(This is something that I sent in an e-mail, and it wasn’t intended to be a blog post, but I’ll use it to fill some space here.)
I first read about what would become the Internet around Thanksgiving, 1972, when I was a senior in high school. It was in a Rolling Stone magazine article by Stewart Brand, called Spacewar! Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, having previously lobbied NASA to take a photo of the entire Earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand#NASA_images_of_Earth
If you look at that link, below Brand’s name you will see the name of Dick Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse pointing system. Engelbart had been funded by a government bureaucrat named Robert Taylor, who jumped over from NASA to ARPA, at the Department of Defense.
At ARPA, Taylor was behind the development of the ARPANET, the first computer network. After Taylor left, the ARPANET became the foundation for the Internet. Taylor had left ARPA to start a new group at Xerox, called the Palo Alto Research Center. And that was where Taylor was when I read about him and his work, in Brand’s article from 1972. This is the article, in which Brand talks about hackers on the Net, as well as predicting online digital music sharing, and the end of print newspapers:
http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
I still have my original copy of the magazine, purchased when I was seventeen. One inescapable theme of the article is that computer gaming cannot be separated from what was going on forty years ago, nor from everything that has happened since then. I am not myself a gamer, but I cannot help but think back to Spacewar! when my son is playing games over the Internet with his Xbox 360, against opponents all over the world.
Xerox PARC’s innovations — GUI screens, e-mail, Ethernet, and laser printers — were the inspiration that motivated Steve Jobs to create the Lisa and Macintosh computers. Like Jobs, Bob Taylor wasn’t an engineer, per se, and he wasn’t a development programmer, as such. He was a brilliant manager of technology, combining great vision with practical insight and organizational skills.
And with that bit of background, here is, to my mind, the single most important person in the history of post-war technology who is not a household name. This link will jump almost 45 minutes into the video. You should at least listen to Bob’s joke, and maybe you’ll like him enough to watch some more.
The best place to start watching the entire video, if you are so inclined, is at this point: