC, when I was calling around to people
who had worked there in the '70s to find out first of all if there was enough of a story
for me to tell in a book, and second of all,
if there was a story -- as there was it turned out.
Would they cooperate with me and help me tell it. So I talked to Bob Metcalfe who invented Ethernet at PARC and Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker who were
the architects of that Alto personal computer, that pioneering machine that Gary showed
you, and a number of other people. And as you might expect, the name they
uttered most often was Bob Taylor's. It was clear that Taylor was their inspirer, their
bulwark, their wall against the outside world. The guy who would help them do their work despite
what Xerox management might have wanted them to do.
[ laughter ] And the most succinct description of his role came from
Chuck Thacker who told me, if you're
looking for the magic of PARC, it was him. As a leader of engineers and scientists, he had no equal. So that was a pretty good testimony and one of the next
calls I made was to Bob who was more than happy to help. But what I want to tell you about was how at PARC Bob moved
from the funder and conceptualizer of the network to being the conceptualizer and the manager, the manager of a distinct team that ended up building
the first personal computer, the Alto, among so many other things. And it's worth taking this moment to consider Bob as
a research manager because he was an unusual type. He wasn't the kind of manager who exercises his authority
and control and influence by knowing technically as much or
more about his subject than the people who worked for him. Let's call that the J Robert Oppenheimer-Bill
Gates model of research management. 'Cause I don't think Bob ever claimed to really know that
much about electrical engineering or double E as it's known, certainly not on the scale of Chuck Thacker
or Butler Lampson who are legends in the field. But he had an incredible instinct for knowing what
technology should be able to do and how it should be
formulated to reach that goal and how far it could be pushed
at whatever stage it was at at a given moment
and maybe a few clicks into the future. Butler and Lampson used to tell a great story,
I'm sure he still tells it, about what occurred when he and
Thacker were building the first PARC computer, which was known as MAXC, M-A-X-C,
and was a clone of a digital PDP-10. And now at PARC they had to clone this machine because
the PDP was built by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was a competitor of Xerox and Xerox--
there's no way Xerox was gonna give them the money
to put a digital computer inside a Xerox facility. So what they had to do, they had to build it
themselves and they cloned it, they emulated the system,
and that was the first PARC computer.
But while they were building it, Bob kept telling them that they ought to be
considering an alternative architecture, without actually explaining in technical terms
just what alternative he had in mind. He had this habit of speaking in parables when he couldn't
articulate his ideas in the precise language of engineering. And the way Lampson put it to me was he said, "When we
were building MAXC, Taylor told Chuck and me a bunch of
stuff we couldn't understand at all at the time and we dismissed it as the ravings
of a technically illiterate manager." [Laughter] But looking back on it, 2 years later, it
was crystal clear what he was trying to tell us to do. He was telling us, build the Alto. So, that's the way Lampson put it. The way Bob put it to me, and this is a clue to one of the
things that made him such a great research manager, was that the was talking functionally, in the same way he got ARPAnet
going by talking about how he wanted a network. He had 3 computers in his office, he had one that
would talk to Berkeley, one that would talk to MIT, one that would talk to somebody -- but they couldn't talk to one
another and he said, I don't want to have 3 terminals in my office -- I want one that will talk to all 3. He got his engineer started on the Alto, particularly
the visual display of the Alto, by talking about the way he wanted to
communicate with the machine. He would say, which organ, in which organ of the human
body has the greatest bandwidth in
terms of its access to the human brain. Well obviously the answer is - it's the eyeball. So if you then contemplate how the computer could best
communicate with its human operator, the answer is
through the display, -- a high quality visual display.
And what Bob told me was the designers
I was working with said, The display - that's crazy. The display is peripheral. And I said, this is Bob talking:
I said, No, the display is the entire point. And of course, he was absolutely right about that and we
have the results of that functional
discussion before us all day long, he says. So another point about Bob as a research manager
and what that tells us about how he saw his role and the times. And that's the importance of a free flow of
ideas in an open marketplace without allowing any idea to gain the status of
orthodoxy just because its proponents might be pulling rank. Bob's instrument for doing this was a
weekly event called Dealer at PARC where all the members
of the lab would gather in a room, and sitting on this collection they
had of hideous bean bag chairs. I think they were mustard colored was the way they were described to me and
they would toss their ideas around one to the other and subject them to open challenge. Now each Dealer meeting, and there was one a week
and it was I think the only mandatory event
at--in Bob's lab every week. One person was designated that week's czar or Dealer and it was up to him to set the subject and
to a certain extent the rules of debate. But the general idea was you had to
place your idea in a marketplace and subject it to an uncompromising
give and take by all your fellows. Now, occasionally one speaker at Dealer would complain that,
you know he was being pounded onunfairly by the
higher ranking members of the lab, people like Butler Lampson or Chuck Thacker. But Bob's fundamental idea was the important thing
and that was that as manager, he was not
going to set the lab's agenda. The lab was going to set its own agenda via Dealer. So that's --that is the way to make sure that talented researchers
get an opportunity to follow their own interest
and to follow their noses. and it's something very important
that Bob implemented at PARC and that probably people who've work in
research labs would say, We don't see that enough. Now one other thing about Bob's management technique
and this is what he described to me that
night at the restaurant in Woodside. So we're back to that now. And it keeps coming back to me ever since he told it to me --
it has come back -- it comes back again and
again for this remarkable wisdom. It has to do with what he called
class 1 and class 2 disagreements. Now, if I remember correctly the subject at hand was the
relationship between Bob Metcalfe, again the inventor of Ethernet
and Chuck Thacker who-- his role was already discussed. Bob and Chuck -- It's Bob Metcalfe and Chuck Thacker --
never got along from the first moment they met. And that's because -- I mean there were lot of reasons
and if you've met both them you would know personality
had something to do with it but as Bob put it, the two of them were locked in
what he called a class 1 disagreement. And what that meant is, what as he
described it to me, that's when two people disagree and neither can
explain to the other's satisfaction the other's point of view. Alright, we're not talking about I can't explain
to your satisfaction my point of view but I can't explain to
your satisfaction your point of view. And I'm gonna quote him here. A class 2 disagreement, as he
explained, is when both can explain to the
other's satisfaction the other's point of view. And as he put it, class 2 disagreements enable
people to work together even when they disagree. But class 1 disagreements are destructive. Most international crises and most of the pain and suffering
and difficulty in the world is based on class 1 disagreements. Thacker and Metcalfe could never reach a class 2
disagreement and they've been enemies all their lives. And you know, when you think of it,
class 1 disagreements in fact, the Middle East, the healthcare debate and
lots of other seemingly intractable disputes
that we might have in our offices or even our families and Bob saw
his role as moving class 1 disagreements to class 2. And I think one reason PARC ended up with such a record of
accomplishment is that he managed to do that not always and I know there are plenty people in the world
who have enduring class 1 disagreements with Bob Taylor
[ laughter ] but very, very often and that's really a key. So I'm gonna close here by quickly placing PARC in the
context of the research environment of its era and to try to address some conclusions about research today. As a corporate research center PARC
wasn't unique but it was unusual. It was a well funded facility deliberately placed far from
corporate headquarters so that it wouldn't feel constrained to work on
incremental improvements to Xerox's product line new formations of copiers and things like that. It was research -- not development. But Xerox didn't really expect it to work on
technologies that Xerox couldn't exploit, it was modeled after Bell Labs but it wasn't really pointed at
basic science the way Bell Labs was. It wasn't going to be
researching the big bang for example. Xerox did hope to productize much of what PARC created. George Pake, who was its first director, told me he had
asked Xerox to hold him to a liberal standard
of success but not an infinite one. He told Xerox' recruiters you'll gonna get nothing of
business value in 5 years, but if you don't have something of value
in 10 years then you're gonna know you hired the wrong guy. Now, I argued in my book that what prevented Xerox
from exploiting so much of what developed at PARC wasn't
that it didn't intend to but that the new technologies required
such a dramatic change in marketing and selling and pricing that no organization Xerox's size, and they had
200,000 salesmen at the time all selling copiers. No organization on that scale could have absorbed
this new technology without tearing itself apart. The Alto and its offspring were addressing
a market that didn't even exist, remember? So to exploit it, you had to be a small organization
built specifically to exploit it, an organization like Apple which did exploit it. So, what are the lessons here? Bob Metcalfe told me that he thought that corporate America
had taken the wrong negative lesson from PARC which is that when you invest in basic research you're
gonna get a lot of stuff you can't use and that that's an expense. Of course, everyone forgets that one of the things that PARC
created was the laser printer which made billions for the company. But in any event, one of the -- this is one of the reasons
that we see fewer big companies expending
as lavishly on independent research centers. That reason and also that public companies today have become
much more focused on short term financial results
in PARC because of pressure from Wall Street. And most in-house corporate research efforts are tied much
more closely to a company's core business than PARC
was or Bell Labs and that includes Microsoft research
and Google Labs which are working on a lot of basic things but all with a focus on something that Microsoft or Google
will be able to put into the marketplace at some point. So we're gonna see a lot more speculative research
being conducted in an entrepreneurial setting. Helped somewhat by the venture capital
sector which a relatively new development. And of course, whether the venture industry can support this
the way AT&T and Xerox did in the past, ...well this is still an open question and we're not
really gonna have the answer to that for many years. But I don't think they're doing too badly yet - especially when you
consider that a lot of venture funding today is coming from big
corporations that are investing through in-house venture funds that enabled them to support
R&D both privately and through academia without making that old style commitment to a big R&D infrastructure. Now, this new way of doing things raises a whole lot of questions about things like intellectual property rights
and the relationship between corporate
America and the university. But obviously, we don't have the time to go into that now -
or at least I don't - but I'm gonna leave you with that as this is
the future of research and keep in mind how different today is from the way
the world was when Xerox created PARC and now I'm gonna turn the podium over to--? Oh, I'm sorry, to Gary. Gary Chapman:
Thank you so much. Michael Hiltzik:
Thank you. [ Applause ] Gary Chapman:
So it's now my pleasure to introduce
Professor J Strother Moore who will
introduce John Markoff and Bob Taylor. Professor Moore holds the Admiral B. R. Inman Chair in the
department of computer science which is named after my
current boss who's sitting right here in the front row, and after getting a BS from MIT in 1970
and a PhD from University of Edinboro. In 1973, J was hired by Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC where he
worked on office information systems including Bravo, the word processing program
that I mentioned earlier and on mechanized reasoning. He's the co-author of a theorem prover used today
by industry to verify hardware and software. He's been serving as the chairman of the computer science
department since 2001 until just about a week
ago or 10 days ago, 17 days ago. [laughter] And he's a member of the national academy for his contributions
to mechanize readings-- reasoning, Professor Moore. [ Applause ] J Strother Moore:
So it's my pleasure to introduce both John
and Bob -- a few words about John. He joined the New York Times as a reporter over 20 years
ago and he now writes in the science section for the Times. He writes for the Times from San Francisco which is a--
just a demonstration of the wonderful properties of the net. He's also an adjunct faculty member
in the Stanford Journalism Department. He's the co-author of a number of books - several of them on cyber crime and hackers and a really fascinating book called What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. My own personal story about John is a debt that we, the
academic computer science community and universities in general owe him for his exposure of a lie being told
by DARPA back about 4 years ago - when DARPA was maintaining that their support for university
research was the same as it had always been. John eventually obtained data that showed that DARPA was
funneling a great deal of its research
money into classified industrial projects and university research had suffered greatly as a result and the Times published that article and Tony Tether was forced
to go back to Congress and reveal their real numbers. And so, in addition to universities owing John something, I
think that just the simple-- those of us who
enjoyed truth [laughter] owe John something. [ Laughter ] [ Applause ] Last year he shared the breaking news award of
the society of American business editors and writers and in 2007 he was named Fellow of the Society
of Professional Journalist swhich is
the highest honor of that organization. As for Bob, so much has been said,
I won't say too much more. Let me just-- Mitch described what
computing was like in the 60s and let me just say that to suggest that there was
a use for personal computers back in the 60s was akin
to suggesting that there was a use for personal cyclotrons. The issue of where you were gonna put it your house was less
pressing than the issue of what you would
do with it once it gotten there. [laughter] And Taylor understood that there was actually an incredible
market, an incredible demand and there could be a demand and need for personal computing
if the proper infrastructure was provided and Bob set
about to make that happen. Some of the things you don't-- you haven't heard about Bob,
I might mention having known him for good long time now, is he loves BMWs and drives one with a license plate UDM
which stands for Ultimate Driving Machine [laughter]. He's a real fan of sake. He plays the guitar and does a great Hank Williams. And if you ever put together a touch
football team, Bob is your quarterback. [Laughter] He's got this absolutely uncanny
ability to know who everybody is on the field and to get the ball to the open person without ever appearing to look. And that's a metaphor for the way he managed PARC and I
suspect, although I wasn't part of it, the way he manage
DECSRC both on and off the touch football field. So, in any case, I concur with everything that's been said
about the remarkable talent of Bob Taylor and
I'm delighted that he accepted our invitation. Bob and John. [ Applause ] John Markoff:
So, now we're gonna hear from Bob. ...but I just wanted to take a couple of seconds to
review because as you've all seen, this is significant but I don't think you fully get how
breathtaking what happened and what Bob did is. When I was a young reporter they told me that if you really
want to understand something, what
you do is you follow the money. And so, let me just review here. Bob as a young NASA program manager funded Douglas
Engelbart, a researcher at SI International who had some big
ideas but didn't have any money and Doug invented the mouse. Then when Bob went to ARPA, he continued to fund Doug
and Doug invented something called the online system. The online system was one of those first, sort
of prototypical personal computing systems. Much of the ideas for the things that you use, all the
things you use in the modern internet and the personal
computer were contained first in that research. And then as it's been described, Bob funded ARPAnet. And ARPAnet was the seed of the internet. But he didn't stop. When Doug had completed his work in the late 1960s, it was Bob's idea to show it to the world and there was an event in San Francisco that is
now referred to as the mother of all demos where this technology was unveiled to basically
the 1000 best computer scientists who were living in that
world that Mitch talked about of punch card computing. At one time, they saw the mouse, they saw
hypertext, they saw networking, they saw it all. It was Bob's idea to fund the demo and he picked up the tab. At PARC, he took Lampson and Thacker
and he funded their work on the Alto. And then when he left PARC and he went to
DECSRC, he funded the first search engine. Now, one of the things I've found in 30 years of writing
about technology is the visionaries are mostly wrong. They're wrong more than half the time. Bob has a record of consistent--
consistency which is breathtaking. So, where did it come from? Let's start at the beginning. [Laughter] You didn't just go to UT and as an undergraduate
and graduate, you grew up in Texas. Tell us about growing up in Texas. Bob Taylor:
Okay. First, I want to thank everyone who's been
involved in arranging all of this. . . Dean Rodriguez, Gary Chapman, J Moore. I want to congratulate the graduate school on 100th
anniversary and thank them for their role in this. Thank the Dell Corporation. Encourage the Dell Corporation to help continue paying
for the new computer science building [laughter]. [ Applause ] It's nice to be here.
Yes, I wanna tell you some things about Texas. I was born in Dallas and adopted
28 days later in San Antonio. I don't know how I got there but that's the way that
happened by a Methodist minister
and his wife who adopted me. I then lived in Uvalde, Victoria, Ozona, San
Antonio, Mercedes, Kingsville, Dallas, and Austin. [Laughter] Or any of those -- Oh, you've heard of all those towns? [Laughter] I'll bet there are some of you
who haven't heard of some of those towns. I know they -- those towns all exist. Like Austin, they may be a lot bigger
than they were when I lived there. My father taught in a Methodist college in San Antonio
from 1936 until World War II
and we lived in San Antonio from 1936 to 1946. In World War II, he became an army chaplain. And in many summers, both before and during World War
II, I spent time in Austin with my favorite aunt and uncle. My uncle was a foreman for the Austin Electric
Company that builds power lines and fixes power lines when they go down
in storms and sets up transformers, that sort of thing. He helped build some of Austin's famous moonlight towers. Do they still call it moonlight towers or...Yeah. And so, when I would be visiting them
and there wouldbe a storm, some power lines would go down at night and my aunt would--
would drive my uncle out to where this damage was and his gang of lineman that he was foreman of and
himself would set about in the midst of the storm trying
to get these wires back up and get power restored. So I got to see a lot of Austin from time to
time in the midst of a storm with people doing
dangerous work on poles fixing power lines. That's a view of Austin that very few people have seen. I also learned how to swim at West Enfield,
Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. I wonder if West Enfield still exists.
Does it? Yeah. My mother and her family were all
living in Austin as they grew up. My mother and her brothers and sisters were graduates of Austin
High School and later went to The University of Texas. My father and mother met at The
University of Texas and were married here. So, I have some Austin roots that are
as good as most of yours, I think. [ Laughter ] John Markoff:
You studied psychoacoustics and I don't think I've really -
until Mike just sort of described your insistence on the display
fully understood the significance about that. But there's a direct link, isn't there? Uou weren't really a psychologist, you were a
physicist in psychologist's clothing, perhaps? Bob Taylor:
Well, the psychology that we worked on was
more like applied physics than it was what most
people think of when they think of psychology. I met just at the beginning of this session the fellow,
Professor McFadden who heads the lab
that I worked in when I was here. We studied-- I did a thesis in sound localization trying to
figure out the accuracy with which a human
being can localize a sound that's out in space. If you shut your eyes and someone snaps their fingers over here, with what degree of accuracy can you point to that source? That was what my thesis was about. So, studying-- so we studied the auditory nervous
system fundamentally and in experimental psychology in
those days you also studied the visual system . . . and you learn some things
about the nervous, the human nervous
system and physiological psychology. So that played a role in your observation or some of the
observation about thinking of the eye as a
focal point for a pipeline from the computer to the brain. John Markoff:
That was pretty radical
for that point in time, wasn't it? Bob Taylor:
Yeah. John Markoff:
There was not a lot -- there was a little bit of graphics work
but there was not a lot going on in terms of visual computing. So no wonder they didn't understand
what you were talking about. Bob Taylor:
But you also-- we also invented a bit-- something called a
bitmap display which made this much more attractive in that every little pixel on the display was
represented by a place in main memory. So memory was more expensive than it is now. [laughter] And so the Alto cost too much money to be
commercially available mainly because of the memory. But if you understood Moore's law as we did then, we knew
that an Alto memory that might cost 7,000 dollars
in 1974 would cost 30 dollars 10 years later. Moore's law and integrated circuit
technology in general is very predictable. Every year or two prices are cut or
performances increase just predictably. Because it's so predictable this is why I
find hardware less interesting than software. Of course, hardware is required for a computer to work
but I promise you it's software that makes it hum. It's software that is the glue
necessary to put systems together. How many of you have programmed?
Oh, wow! [ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
That's impressive. How many of you have punched cards? [ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Oh my god! [ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
made this much more attractive
Okay. So you understand what Mitch was telling you. Audience:
Yeah!
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Well, the first time I had to -- I wanted to use
a computer was to process the data for my thesis, my graduate thesis that I just mentioned to you. So I went over to the UT computer center which
is of course in those days a batch processor and this guy in a white coat behind the glass wall introduced
me to the key punch machine and went through, explained to me all the rigmarole that Mitch accurately
and completely described to you a while ago. It's just like Mitch said, exactly. [laughter]
And I was appalled. I mean, and after I thought about
it for a while I was angry. And back in my lab I had a Monroe calculator
about like that that sat on a table and I just went back to my lab and programmed up
my data with this Monroe calculator. I'm not gonna touch that key punch machine and go
through that ridiculous card business, just unbelievable.
[laughter] But I didn't know what to do about it, you know.
I was offended but I didn't know what to do. I thought it was insulting. I mean, because I knew
that the computer could manipulate symbols. You know, it used high voltages and low
voltages to represent 1's and 0's and that 1's and 0's could be
combined to represent letters and letters could be combined
to represent text, alright, and text could be combined to represent knowledge. Why can't computers do that?
It's just so obvious, I think. I do. So, but I didn't know what to do about it. Two years or so later I read this article that Mitch also mentioned,
written by J.C.R. Licklider known as Lick to his friends
who later became my mentor, one of them. And the title of this article was Man-Computer Symbiosis and he
proposed a symbiotic relationship between computers and humans and I read this article and it
was a eureka experience for me. That's what-- that's-- yes, that's
what we do about computers. So from then on my, the course of my life was pretty well set. And not a year or two later I have found myself working as a
program manager for NASA headquarters and this proposal
came across my desk that John mentioned from Doug Englebart and he wanted to work with computers
like this so I funded him right away. And then Lick came to set up this program in
ARPA that Mitch told you about, -- the research program -- and
eventually convinced me to go join ARPA. But it seems that from the time we had, Lick had
started these time-sharing projects that I told
you about, that Mitch told you about. And that was the birth of interactive computing.
Well that was part of the birth of interactive computing. A fellow named Wes Clark who is an unsung hero, a huge hero, had invented what I think of as the first personal computer. Back in '61 or '62, it was called the LINC. Now it was designed only-- primarily
for medical laboratory use. So it wasn't what you would call today a general purpose
computer but it was personal and it was relatively small. It has a small display and you could
interact with its program and it helped the medical researcher
in monitoring and running medical experiments. It seems to me that after the invention of the LINC, it's the
name of that computer, and the invention of time-sharing, we now had examples of interactive computing. And after that, it seems to me everything
just logically falls into place. If you have interactive computing and you have to rely on a
large single mainframe computer that is connected to a
lot of terminals then you have a network of terminals. Well, why not have a network of computers,
so the ARPAnet was built, an obvious idea. Once you, as I say, once you have interactive computing. But if you're still-- if the technology moves on,
the hardware technology, and you're still restricted to single large mainframes
with lots of terminals, why not have a personal computer? Again, obvious idea. And so we built the Alto at Xerox PARC. And so now you have a network of computers,
Altos connected into a network. We had the first internet, lower case i, at Xerox PARC
about 1975, 1976 where we had invented the Ethernet. We connected it to the ARPAnet and now you have an internet. Lower case I internet is a connection of
two or more interactive computer networks. So we have the ARPAnet and the
Ethernet -- that makes an internet. Now we also had name servers, email systems, other
features associated with this total Alto system
-- that gave us the first internet. We didn't have at that time search engines.
We didn't have the World Wide Web. There were several things we have today that we didn't have then, but we had enough other facilities so that we could
take the 5,000 or so users of the Altos that had been built
and scattered around Xerox and we gave some to Stanford, to MIT
and to Carnegie Mellon and we had some
in Carter's Whitehouse and in Congress, laser printers, and Ethernets and Altos. So that we had a small by today's standards internet user
community but we didn't have the internet with a capital I. Xerox lawyers would not let much of
this technology into the public domain. We, for example, we invented some
modern programming languages, very modern, very advanced programming languages
and Xerox lawyers wouldn't let us tell people about them. How are you gonna get people to use a programming language
if you can't tell them about the programming language? There are a lot of stories about this period of time that
brings up the age-old question of why are there
so many more horses' asses than there are horses? [ Laughter ] [ Applause ] John Markoff:
I'm still-- before you go on on horses'
asses, I want to sort of get into that-- your formative, the things that helped form your thinking. Where you out of school and in
industry by the time of Sputnik? Or was Sputnik influential on your career in anyway?
I mean it created DARPA. Bob Taylor:
I was -- Sputnik happened in '57.
I was here in '57. John Markoff:
Did it have an immediate impact in any way? Bob Taylor:
On me? John Markoff:
Yeah, indirectly or-- Bob Taylor:
Well I was dumbfounded that the Russians
could do something like that and that the nation was dumbfounded and that's what motivated Eisenhower to tell the defense department to create ARPA. ARPA was created to fund far out risky research so
that we wouldn't get surprised again by anybody. And so the first programs in ARPA were all space
programs because Sputnik was a space program. But then a few years later, two or three, NASA was created
so all the space programs in ARPA were moved to NASA and that left ARPA free to start new research programs
and that's when they started computer research programming. John Markoff:
So it got brought up, but tell us about the
moment that you came to sit down in your office
and you were confronted by the three terminals. Bob Taylor:
Ah well. ARPA was -- I was in ARPA and we were
supporting research efforts at universities and a few research centers other than universities
in interactive computing and we had terminals -- I had terminals in my offices, two, three of
these systems that we were supporting so that we could sit down and use these systems
and sort of keep up with what's going on and sometimes we would learn of some new program that
someone had written at one of these places and . . . and they would tell us how to log on to their system
and we could use that program or examine that program. So there were these three terminals there, each to three
different systems. These systems were all geographically separate. Two were in California, one was in Massachusetts
-- and ones in California were 400 miles apart.
Northern and Southern California. So, again, an obvious idea. It's silly to have to
move from one of these chairs to the other one. John Markoff:
Was the idea of the intergalactic network
firmly embedded in your-- I mean was that a concept that you brought with you to ARPA?
Was it on your to-do list when you came? Bob Taylor:
Oh yes. When I went to ARPA I thought well, now what is it? I'm only gonna be here a short time because no one should
stay in a job like that for more than 4 or 5 years, I thought. So, what is it that I wanted -- really want to
make happen? And that was it. You know, I wanted to interconnect these.
I don't want geography to be in the
way of people who have mutual interests. So we used the ARPAnet which was not an
internet, do you understand? It was a single network. We used the ARPAnet to make it possible for researchers at
one place to communicate in various ways through programs
or data or email with other researchers in other places. So you had a community of people who shared interests.
They were all doing computer research. So it was natural. John Markoff:
So, one of the things that struck me the
first time I visited PARC was it was not only different
because of the kind of computing it was working out -- --it was different architecturally--particularly CSL--and I got a
little bit of insight that you're something of a frustrated
architect - or you were. Bob Taylor:
Yeah. John Markoff:
So they mentioned bean bag chairs but that was
part of a much broader vision of the way people-- Bob Taylor:
I think Michael said they were all mustard color.
That's not true. [ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
And they were not ugly.
I think he said they were ugly. They were multi -- they were all different colors.
I mean any one bean bag chair was a single color but
they're-- all the different chairs were different colors. I want to get that very important point. [ Laughter ] John Markoff:
But it wasn't just bean bag chairs. That's what everybody has taken
away. But it was a broader vision about people should collaborate. Bob Taylor:
Well, maybe you're talking about the way I
conned the management of PARC to let us
redesign the floor plan for our own spaces, yes. Well, so when we started PARC we were in a rented building
and plans were laid to build a much bigger permanent facility and when and a few years later, those plans were
ready and they-- the architects showed us the plans. There were three or four different laboratories at PARC. My lab was less than one third of PARC in
terms of numbers, excuse me, numbers of people. So they showed us these plans and they -- the building
was built in to a hillside overlooking Silicon Valley. By the way, Silicon Valley is misnamed. You see it
should be called Software Valley but that's an aside. And this building was built into a hillside. What happened? [Noise] Hello?
Can you hear me? Audience:
Yes! Bob Taylor:
And the weather in that part of the world is
very nice most of the year but the-- and the architects had made use of lots
of glass but they had no atria so you had this long building but the middle
of it was dark in terms of getting sunlight. And so we asked the architects to go back and redesign
the building and put some atria in it which they did. Then they came back and the hallway is
like the previous -- the original design. The building was long and it had
two major hallways running down it. This new design had the atria between the hallways. But off of two major hallways was office, office, office,
office, office, office . . . office, office,
office, office, office, very boring. it's not interesting at all and didn't really take
advantage of some things that are important with
regard to having people more accessible to one another because if you wanted to talk someone at
the other end of the building or even at the other end of your lab, you had to walk this long linear distance. So, I thought well, we can redesign this and have,
as he-- as John said I'm a frustrated architect. We can have offices that are sort of around a central area. Here and here and here and here and so the areas of the
offices are also around another central area. You got the picture? But the PARC management wouldn't allow this because we'd
already sent the architects back for a redo the first time around. Well, our lab had a contract, an open contract
with an outfit across the bay called M&M Designs. This was not an architecture outfit.
This was an outfit that designed printed circuit boards. And so I got -- I got my private -- my private
architect who had done some work for me in my house. And I told him what I wanted in the way of a new design for our lab. And he took the drawings from the original -- the
standard architect and he did them according
to what I wanted, redid them. And we sent a check to M&M Designs who
sent the check to the-- my architect. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
It's called money laundering. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
Well, but now we have to convince.
So now we have a completed design, alright, and it
didn't cost Xerox management anything, they thought. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
And how do we convince them? We take it to them and they say, well, but how much does
this cost compared to what the original design was and we show that it's cheaper than the original design to build. And furthermore, it has two more
offices in it than the original design. Oh! They couldn't think of any reason to object. This is sort of like the invitation
I got from Gary and J. Moore. When they first asked me to come here I said,
I don't travel anymore, I don't want to do that. I love Austin, but I'd rather stay home.
And because when I leave my immediate
neighborhood, my quality of life goes down. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
But then, Gary ticked off this -- the whole list of things. Well, we'll do this, and this, and this, and this, and he listed so many things, it was like-- it's was like our building plans for our lab. I couldn't think of anything to object. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
So I finally said, No, I would
just be hard to get along with, you know. John Markoff:
So you took about a half of decade or 6 years and you gave this
Fortune 500 Company a product that basically changed the world
and they weren't able to. Bob Taylor:
Well, they weren't willing to. John Markoff:
Well, I wanted to ask you why.
What was the-- Bob Taylor:
Why weren't they willing to? John Markoff:
Yeah, why weren't they willing to?
What was the-- Bob Taylor:
Well, that's complicated. Well, first of all, they were a copier
company; they were not a computer company. Copier's - Selenium is an important
element in building copiers. Silicon, as you know, is an important
element in building computers. Now we used to say about Xerox the
selenium tail wags the silicon dog. When I first visited the copier research center in Webster,
New York, shortly after joining Xerox, the director
of the center came to meet me in the lobby and he said, the first thing he said to me is, You know, the computer
will never be as important to society as the copier. Audience:
[ Laughter ] John Markoff:
End of discussion. Bob Taylor:
Well, they said there were certain cultural problems I guess.... Then when in the late '70s after we had our systems up and
running at PARC for several years, Xerox held a meeting in
Boca Raton, Florida that they called future's day. Well, it was a three-day meeting.
The last day was called future's day. And the chairman or the president of Xerox had 250 of the
top Xerox managers come to this 3-day meeting
to talk about planning for Xerox and so on. And on the third day, he had asked us to put on a
demonstration on stage of all of our stuff for
this audience of 250 managers and their wives. So we did that and it went very well. And in the afternoon, we took down all this stuff from the
stage and moved it into a big, a large room, and set up
different demonstration booths, sort of, areas across-- around this big room to allow the
people to come and sit down and use the Alto and use email and
print on the laser printer and so on -- -- use all the properties that we had been using
ourselves in our daily work for several years. And a strange thing happened. The men stood around the outside of all of these demonstration
areas and didn't go--wouldn't go--sit down at an Alto and use it. And the women all came, every one of them, and sat down at all of
these different places and were thrilled and enchanted. Men don't type. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
That was their ethic, you know.
I don't type, my secretary types. And the women, a lot of them, had been
secretaries and they loved it. So-- John Markoff:
They knew there was trouble. Bob Taylor:
So when you put these things together,
right, you know there was trouble. John Markoff:
Yeah. Bob Taylor:
You know. John Markoff:
So 1978 in return for permitting Xerox to invest in Apple,
Xerox let Steve Jobs visit your lab. Bob Taylor:
Right. I wasn't-- I was out of town at the time, otherwise I - Audience:
[laughter] John Markoff:
Well, it reduced-- Bob Taylor:
Otherwise, I hate to think of what would have happened. Audience:
[ Laughter ] John Markoff:
It reduced one of your researchers to tears.
She had to be forced to let the Apple guys visit. Bob Taylor:
That's right. Yeah. Well, there's one of them-- she didn't work
in my lab but she was a computer researcher, yeah. There's a story when I was mentioning software
a while ago that I wanna be sure to tell you.
It's a NASA story. It may not be true but it's a good story.
It could be true. NASA for all of its launch -- in each of its launch
vehicles, they were worried a lot about
the weight of the vehicle naturally. And so they had a set of guys who would come around
to the various projects and weigh various components
that were going to be in the spacecraft. And so they came around once to one of these projects and they said, We're here to weigh your computer. Okay, here's the
computer -- they weighed it. And the weighers said, Okay, that's good,
now we're here to weigh the software. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
And they were told that
the software doesn't weigh anything. Aah - they wouldn't believe it, but eventually they went away. They came back and a few days later
and they were very angry. They said, You told us the software didn't weigh anything,
but we found closet full of shoeboxes full of cards
with holes punched in them, and that weighs a lot. And we said, Well, the software is in the holes. Audience:
[ Laughter ] [ Applause ] John Markoff:
So, I want to ask 2 more questions.
If people-- if people have a couple of questions at the end, if you want to line up at the microphones, but
let me-- let me ask a couple more questions. Bob Taylor:
Did you understand if
you want to ask questions, go to the mikes? John Markoff:
Yeah. Bob Taylor:
Okay. John Markoff:
So when you started PARC, at PARC when you set up your laboratory,
you didn't start with Alto, you started with the system called POLOS. Bob Taylor:
No, no. John Markoff:
No? Bob Taylor:
No the other-- there was-- John Markoff:
Oh, there's another lab. Bob Taylor:
There's another lab at PARC that was involved
with computing related stuff. . . . . .and it started with POLOS and we started with the Alto, well, sorry,
we started with MACs, as Michael told you, but then we quickly
moved to build the Alto. John Markoff:
That idea of POLOS was still a distributed computing idea. Bob Taylor:
Yes. John Markoff:
Were there hints of cloud computing
at work that early on? Is that an analogy? Bob Taylor:
The first use of the term that I know
of cloud computing was used in a set of slides in a presentation given by Mike Schroeder
of my lab in about 1978 or something like that. But cloud computing is just a buzz
word today, probably was then too. It just means putting certain stuff that you want to use - not just
on your own computer but locating it elsewhere on the net in somebody else's computer or some
computer that you rent time on or something like that. It is not a very, I mean it's a distributed computing idea,
but it's not as exciting as it once was, I mean it's sort of old hat. John Markoff:
It's plumbing. Bob Taylor:
But people are using it a lot now as though it were something
new. It's just part of the advertising that goes on. If you look at -- I remember laughing about IBM
or AT&T advertisements back in the mid-'90s when the internet was just becoming visible to people. I mean we've been using it since 1970s but it didn't--
people by and large weren't -- didn't start
using it till mid-'90s -- something like that. And the advertisements, the Xerox advertisements, the AT&T
and IBM advertisements of that time were advertisements
that would have you believe that they invented it. You know, well, when IBM-- when I invited
IBM to join the ARPAnet, they declined. This was in '60s -- last half of the 60s. The ARPAnet was gonna come up in '69 and we wanted them to
be a node so they can experience this development of
this technology because I wanted to get the technology out into the world . . . and the way you do that is to get the commercial computer
companies to push it and so that people can buy it. IBM said, We're not interested.
Our computers can already talk to each other. Well, their computers were not
interactive, so what the hell does that mean? Okay. They missed -- they missed it completely. AT&T, I made the same invitation to them
and they said packet switching won't work. Packetswitching is the switching technology that the ARPAnet uses -- -- used -- and that the internet uses today.
And that we used in our internet at PARC.
Packet switching works. Audience:
[ Laughter ] John Markoff:
So if you want to really know, I commend you
to go take a look at Bob and Licklider's paper,
The Computer as a Communications Device particularly the last two pages which sketches out
the future, and it really is - it's so striking. You got it-- this was when-- '60-- Bob Taylor:
We wrote it in '67, it's published in '68. John Markoff:
So it's all there, but there's one thing
that you predicted that still isn't here and
that was this notion of an intelligent agent. You know, we've had this vision. I mean there have been people banging
on this vision for 30 years, and I still am
not using one on a day-to-day basis. Bob Taylor:
Nor you won't either. It's not gonna come anytime soon John Markoff:
What's the deal? Why is it such a hard problem? Bob Taylor:
Hmm. Because to make computers behave
like people, it's not likely to happen anytime soon. I mean it's -- I knew more about the human nervous --
-- the people that I recruited knew
a lot more about computing than I did, but I knew more about the human
nervous system than most of them. And they didn't have sufficient regard for the
complexity and ability of the human nervous system. So some of them thought they could really build a computer
program that could out perform a human being. Well, if the task is well bounded, like a game of chess or
checkers or something like that, then, yes, sure, I mean not right away,
but eventually a computer program
did beat a chess master in that game. But if you want a computer to play ping pong with a
ping pong champion, or you want a computer to write a
bestselling novel, fat chance, not anytime soon. So, this was all part of that genre. John Markoff:
Now did you fund John McCarthy's lab on the other
side of the Stanford campus in addition to Englebart's lab or-- Bob Taylor:
Yes. John Markoff:
You did. You funded both-- Bob Taylor:
Actually, Lick had started
funding him before McCarthy's lab, yeah. John Markoff:
Because John McCarthy represented this
position in computer science that we could create
a human brain, we could replace the human brain. Bob Taylor:
That's right. And I funded the Artificial Intelligence Research,
but I didn't fund it because I believed that they
could emulate the human nervous system. I funded it because they worked on problems
that challenged systems research, the ability to build new kinds of systems to do different new things. They -- one of their challenges was to build a
hand -- what they called a hand-eye system. Build a computer-generated eye and a computer-generated hand
that such as the eye would look at a scene
on a tabletop with blocks on it and the hand could move and pick up a block
and stack the blocks in a certain way. That's the hand-eye problem or one of
versions of the hand-eye problem. Well, that forced the investigation of how
to make different subsystems like those that control the hand work with
other subsystems like those that control the eye. That's an important problem. So I funded Artificial Intelligence when I was in ARPA
because they were on the lunatic fringe
of looking at what was possible not because I thought they could create a nervous system. John Markoff:
Yeah. Any idea where the lunatic fringe is today? Bob Taylor:
They're still lunatics, but I don't-- [laughter].
No, I'm retired. I don't -- I've lost track of them. John Markoff:
Fair enough. Well, thank you. Let's give Bob a warm applause. [ Applause ] John Markoff:
Do we actually -- we may have some questions. Bob Taylor:
I want to thank Victoria for this. [he holds up his Outstanding Alumnus award] It's very nice. I never expected one of these. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
I'm a life member of UT's Alumni Association, so
I read the Alcalde every time it comes and I
always see people in the Alcalde who get this. Audience:
[ Laughter ] John Markoff:
Let's take on the right-hand side first. Clive Dawson:
Sure.I'm Clive Dawson. I work at AMD here in Austin, and
I have a comment and a question. Back in the '70s, I was working for The University of Texas
Computation Center and we were the proud
recipients of one of those Xerox Altos. Bob Taylor:
Were you? Clive Dawson:
We were. We had one right here and we were using it to prepare
some -- the word processor to do large documentation systems. Bob Taylor:
Wow. Clive Dawson:
The gal that was basically operating it, I think this Alto must have
come to us with the shortage of that very, very expensive memory because she measured response time on that system by the number of lines of knitting she could do on her afghan. Audience:
[Laughter] Bob Taylor:
Yes some Altos did have less memory than others. Clive Dawson:
The question I had was dealing with your comment about
how hardware was less interesting to you than software. And I was wondering if you could comment on the notion that
the Moore's Law reduction in price and increase in power
of hardware has been the single most important factor in the decrease of the skill and ingenuity of the software
developers who did fascinating work in squeezing, you know, incredible amount of productivity out of a one nips machine
like a PDP-10 who could support, that could support 100 users. And that we're not gonna see that
stuff ever again until we hit the hardware wall. Bob Taylor:
Well, I understand your question, but the answer is -- that as the hardware increases in capability, and
decreases in cost, the thing that changes is not the
ability of software people but their ambition increases. So as they get more ambitious, they try to build larger and
more complicated programs and you have what you describe. Now if you could keep -- if you could keep their ambitions down
at the level that the hardware that they had 5 years ago, forced them to stay at, then you're
right, we would have improvements. But how can you control somebody's ambition
when-- if the hardware allows more stuff then
by God, I'm gonna give it more stuff, right? John Markoff:
Over on this side. Huan Kim:
Hello, my name is Huan Kim.
I'm a PhD student in Computer Science here. Bob Taylor:
Well, done. Good choice. Audience:
[ Laughter ] Huan Kim:
Thank you. First of all it seems like all your ideas have been
so obvious to you and I just find that fascinating. And now we're hearing about this thing
called the future, the internet of things. And I don't know if you -- if you've ever thought that we
were going be going to that or what is your opinion on -- Bob Taylor:
I have no idea what that is. Huan Kim:
Well, it's actually from -- I mean -- John Markoff:
Yeah. PARC came up with this notion of ubiquitous computing. Bob Taylor:
Yes. John Markoff:
That's the general-- Bob Taylor:
I know about that. John Markoff:
Yeah, that's what he is . . . Bob Taylor:
We had ubiquitous computing before PARC started publizing it. Huan Kim:
If I'm wrong, you tell me, it come up on 1989-- Bob Taylor:
But I'm retired so you're asking me
a question about what's gonna happen in the future? Huan Kim:
Well, I mean, I mean -- what I've been hearing is that
your ideas -- oh, this is so obvious, and well, it
means obvious for you and not obvious for everybody else. I'm just wondering whether you have all these everything
on the internet and everything be connected. What is -- I mean what is your opinion-- Bob Taylor:
What's the next -- you wanna know what the next obvious thing is? Audience:
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Is that what you're asking? Huan Kim:
I'm just wondering what your opinion can be-- Bob Taylor:
About what? Huan Kim:
Your opinion on the next things. John Markoff:
Your thoughts on the next level, I guess. Bob Taylor:
Okay, well. There are a lot of problems that call out for solutions. But. . . including the fact that we're up against
bandwidth limitations these days, our nation has fallen way behind other nations
in terms of how much bandwidth is available to people. It's worth noting that our telecommunications industry has
promised us for years and years and years that if we will just let them increase these rates over
here and let these mergers occur over here, that they will make investments that will give
us increased bandwidth, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't -- hasn't happened.
You know they have not kept their word. So we have lots of -- lots of problems.
But because I've been retired for 13 years, I
no longer know the solutions to these problems. I mean, you know, I don't keep up.
I don't even know how to twitter. Audience:
[ Laughter ] John Markoff:
You're lucky. Let's jump to the back and then to you. John Woods:
Hey, my name is John Woods.
I'm a PhD student in molecular biology.
First of all, thank you so much for coming in. Bob Taylor:
Did you say microbiology? John Woods:
Molecular. Bob Taylor:
Molecular biology. Well, biology and computing are going
to come closer and closer together. John Woods:
Yeah, I was a computer science
major in undergrad. So... Bob Taylor:
Ah, well good. Good combination. John Woods:
So, I'm sure you get this all the time, but I'm really curious
to hear what was your reaction when you heard that Al Gore
had said that he had in fact invented internet. Audience:
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Well, I'm glad you asked that question
because I'm gonna tell you, Al Gore never said that. John Markoff:
Yeah, that's right. Bob Taylor:
A New York Times, pardon me. Audience:
[ Laughter ] [ Applause ] Bob Taylor:
A New York Times reporter claimed that he said that - in print -
and it was an out and out lie. He never said anything like that. He was a supporter, an early supporter in
Congress of computing technology, and he deserves credit for that, but he
never said he invented the internet. John Markoff:
I have to -- I have to stand up for Al Gore here. Audience:
[ Laughter ] John Markoff:
And for the New York Times. Al Gore was instrumental in calling
for the creation of a national data highway, in which the Times
reported in the 1980s, and I think it was sort of bollock stuff.
But you're right, he never... Bob Taylor:
Right, that's quite . . . John Markoff:
. . . says that he invented the internet.
Let's jump-- Unidentified woman:
Hi, Mr. Taylor. Thank you very much for coming here tonight. Bob Taylor:
Thank you. Unidentified woman:
And I know you're retired and everything and my question was-- Bob Taylor:
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Slow down your speech.
I can't understand what you're saying. Unidentified woman
Oh, I'm sorry. I know you're retired and
everything, and my question is a little-- Bob Taylor:
I'm not dead, but I -- Unidentified woman:
No, no, no -- Audience:
[ Laughter ] Unidentified woman:
But it is like a little on the future side of the internet. My question is what your thought -- what your thoughts are on
the possibility of internet being free one day for everyone
just like we get radio signals for free and TV for free. Bob Taylor:
Good, good question. I want very much and always have from the time I first
imagined such a thing to be free to
everyone, everyone around the world. Many things that we use are free,
even things that are built by us. Highways, except for toll roads, are free. I mean we pay for them in taxes, but fine, we should be able to
pay for internet access through taxes too, as far as that goes. So, I want them very much to be free. I mean . . . From the beginning, I thought of the internet not as something that had specific applications that would do X, Y, and Z, but rather would be a medium that people could take in whatever direction they wanted to. In whatever direction they're interests said
that they might take the internet. And that's what's happened. That there's no central organization, no central single
authority has taken the internet in such a direction as to say, Well, you can do this, but you're forbidden to do that even
though you could do so on the internet. So freedom of use is critical. Now, there's a counter problem, and that is that on the internet, an
irresponsible individual can do a great deal of damage. Now our highway system is as good an analogy as I
can come up with even though it's not perfect. If there's an irresponsible driver on the highway
system, you take their driver's license away. So if I could think of a way to make people
-- to give people licenses to use the internet, such as if they were irresponsible,
they could no longer use the internet, I would be advocating that.
But I haven't been able to think of that solution. So there is this tug between wanting it to be
free and easily accessible to everyone, and yet wanting to figure out some way
of making people who use it do it -- do so responsibly. A malicious internet user can do a lot more
damage than an irresponsible driver of a car.
Enormous amount of damage. They can bring down hospitals which are on life support systems...
-- you don't wanna hear it, it's terrible. But people are working on these
problems today and they will for until they're solved. The internet is here now, you
know, I'm not worried about it going away. John Markoff:
Let's jump to the back right corner. Bob Taylor:
Thanks. Unidentified man:
My question relates to the culture
you spoke of where you mentioned that-- Bob Taylor:
Where is it? Back there? John Markoff:
Yeah. Unidentified man:
Can you hear me okay? Bob Taylor:
Yeah. John Markoff:
Yeah. Unidentified man:
The culture you mentioned at PARC and how there's all
this innovation but the company let the tail wag the dog
and didn't capitalize on some of these fundamental things. And if you -- if you have a premise that there's lots of growth
and advancement coming out of innovation like that,
and then probability of exploitation based on the culture. My question is if you extract -- if you apply the
culture at Xerox for that principle to society at large, do you have a comment on kind
of our probability of exploiting such innovations. You know, and in terms of where our culture stands
today versus at different times over your career. Bob Taylor:
I don't understand the question. Try again. Unidentified man:
Okay. There's a culture at Xerox
that didn't enable the exploitation -- Bob Taylor:
Right. They were accustomed to the copier cut the world. Yes. Unidentified man:
Right. So now step back the culture of our society -- Bob Taylor:
Oh, yeah. Unidentified man:
If you say, okay, no-- Bob Taylor:
I don't think of our society as having a single culture. Unidentified man:
Okay. So my question is what are -- are we headed in the right
direction or the wrong direction in terms of probability of exploiting
potential for innovation? Bob Taylor:
Potential of innovation? Unidentified man:
Yeah, like you-- like that stuff you're doing, like that stuff. Bob Taylor:
I can't say that -- I can't say that we're headed
in either the right or wrong direction. I mean, I think that we'll take advantage of innovation eventually. Sometimes it's very slow, like in this case. But if the
innovation is strong enough, it will usually obtain. So I guess I don't have any
thing worth listening to to say about that. Unidentified man:
Thank you. John Markoff:
Fair enough. A couple more quick questions.
This gentleman here in the front right. Unidentified man 2:
Hi, Bob. Thanks again for making it out to Austin.
I took a vacation to California and it's a very comfortable place to be Audience:
[ Laughter ] Unidentified man 2:
Especially when you have had summers like we've had here. Bob Taylor:
Yeah, I understand it's rather warm. Unidentified man 2:
Yeah, hopefully [voice trails off] Bob Taylor:
But when I grew up, we had no air conditioning
in Texas. So you guys have it easy. Unidentified man 2:
True enough. I'm a graduate of the LBJ School here
and also the IC Squared Institute. And my question is kind of related
to that background a little bit. Given your background in working for both public and
private organizations in a research capacity, I'm wondering what you think the role of government
should be in terms of developing new technologies especially with the kind of a shift in focus of the current administration. Bob Taylor:
That's a great question. I -- if I had had the opportunity,
I would have planted that question in you. Audience:
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Okay, it reminds me, you should know that people
-- a lot of people elsewhere in the country think of
Austin as the blue oasis in an isle of knowledge. And it's in the midst of a red desert -- Audience:
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Of ignorance. Audience:
[ Laughter ] Unidentified man 2:
A blueberry in the tomato soup. Bob Taylor:
The people who are worried about government
taking over things like to say, Well, you don't-- you want the government to run things, you ought to go
to the DMV and see what kind of a job they do. But the government had a huge impact on creating the internet, and if you go to the DMV over the
internet, you'll find you won't have to stand in line. Audience:
[ Laughter ] [ Applause ] Bob Taylor:
So furthermore, it's my private opinion that
private companies, I guess starting with the health
insurance industry, deliberately harm individuals for profit. And the government does not deliberately harm individuals. They harm individuals through incompetence,
sometimes, okay, but they don't do it deliberately. And there are certain private industries that do. So, I hope that the government has a strong role in innovation, but there's a strong role for the private sector as well, we just have to be careful about how we give them latitude. Nobody is interested in creating private armies or private
navies - we are willing to have the government do that, okay? We are willing to have the local government support
fire departments and police departments and parks. No one's arguing that private industry
ought to take that over. So private enterprise, private industry
is very important for our nation. But this dichotomy between private industry can always do this better
than government or vice versa, is false and sad and divisive. And these people ought to know better. [ Applause ] John Markoff:
Two more quick questions. The first and then next. Phillip Verheyden:
So my name is Phillip Verheyden.
I'm a senior undergraduate student in Computer Science. Bob Taylor:
Good. Phillip Verheyden:
And my first question you actually answered earlier
with the -- is about the licensing issue on the internet. Bob Taylor:
The what issue? Phillip Verheyden:
The licensing -- Bob Taylor:
Oh right, right, right, right, right. Phillip Verheyden:
And the licensing of users which you answered earlier. My next question was about your thesis, and about what you actually found when how good humans are at directing--
[ Laughter ] -- where do sounds come from? Bob Taylor:
People can, on an azimuth plane, can localize sound within 3 degrees. The Navy sponsored this research. I was working for DRL, there used to be a lab here called
the Defense Research Lab, I don't know, I think it's now
out at Balcones reconstituted as something else. Member of audience:
Applied Research Labs Bob Taylor:
Huh? Member of audience:
Applied Research Labs Bob Taylor:
How are you, Bobby? Audience:
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Nice to see you. So, sonar operators are trained to try to localize sound,
and they have earphones to pick up the sound, so the Navy was interested in accuracy to the extent to which
they needed to be augmented for greater accuracy.
That's why they sponsored the work. The thesis was published in the Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, not in a psych journal. So it's another instance where being
labeled a psychologist is a bit of a misnomer. John Markoff:
A final question, from the back. Douglas Hackney:
Thank you, Mr. Taylor. My name is Douglas Hackney.
I'm an author and entrepreneur, a recent transplant
from San Diego to the beautiful area of Austin. Audience:
[ Laughter ] Bob Taylor:
Good. Douglas Hackney:
I finally saw the light [chuckles]. My question relates to
your overview of modern computing versus your vision. What elements of modern computing do not encompass your
vision, or maybe to flip that's a better way to ask that. When you were all sitting around on the beanbag chairs, thinking
about what it was gonna be like when everybody caught
on to what you were thinking about, what didn't make it? What's not included now that was a part of your vision? Bob Taylor:
The first that comes to mind is increased bandwidth. That is we would have believed that we would
have much greater bandwidth today than we have. So, such that for example, we could imagine sitting in a
chair and having a display or maybe eyeglasses that would
give us an idea of what we call today virtual reality, that is you could move -- you could
navigate any place in the world. Suppose you wanted to be on the Finger Lakes in Northern Italy,
around Lake Como, you could go there in a virtual reality sense. Things like that were imaginable,
but we still can't quite do that. We can do some pretty interesting things in that regard, and
the movie industry has done some really interesting
things with regard to that kind of thing. But we can't sort of online immediately go
sit in some magical chair and go to Lake Como. That would be nice. Have you ever been to Lake Como?
It's pretty expensive. It's pretty nice. John Markoff:
Once again, let's thank Bob for this evening. Audience:
[ Applause ] Victoria Rodriguez:
Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Bob. The university is just enormously grateful and we
are just so proud to claim you as one of our own. So thank you, Bob, for coming. Thank you for sharing
your amazing journey and your amazing story with us. And thank you also, Mike and Mitch and John for traveling such
a long distance to come in and be with us this evening. I want to also just say the story Bob was saying about how
Gary Chapman, one by one, knocked down
the obstacles that brought Bob here. I just want to say how enormously grateful the Graduate
School is to the Department of
Computer Science and to the LBJ School. Personally, to J Moore and to Gary Chapman, because I don't
think the Graduate School could have come up with a more
wonderful way to kick off our centennial celebration. So thank you, really, Gary, J, Mike, Mitch,
John, all of you for making this possible.
So thank you, thank you for coming all of you. And once again, I invite you to think about joining
the 1910 Society and to stay in touch with us. We're going to have a wonderful 18 months coming up of
celebrations for the Centennial of the Graduate School. So please stay in touch and we hope to see you again.
So thank you for coming. Good night. Audience:
[ Applause ] [ Music ]
