Alan Kay - ARPA / Xerox PARC culture

[@visakanv]

timestamp notes for future reference: 0:00 intro - alan kay, dynabook, personal computer pioneer, late 60s at uni of utah, became forth node on the ARPAnet, then went to work at Xerox/PARC. overlap... Bob Taylor from ARPA ended up running Xerox/PARC... Alan is Tron (?) 4:30 Alan, could you talk about the internet and ARPA/Parc in a few minutes 5:00 minimal number of things that need to be talked about… I tell the future, nothing easier, but who can tell the past? if you’re feeling creative, tell a future that you’d like to see happen, then you can make it happen… the reason the past is hard to tell is it happened in real time across an entire world. any kind of compression of that past is almost certainly going to leave out something important, including as goethe pointed out, most of the people who actually participated in making something happen this is why… superheroes are like MVPs in sports, but all of the stuff that we did was of teams of various sizes, so we try not to claim this got invented first, that got invented first… this doesn’t work very well… both america and the US (UK?) claim to have invented television - most people don’t know that the first tv image put on a CRT was done in japan. he understood what a CRT could be and made one that could show a television image 7:00 radar- who was most important person, directly responsible for this country not being lost in the battle of britain, it was henry tizzard, because he started worrying about germany when hitler came to power- physicist first poking at people looking for a death ray, that’s too much power, but we might be able to detect planes coming, could scramble the RAF… also key tech for defeating submarines, and night bombing… key tech that won the war for the allies. happened here. the bosses of these physicist allowed them to do whatever - cavity magnetron - enough power at small enough wavelength to detect even periscope of submarine. tizard +vannevar bush → convinced british govt that they should give everything to the US and trust it’ll work out, and it did. → 20 MIT, developed almost all the WW2 radars developed by American companies. british scientists came over 10:00 vannevar bush had been thinking that everyone should have a desk that holds 10,000 books of stuff, pointing devices. memex. 1945. many current inventors read what vbush had written. 10:40 british computing - turing, ada, babbage… manchester computers… brits were ahead of the americans during the 50s and 60s… IBM bought out all the good stuff that was being done over here… as part of our story, we could… in 1969, celebrate don davies national physical laboratory network… people working on network were friendly. US got more credit in a way because of the resources to develop… but intellectually it was kinda even-steven ARPA - open-ended govt research in the public domain, a bit too complicated to talk about… Xerox Parc… an integral part of this community, everyone got their PhDs paid for by ARPA… Licklider: computers are destined to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone universally networked worldwide, 1962. got money from govt, they liked him… 13:00 network… air defense systems… displays and pointing devices… licklider saw those and said what he said, fund MIT to make a computing utility. this wartime system with displays and pointing devices, networked… we wanna connect everything, intergalactic network 14:10 lenny… did some important early work showing that you could queue messages without congestions. did not invent packets, but his messages were like what packets eventually came to be. invented more or less independently by Baran and Davies… ARPANET and NPL net… wonderful net called AlohaNet, how did you get University of Hawaii when telephone was expensive… broadcast over the air… ethernet… coax cable… broadcast radio inside cable… these two networks were connected for the first time in 1973 15:36 what we’re celebrating today is packet networking… PARC had its own internet, many people worked on it. SRI… bread truck? 1976 outdoor beer garden, still there, called zots, in october, this red truck… inside had a couple of PDP-11s, radio transmitters, micky mouse phone, was so they could prove to the people in washington who were using a standard telephone- maybe first VOIP- radio net linked into bay area packet radio network, across the country on the arpa net… why were they at this beer garden? so they could drink beer while doing their monthly report, quaffing the golden liquid, trying to tell what they should tell the govt sponsors. everybody had a very merry time because it all worked internetworking, had to go through a bunch of networks to go to washington, maybe 1977… bread truck… connecting several networks by satellite in the US we have congress and pentagon, in 1957 russia got americans to do things for the only reason to do them, which is that they were scared… if you’re interested in why all this stuff happens at some times and not others, its that regular people don’t want anything to do with boffins unless they’re terribly scared. its only when there’s a real threat of war that they start looking for unusual people to try and find more ways out of a dilemma. so sputnik caused arpa to be created… 18:50 arpa directors, US congress… wasn’t as bad as congress is now, but they’d ask how is the work relevant? ARPA would say, that’s not the right question to ask, the right question is how is this going to help the US, or this technology, or our society, or our culture generally. ARPA directors would stand up to the DoD in a polite, civilized way, attack their myopia. they were scientific statesmen. 15 minute conversation about why the network, about a million dollars then, about 9 million dollars now. today it would have a lot more people in the path of progress book in 1953 written about british computing, papers by everybody who was important - turing, christopher straykey, manchester people, maurice wilkes, 22:56 problem dealing with the past: words we use today were used in different ways in the past. we tend to evaluate the past in terms of the present. a good eg and a great complaint: when engelbart, the inventor of the mouse died… the mouse was nothing, it just happens to be visible. its the invisible stuff that you have to look at. bret victor: the flaws are, using today’s term to refer to the past, treat the past as the present… we have a much cruder present from his richer past

[@visakanv]

24:40 englebart was very special. that’s just the button on the radio, we invented a whole car. the demo has distracted from more unique and important big ideas about thinking vehicles for humanity the problem with invention, and incremental innovation, is that people don’t even reinvent the wheel, they reinvent the flat tire. similarly, full glass of water holds a half-glass. for the creature that’s comfortable in the half-glass… also has the opportunity to go up, but if only half… once ‘normal’ is redefined downwards it’s very difficult for most people to go beyond it the things that we take to be normal today in many ways are just shadows of better ideas in the past people are curious about orwell’s typewriter - it’s so much easier to talk about typewriters than to talk about what he was trying to accomplish, how did he go about it, what kind of ideas can words express and help us have, how does reading and writing rather than hearing and saying cause us to think and do differently? how does printing change our reading, writing, thinking? how did typewriter affect orwell’s thinking and writing? 27:00 mid-50s SAGE defense system, interactive terminals with pointing devices. air traffic control systems came from there. before that it was the ATC for russian bombers. what were they trying to accomplish? how were they able to make stuff happen? Every home will have one… a utility like power/water/gas. Computer graphics… 28:50 why intergalactic? engineers always give you the minimum, I want a worldwide net so I’m asking for an intergalactic one. important to learn how to communicate with aliens. once you scale up, the most scaled up points are going to be alien with you. “computer as a communications device” paper - almost absent from the comms devices you’re using… no good ideas are in the mobile phones that you have. if you can’t share context, it’s hard to agree on something. if you’re trying to communicate with a computer, what shared context could you possibly have? sometimes it’s hard to negotiate with oneself 31:20: we use media to communicate with ourselves and others. the biggest sin would be to just imitate the physical media that we’re using. all about movies, recordings, photographs, text… all the things that people have gotten used to that you can sell without a learning curve, that are normal today. almost everything important about computers has been left out. we can collaborate in real time with others and our tools on critically important projects. engelbart group meeting… 33:00 what are tools? tools train us- she’s thinking more hammerlike thoughts… it’s a natural thing, if people don’t do what we want, hammer them. how dangerous it is to have a Pleistocene brain with nuclear weapons 34:00 inward tools… view of the world, teacher… help via tool, via agent, via teaming… things that were talked about back then. what if we replaced parts of each thing with computers? what does it mean in terms of communications, of agencies, collective IQ of groups 35:00 when englebart said augmentation he didn’t mean just adding a tool. almost nobody who reads about englebart reads far enough to see what he was driving at. 35:42 visions not goals. they didn’t think they were wise enough to pick goals. large amount of money to create the next generation of researchers. I was the oldest one at 30. you need unusual people but this is the least thinking to worry about 37:00 finding outliers, unusual people with unusual abilities. get the best people who are interested in X and let them do their thing. they want to choose their own problems, sure, because they’re artists. “my job is to organize things so that when the lone wolves need to cooperate, they will” 39:00 command & control doesn’t work with cats 40:00 great visions are the ultimate cat toy- has to be romantic but something that can be filled in 41:00 the goodness of the results correlates most strongly with the goodness of the funders