Dealers of Lightning (5 page)

From his comfortable living room one can peer down through the win­dows on either side of a pale stone fireplace toward the Hoover Tower of
Stanford University, six miles away as the crow flies and eleven by road.
PARC is invisible from this vantage point, except perhaps in Taylor's
imagination. Divorced, his three sons grown and employed, he lives
alone in this aerie and spends a certain amount of time fighting the last
war. For him the world is easily divided between the geniuses he
employed and those from whom he straggled to protect them.

I asked him to articulate the common theme lurking behind the
great innovations achieved under his leadership. These included the
ARPANET, the embryonic Internet he conceived and financed as a
Pentagon g
rantmeister
before joining PARC, and the idea of the per­sonal computer, linked into a local network and equipped with a high-
quality interactive display.

He settled back, slippers on the coffee table. "I was never interested
in the computer as a mathematical device, but as a communications
device," he said, then paused meaningfully, as if to suggest that I would
almost have had to live within the military-industrial complex of the
1960s to understand how revolutionary a world view that was. The his­tory of the digital computer up to then was that of a glorified calcula­tor. A mainframe taking up half the floor of a large office building
could run a payroll, balance the books of a billion-dollar corporation,
calculate in split seconds the optimum trajectory of an artillery shell or
a manned spacecraft aimed at the moon. But it was a mute self-
contained machine that received its questions via teletype or stacks of
punch cards and delivered its answers in the same way.

"The notion of a human being having to punch holes in lots of cards,
keep these cards straight, and then take this deck of what might be hun­dreds and hundreds of cards to a computer
.
.
.
You come back the next
day and find out that your program executed up until card 433 and then
stopped because you left out a comma. You fix that and this time the pro­gram gets to card 4006 and stops because you forgot to punch an O
instead of a zero or some other stupid reason. It was bleak."

Taylor perceived the need for something entirely new. "I started talk­ing functionally," he said. He asked himself: Which organ provides the
greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain? Obviously,
the eyeball. If one then contemplated how the computer could best com­municate with its human operator, the answer suggested itself. "I thought
the machine should concentrate its resources on the display."

The computer traditionalists goggled at him. Most were mathemati­cians or physicists and thus perfectly content to employ calculators the
size of cement trucks in quest of the next prime number. In 1968, when
he and his mentor, the eminent psychologist J.C.R. Licklider, published
an article entitled "The Computer as a Communications Device," the
kind of interactive display he was talking about would have consumed
memory and processing power worth a million dollars even if limited to
the size of a small television screen.

"It took me a couple of years to get them to come around. The design­ers said, the display? That's crazy, the display is peripheral! I said, No, the
display is the entire point!"

The rest of his career would be devoted to making sure they never
forgot it.

Bob Taylor was born in 1932. If one quarries his early life for keys to his
temperament, two things stand out. One is his family's itinerant lifestyle.
His father, the Reverend Raymond Taylor, was a Methodist minister in
the West Texas of the Depression at a time when church policy was to
relocate its ministers every couple of years. There would be two or three
years in Uvalde a couple of hours north of the Mexican border, followed
by a few in Victoria, Ozona, or Mercedes, none of these places notable for
much except the wrenching poverty of field and ranch hands. Even today
this is a region where one out of three residents lives below the poverty
line.

This went on until almost the onset of war, when his father took a job
teaching philosophy and religion at the Methodist University of San
Antonio. The frequent relocations had already left their mark on the boy.
"You've got to make a new set of friends and interact with a new set of
prejudices every time," he recalled. Living under the spotlight that falls
on the local minister's son scarcely made things any easier. "There's the
usual number of fights you have to go through to find out where you
stand in the pecking order." By the time he was ten Bob Taylor had mas­tered the skill of establishing his place in the local hierarchy and holding
it against all comers.

The second element was something his mother, Audrey, revealed to
him at a very early age. He had been adopted as a twenty-eight-day-old
infant.

"The first bedtime story I remember being told was about how I had
been chosen. Picked out by my mother and father. All the other parents
had to take what they got, but I was chosen. That probably gave me an
undeserved sense of confidence." He chuckled in a rare moment of self-
deprecation. But throughout his adult life few things would be as sacred
to Bob Taylor as the process of selection. For him it was almost an anoint­ing. He would be the one doing the choosing, but he expected the select
to feel invested with the same confidence he had felt, and the same pro­found gratitude.

After the war he was ready for college
—
or rather, not ready at all.
There was a short stint at Southern Methodist University ("I majored in
campusology") followed by a break for the Korean War, which he spent
as a naval reserve officer landlocked at the Dallas Naval Air Station. The
G.I. Bill paid for a berth at The University of Texas, where he followed an
eccentric course of study for another two years. "One day in 1956 I real­ized I'd been in school an awfully long time. I walked into the Deans
office to find out what it would take to graduate. They checked and said,
'If you take these two courses you can graduate next semester. Your major
will be psychology and you'll have minors in mathematics, English, phi­losophy, and religion.'" In truth it was not quite as haphazard as that. He
stayed long enough to earn a master's in sensory psychology, the study of
how the brain receives input from the senses. The year 1961 found Bob Taylor in Washington, D.C., which he had
reached by a circuitous route. After leaving UT he had briefly taught at
an experimental boarding school run by a friend outside Orlando,
Florida. But the arrival of his second and third children, twin boys,
quickly put an end to life as a dormitory housemaster on $3,600 a year.
He found a job at Martin Aircraft, which was building the mobile missile
system known as Pershing at a nearby plant. A year later he jumped to a
better-paying post with a Maryland company designing flight simulators
for the military. What caught his attention here was the tremendous
power of information delivered interactively. This was a principle every­one understood in the abstract, but got driven home only when they wit­
nessed
it in action: You could
teach pilots from
books and
theory
until
your
voice gave out, but find a
way to place
their hands on
a
joystick and
their
eyes
on a simulated landscape and
it was
as though they were learn­ing everything for the first time.

This job also led directly to his next
stop. President Kennedy’s
exhorta­tion to place a man on the moon by the
end
of the decade had the fledg­ling National Aeronautics and
Space
Administration scrounging for
management talent wherever it might
surface.
Taylor,
by
lucky coinci­
dence,
had tried to sell
NASA
on a
research
program using one of his
simulators to explore a wide variety
of
sensory inputs.
NASA
was
intrigued by the idea, but even more
by its
proponent.
The
agency
agreed to fund further work by his
company,
but only if he joined
NASA
as
the project manager.

Not yet
out of his twenties, the rural preacher's son
was in the
thick
of the
most important government crash program since
the Manhattan
Project. He
met with the original seven
Mercury
astronauts, the era's
reigning national heroes, and witnessed space shots first-hand.
But
such
thrills soon paled.
NASA
and the
Mercury
program might appear
the apogee of scientific glamour to a public devouring
the
polished
hagiographies of the seven astronauts in
Life
Magazine,
but the
truth
was
less splendid.

"We
said we were going to the moon, but we were
a
hell
of a
long
way
from getting there," Taylor recalled.
"It
was mostly engineering,
and
sometimes fairly pedestrian engineering.
It
wasn't
science,
and
I
was
much
more interested in science."
Deep
down he was looking for a way out.
He
glimpsed
it
one day in
1962
when
he received an unexpected invitation to an interagency
meet­
ing on computer technology.
The
summons came from the
Pentagon,
or
more specifically from
J.C.R.
Licklider, an
MIT
behavioral psychologist
who had
taken charge of a new program at
ARPA,
the
Defense Depart­
ment's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Taylor knew
Licklider
only
by his forbidding reputation, which had been forged in the same spe­cialty, psychoacoustics—the study of the psychology
of
hearing—in
which Taylor had done his master's thesis. What he did not anticipate was
that Licklider would compliment him on his thesis during their first
meeting. "I was thirty in 1962, and he was internationally known," Taylor
said. "It floored me that he knew who I was."