Robert W. Taylor died yesterday. While working at ARPA, he funded the work that led to the Internet. He managed the legendary Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab, where the Alto and the Ethernet were created. He won the National Academy of Engineering’s Draper Prize. You can read about these things more elsewhere.
Bob Taylor hired me, with my new PhD, into CSL. Later, he hired me again, at the Digital Equipment Systems Research Center. I learned not everything I know, but quite a lot of it, on his watch. Bob had the special genius of assembling groups of people who could invent the future.
At Xerox, the weekly group meetings were called Dealer, as in Dealer’s choice. The speaker set the rules. The culture was for the audience to do their level best to challenge the ideas. Bob talked about civility, and about the necessity of “turning type one disagreements into type two disagreements”. A type two disagreement is where each party understands and can explain the position of the other.
I was first exposed to CSL as a research intern while a graduate student. On either side of my office were Dave Gifford and Eric Schmidt. When I graduated, I turned down a couple of faculty appointments to stay at CSL. There was no place else that had the same concentration of talent and the freedom to build new things. Both of those factors were the work of Taylor. He felt his job was building the group and building the culture, then defending it from outside influence.
In 1984, corporate finally got the best of him and Taylor left to start the Systems Research Center at Digital Equipment. I was number 24 to quit and follow him. Against all odds, Taylor repeated his success and built another outstanding research group at Digital. Occasionally, some dispute or other would arise, and folks would go complain to Bob. He had a plaque on his wall “Men more frequently need to be reminded than informed.” Bob would gently remind us of the rules of disagreement.
It’s not well known, but Taylor was from Texas and a little bit of the Lone Star State followed him around. One time, Dave Conroy and I had succeeded in getting a telephone audio interface running on our lab-built Firefly multiprocessor workstations, and mentioned it on our way out to lunch. When we got back, we found Taylor had dialled in and left us a 30 second recording. Dave and I knew this had to be preserved, but the test program we had had no code to save the recording! Eventually, we sent a kill signal to create a core dump file and fished the recording out of the debris. Here’s Bob Taylor: