The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 62

Taylor and Licklider sometimes traveled to conferences together, further sealing their friendship. On a trip to Greece in 1963, Licklider took Taylor to one of Athens’s art museums and demonstrated his technique for studying brushstrokes by squinting at a painting. At a taverna late that evening, Taylor got himself invited to sit in with the band and taught them to play Hank Williams songs.³⁸

Unlike some engineers, both Licklider and Taylor understood human factors; they had studied psychology, could relate to people, and took joy in appreciating art and music. Although Taylor could be blustery and Licklider tended to be gentle, they both loved working with other people, befriending them, and nurturing their talents. This love of human interaction and appreciation for how it worked made them well suited to designing the interfaces between humans and machines.

When Licklider stepped down from IPTO, his deputy, Ivan Sutherland, took over temporarily, and at Licklider’s urging Taylor moved over from NASA to become Sutherland’s deputy. Taylor was among the few who realized that information technology could be more exciting than the space program. After Sutherland resigned in 1966 to become a tenured professor at Harvard, Taylor was not everyone’s first choice to replace him, since he did not have a PhD and wasn’t a computer scientist, but he eventually got the job.

Three things at IPTO struck Taylor. First, every one of the universities and research centers that had a contract with ARPA wanted the latest computers with the most capabilities. That was wasteful and duplicative. There might be a computer that did graphics in Salt Lake City and another that mined data at Stanford, but a researcher who needed to perform both tasks either had to go back and forth by plane or ask IPTO to fund another computer. Why couldn’t they be connected by a network that allowed them to time-share each other’s computer? Second, on his travels to talk to young researchers, Taylor discovered that those in one place were intensely interested in learning about the research happening at other places. He realized that it would make sense to connect them electronically so they could share more easily. Third, Taylor was struck by the fact that there were three terminals in his Pentagon office, each with its own passwords and commands, connected to different computer centers ARPA was funding. “Well this is silly,” he thought. “I should be able to access any of these systems from a single terminal.” His need for three terminals, he said, “led to an epiphany.”³⁹ All three of these problems could be solved by building a data network to connect research centers, that is, if he could implement Licklider’s dream of an Intergalactic Computer Network.

He walked across to the E-ring of the Pentagon to see his boss, ARPA director Charles Herzfeld. With his Texas twang, Taylor knew how to charm Herzfeld, an intellectual Viennese refugee. He brought no presentation or memos, instead just launching into an ebullient pitch. A network funded and imposed by ARPA could permit research centers to share computing resources, collaborate on projects, and allow Taylor to jettison two of his office terminals.

“Great idea,” Herzfeld said. “Get it going. How much money do you need?”

Taylor allowed that it might take a million dollars just to get the project organized.

“You’ve got it,” Herzfeld said.

As he headed back to his office, Taylor looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured to himself. “That only took twenty minutes.”⁴⁰

It was a story Taylor told often in interviews and oral histories. Herzfeld liked the tale, but he later felt compelled to confess that it was a little misleading. “He leaves out the fact that I’d been studying the problem with him and with Licklider for three years,” said Herzfeld. “It was not hard to get the million dollars because I was kind of waiting for him to ask for it.”⁴¹ Taylor conceded that was the case, and he added his own lagniappe: “What really pleased me was that Charlie took the money out of funds that were supposed to go to developing a missile defense system, which I thought was the stupidest and most dangerous idea.”⁴²

Taylor now needed someone to run the project, which is how Larry Roberts came into the picture. He was an obvious choice.

Roberts seemed born and bred to help build the Internet. Both of his parents had doctorates in chemistry, and as a kid growing up near Yale he had built a television, Tesla coil,^III ham radio, and telephone system from scratch. He went to MIT, where he got his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering. Impressed by Licklider’s papers on man-computer symbiosis, he went to work with him at Lincoln Laboratory and became his protege in the fields of time-sharing, networks, and interfaces. One of his experiments at Lincoln Laboratory involved connecting two distant computers; it had been funded by Bob Taylor at ARPA. “Licklider inspired me with his vision of linking computers into a network,” Roberts recalled, “and I decided that would be my work.”

But Roberts kept turning down Taylor’s offer to come to Washington to be his deputy. He liked his job at Lincoln Laboratory and didn’t especially respect Taylor. There was also something Taylor didn’t know: a year earlier, Roberts had been offered Taylor’s job. “When Ivan was leaving, he asked me to come to IPTO as the next director, but it was a management job, and I preferred research,” he said. Having declined the top post, Roberts was not about to be Taylor’s deputy. “Forget it,” he told Taylor. “I’m busy. I’m having fun with this wonderful research.”⁴³

There was another reason Roberts resisted, which Taylor could sense. “Larry was from MIT with a doctorate, and I was from Texas with just a master’s,” Taylor later said. “So I suspect he didn’t want to work for me.”⁴⁴

Taylor, however, was a clever and stubborn Texan. In the fall of 1966, he asked Herzfeld, “Charlie, doesn’t ARPA fund 51 percent of Lincoln Laboratory?” Herzfeld confirmed that. “Well, you know this networking project that I want to do, I’m having a hard time getting the program manager that I want, and he works at Lincoln Laboratory.” Perhaps Herzfeld could call the head of the lab, Taylor suggested, and say that it would be in its interest to convince Roberts to accept the job. It was a Texas way of doing business, as the president at the time, Lyndon Johnson, would have appreciated. The lab’s chief was no dummy. “It would probably be a nice thing for all of us if you’d consider this,” he pointed out to Roberts after getting Herzfeld’s call.

So in December 1966, Larry Roberts went to work at ARPA. “I blackmailed Larry Roberts into becoming famous,” Taylor later said.⁴⁵

When Roberts first moved to Washington, around Christmas, he and his wife stayed for a few weeks with Taylor while looking for a home. Even though they were not destined to be personal pals, the relationship between the two men was cordial and professional, at least during their years at ARPA.⁴⁶

Roberts was not as genial as Licklider, nor as extroverted as Taylor, nor as congregational as Bob Noyce. “Larry’s a cold fish,” according to Taylor.⁴⁷ Instead he had a trait that was just as useful in promoting collaborative creativity and managing a team: he was decisive. More important, his decisiveness was based not on emotion or personal favoritism but rather on a rational and precise analysis of options. His colleagues respected his decisions, even if they disagreed with them, because he was clear, crisp, and fair. It was one of the advantages of having a true product engineer in charge. Uncomfortable at being Taylor’s deputy, Roberts was able to work out an arrangement with ARPA’s top boss, Charlie Herzfeld, to be designated the agency’s chief scientist instead. “I managed contracts during the day and did my networking research at night,” he recalled.⁴⁸