Robert Taylor (computer scientist)

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For other persons named Robert Taylor, see Robert Taylor (disambiguation).

Robert W. Taylor (born 1932) was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1965-69), founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) (1970-83), and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center (1983-96). Taylor is currently retired and living in California.

1 Background
2 Career in Computer Networking
3 Awards
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Background

Bob Taylor was born in Texas, the son of a Methodist minister. Taylor was trained as an experimental psychologist and mathematician and his earliest career was devoted to brain research and the auditory nervous system. After working for a defense contractor, Martin Marietta, and after he submitted a research proposal to NASA, Taylor was invited to joined NASA in 1961.

[edit] Career in Computer Networking

J.C.R. Licklider and Taylor co-authored the seminal paper, "The Computer as a Communication Device"^[1]. Taylor worked on the creation of ARPANET, which later became the modern internet.

As Taylor's work on computer networks shows, surviving a nuclear attack was not a primary design goal in the construction of ARPANET. Rather, Taylor wanted to network expensive mainframe computers together. The first three he had in mind were at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), System Development Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica, and the University of California at Berkeley. His reasons to network the machines were primarily practical: networking was a more efficient way to maximize the use of expensive computing resources, and to reduce the amount of redundant work.

This communication was impossible in the time-sharing framework of the day. So, along with the graphical user interface (GUI) revolution, Bob Taylor gave the go-ahead, and the money, to head start a second computer revolution: from time-sharing to networking.

Licklider and Vannevar Bush exerted the most important influences on Robert Taylor, and if ARPA's Director Charlie Herzfeld allocated the budget on Taylor's urge, it was Lawrence G. Roberts, who Taylor was able to attract from MIT, who made the whole thing technically possible.

Apart from his outstanding work as an operating systems code writer (on the TX-2, the upgrade on the TX-0, the first all-transistor computer built in the world) and as a visionary on the GUI and the online computer, Robert Taylor also excelled as a Team builder, co-ordinator and all-times reference.

[edit] Awards

In 1984, Taylor, Butler Lampson, and Charles P. Thacker received the ACM Software Systems Award "For conceiving and guiding the development of the Xerox Alto System demonstrating that a distributed personal computer system can provide a desirable and practical alternative to time-sharing." (In 1994, all three were named ACM Fellows in recognition of the same work.) In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology "For visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including computer networks, the personal computer and the graphical user interface." In 2004, he won the Charles Stark Draper Prize together with Alan Kay, Butler W. Lampson, and Charles P. Thacker "For the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers."

Doing that with scientists for years in a row is arguably his 3rd revolution: the flat, chaotic Business Unit that produces the best results in the world.