The Power Of The Context

Alan Kay

[Remarks upon being awarded — with Bob Taylor, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker — the Charles Stark Draper
Prize of the National Academy of Engineering, February 24, 2004]

VPRI Memo M-2004-001

Viewpoints Research Institute, 1209 Grand Central Avenue, Glendale, CA 91201 t: (818) 332-3001 f: (818) 244-9761
The Power Of The Context
Remarks upon being awarded — with Bob Taylor, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker —
the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering, February 24, 2004

by Alan Kay

When Bill Wulf called to say that the four of us had been
awarded this year’s Draper Prize, I was floored because even the
possibility was not in my mind. Given the amazing feats of
engineering in the 20th century, the previous laureates, and that
this is just the 10th awarding of the prize, it seems unbelievable
Bob Taylor Butler Lampson
to have been chosen. Of course, every engineer, mathematician
and scientist — every artist — knows that the greatest privilege
is being able to do the work, and the greatest joy is to actually
turn yearnings into reality. So we were already abundantly
rewarded many years ago when this work came together to
create a new genre of practical personal computing.

There were three people who were absolutely indispensible to Chuck Thacker Alan Kay
Xerox PARC's success: Bob Taylor, Butler Lampson, and Chuck
Thacker. Receiving this award with them is a truly incredible
honor. Since this award is about a whole genre of computing, it
is extremely important to acknowledge and thank the larger
group of several dozen PARC researchers who helped conceive
the dreams, build them and make them work. This was especially
so in our Learning Research Group, where a wide range of
special talents collaborated to design and build our computing Dan Ingalls Adele Goldberg
and educational systems. I particularly want to thank Dan Ingalls
and Adele Goldberg, my closest colleagues at PARC for helping
realize our dreams.

About 10 years ago I wrote a history paper about our group's

research (available online: see references below) and found, even
in 60 pages, I could not come close to mentioning all the relevant
influences. This is because I've long been an enthusiastic
appreciator of great ideas in many genres—ranging from the
graphic, musical and theatrical arts to math, science and
engineering. I’ve been driven by beauty, romance and idealism,
and owe more intellectual debts than most, starting with my
artistic and musical mother and scientist father.
“When there was only one personal computer… “
My best results have come from odd takes on ideas around me— The UR-Vision: Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad on TX-2
3am-6am at Lincoln Labs in 1962
more like rotations of point of view than incremental progress.
For example, many of the strongest ingredients of my object-
oriented ideas came from Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, Nygaard
& Dahl's Simula, Bob Barton's B5000, the ARPAnet goal,
Algebra and Biology. One of the deepest insights came from
McCarthy's LISP. But the rotational result was a new and
different species of programming and systems design that turned
out to be critically useful at PARC and beyond. Bob Barton John McCarthy James Watson

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 1

Similarly, my start in personal computing came first from my
colleague and friend, the wonderful and generous Ed Cheadle,
who got me deeply involved in building "a little desk-top
machine"—the FLEX Machine—that we called a "personal
computer". Many of the later ideas incorporated were
“adaptations, rotations, and dual reflections" of the lively ARPA Ed Cheadle

interactive computing community with its cosmic visions of FLEX Machine self portrait, ca 1968
Licklider, Taylor, Engelbart, Clark, Shaw, Ellis, and many others
about “man-computer symbiosis and intergalactic networks”.

My interest in children's education came from a talk by Marvin

Minsky, then a visit to Seymour Papert's early classroom
experiments with LOGO. Adding in McLuhan led to an analogy
to the history of printed books, and the idea of a Dynabook A picture that could have been “The LINC was early and
metamedium: a notebook-sized wireless-networked "personal taken yesterday: Doug Engelbart small”, Wes Clark and LINC in
in 1967 1963
computer for children of all ages". The real printing revolution
was a qualitative change in thought and argument that lagged the
hardware inventions by almost two centuries. The special quality
of computers is their ability to rapidly simulate arbitrary
descriptions, and the real computer revolution won't happen until
children can learn to read, write, argue and think in this powerful
new way. We should all try to make this happen much sooner
than 200 or even 20 more years! This got me started designing Tom Ellis’ penbased GRAIL Seymour Papert with early
system, ca 1968 LOGO Turtle
computer languages and authoring environments for children,
and I've been at it ever since.

Looking back on these experiences, I’m struck that my lifelong

processes of loving ideas and reacting to them didn’t bear really
interesting fruit until I encountered “The ARPA Dream” in grad
school at the University of Utah. A fish on land still waves its
fins, but the results are qualitatively different when the fish is put McLuhan’s astounding insights
in its most suitable watery environment. about media Dynabook Model, ca. 1968

This is what I call "The power of the context" or "Point of view

The 4 ARPA-IPTO “Golden Age” Directors
is worth 80 IQ points". Science and engineering themselves are 1962-72
famous examples, but there are even more striking processes
within these large disciplines. One of the greatest works of art
from that fruitful period of ARPA/PARC research in the 60s and
70s was the almost invisible context and community that
catalysed so many researchers to be incredibly better dreamers
and thinkers. That it was a great work of art is confirmed by the
world-changing results that appeared so swiftly, and almost
easily. That it was almost invisible, in spite of its tremendous
J.C.R. Licklider Ivan Sutherland
success, is revealed by the disheartening fact today that, as far as 1962-64 1964-66
I'm aware, no governments and no companies do edge-of-the-art
research using these principles. Of course I would like be shown
that I'm wrong on this last point.

Just as it is difficult to pin down all the processes that gave rise
to the miracle of the United States Constitution, catching the key
principles that made ARPA/PARC special has proven elusive.

Bob Taylor Larry Roberts

1966-69 1969-72
VPRI Memo M-2004-001 2
We know that the designers of the Constitution were brilliant and
well educated, but, as Ben Franklin pointed out at the
culmination of the design, there was still much diversity of
opinion and, in the end, it was the good will of the participants
that allowed the whole to happen. Subsequent history has shown
many times that it is the good will and belief of Americans in the
Constitution that has allowed it to be such a power for good—no
scrap of paper full of ideas, however great, is sufficient.

Similarly, when I think of ARPA/PARC, I think first of good

will, even before brilliant people. Dave Evans, my advisor,
mentor, and friend was simply amazing in his ability to act as
though his graduate students were incredible thinkers. Only fools
ever let him find out otherwise! I really do owe my career to
Dave, and learned from him most of what I think is important.
On a first visit to the Lincoln Labs ARPA project, we students
were greeted by the PI Bert Sutherland, who couldn't have been
happier to see us or more interested in showing us around. Not Dave Evans in the 60s Bert Sutherland

too many years later Bert was my lab manager at Xerox PARC.
At UCLA, young professor Len Kleinrock became a lifelong
friend from the first instant. A visit to CMU in those days would
find Bill Wulf, a terrific systems designer and a guy who loved
not just his students but students from elsewhere as well. If one
made a pilgrimage to Doug Engelbart’s diggings in Menlo Park,
Bill English, the co-inventor of the mouse, would drop what he
was doing to show everything to the visiting junior researchers.
Later at PARC, Bill went completely out of his way to help me Len Kleinrock late 60s Bill Wulf
set up my own research group. Nicholas Negroponte visited Utah
and we’ve been co-conspirators ever since. Bob Taylor, the
director of ARPA-IPTO at that time, set up a yearly ARPA grad
student conference to further embed us in the larger research
processes and collegial relationships. As a postdoc, Larry
Roberts got me to head a committee for an ARPAnet AI
supercomputer where considerably senior people such as Marvin
Minsky and Gordon Bell were theoretically supposed to be
guided by me. They were amazingly graceful in how they dealt
Bill English in the late Nicholas Negroponte
with this weird arrangement. Good will and great interest in 60s
graduate students as "world-class researchers who didn't have
PhDs yet" was the general rule across the ARPA community.

What made all this work were a few simple principles articulated
and administered with considerable purity. For example, it is no
exageration to say that ARPA/PARC had "visions rather than
goals" and "funded people, not projects". The vision was
"interactive computing as a complementary intellectual partner
for people pervasively networked world-wide". By not trying to Marvin Minsky Gordon Bell at his PDP-6, mid 60s
derive specific goals from this at the funding side, ARPA/PARC
was able to fund rather different and sometimes opposing points
of view. For example, Engelbart and McCarthy had extremely
different ways of thinking of the ARPA dream, but ideas from

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 3

both of their research projects are important parts of today's
interactive computing and networked world.

Giving a professional illustrator a goal for a poster usually

results in what was desired. If one tries this with an artist, one
will get what the artist needed to create that day. Sometimes we
make, to have, sometimes to know and express. The pursuit of
Art always sets off plans and goals, but plans and goals don't
always give rise to Art. If "visions not goals" opens the heavens,
it is important to find artistic people to conceive the projects.

Thus the "people not projects" principle was the other

cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal
distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large
percentage of organizational processes have been designed to
deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We
can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also
astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research.
ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and
ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and
"whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and
important". Thus conventional oversight was not only not
needed, but was not really possible. "Peer review" wasn't easily
done even with actual peers. The situation was "out of control",
yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic.

"Out of control" because artists have to do what they have to do. The ARPAnet itself was “out of control” in one sense — there
"Extremely productive" because a great vision acts like a was no centralized controller — but was perfectly convergent in
what it was supposed to do
magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron
particle artists to point to “North” without having to see it. They
then make their own paths to the future. Xerox often was
shocked at the PARC process and declared it out of control, but
they didn't understand that the context was so powerful and
compelling and the good will so abundant, that the artists worked
happily at their version of the vision. The results were an
enormous collection of breakthroughs, some of which we are
celebrating today.

Our game is more like art and sports than accounting, in that
high percentages of failure are quite OK as long as enough larger
processes succeed. Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average was
"only" .368, which means that he failed almost 2/3s of the time.
But the critical question is: what happened in the 1/3 in which he
was succeeding? If the answer is "great things" then this is all the
justification that should be needed. Unless I'm badly mistaken, in
most processes today—and sadly in most important areas of
technology research—the administrators seem to prefer to be
completely in control of mediocre processes to being "out of
control" with superproductive processes. They are trying to
"avoid failure" rather than trying to "capture the heavens".
Ty Cobb – only 37% effective?

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 4

What if you have something cosmic you really want to
accomplish and aren't smart and knowledgable enough, and don't
have enough people to do it? Before PARC, some of us had gone
through a few bitter experiences in which large straight-ahead
efforts to create working artifacts turned out to be fragile and
less than successful. It seems a bit of a stretch to characterize
PARC's group of supremely confident technologists as
"humble", but the attitude from the beginning combined both big Beanbag room at PARC where all matters high and low were debated
and decided
ideas and projects, with a large amount of respect for how
complexity can grow faster than IQs. I remember Butler, in his
first few weeks at PARC, arguing as only he could that he was
tired of bubble-gummed !@#$%^&* fragile research systems that
could barely be demoed by their creators. He called for two
general principles: that we should not make anything that was
not engineered for 100 users, and we should all have to use our
creations as our main computing systems (later called Living
Lab). Naturally we fought him for a short while, thinking that the
extra engineering would really slow things down, but we finally
gave in to his brilliance and will. The scare of 100 users and One of the most amazing people
Bob Taylor at PARC: the
having to use our own stuff got everyone to put a lot more master of social dynamics
I’ve ever met: Butler Lampson,
early days at PARC
thought early on before starting to crab together a demo. The and the critical
result was almost miraculous. Many of the most important “impressario” (as Chuck
likes to call him)
projects got to a stable, usable, and user-testable place a year or
more earlier than our optimistic estimates.

Respect for complexity, lack of knowledge, the small number of

researchers and modest budgets at PARC led to a finessing style
of design. Instead of trying to build the complex artifacts from
scratch—like trying to build living things cell by cell—many of
the most important projects built a kernel that could grow the
artifact as new knowledge was gained—that is: get one cell’s
DNA in good shape and let it help grow the whole system.
“Mr. Make It Work”: Chuck
Thacker at PARC Bilbo, The First Alto
For example: Chuck's beautiful and parsimonious architecture
for the Alto allowed most functions that were normally frozen in
hardware to be re-microcoded at will as new ideas came forth,
without requiring the low-level HW to be redesigned and built.

The Smalltalk system that I designed, and Dan Ingalls

implemented, used an important meta-idea from LISP that
allowed its DNA to be completely described on one sheet of
paper, implemented in a month, and then grown in the presence
of experience and new ideas into the powerful system it became.

The bitmap display acted as "silicon paper" that could show any
Would you trust this child with your funding?
image and this allowed us not to have to be perfect about the Alan Kay at PARC with Altos in the background
kinds of graphics that could be displayed. This led directly to
bitmap painting, animation and typography.

Smalltalk realtime 2.5D paint-ing Printing quality fonts could

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 and animation on Alto also be “painted”5
The overlapping window interface was a finesse that tried to give
children of all ages a simple universal way to communicate with
anything on the computer in a form that revealed how windows
were made (the original version was just 2 pages of Smalltalk).

The desktop publishing finesse was the realization that it was

really just “object-graphics done right”, that is, arbitrary and Early version of the Small-talk Early version of desktop
open-ended graphic objects that could be laid out in 2-1/2 D. overlapping window GUI publishing with iconic GUI in
Smalltalk

Smalltalk was a language powerful enough to write its own

operating system but in the friendly form of what today would be
called a scripting language. So children were also authors (our
main user community) and created many interesting interactive
systems. This greatly extended the wide range of user studies
that were done on the Alto. Draw application made by a 12- Circuit design application made
year-old girl in Smalltalk on the by a 15-year-old boy in Smalltalk
color Alto
A beautiful finesse was Butler's and Charles Simonyi's approach
to the text editor BRAVO (the direct precursor to MS Word). It
was partly an experiment in programming and partly in trying to
design a new kind of word processor. They hit on the idea of
providing something everybody wanted (printing on the new
laser printer), dealt with the many early bugs by guaranteeing
that the system could replay right up to a crash, and provided an
online complaint and suggestion service. Most versions of Charles Simonyi
BRAVO—as with Smalltalk and many of the other systems at at PARC
PARC—were thus heavily used during their actual incremental
creation: they were grown into being.

Another example of finessing avoided trying to make a perfect

BRAVO WYSIWYG Display
artifact—e.g. a network that has no noise and transmits perfectly.
Instead Metcalfe's and Boggs' Ethernet (codesigned by Lampson
& Thacker) was set up for errors-as-normal but could always
eventually send the messages perfectly, even under extreme
conditions. The difference between having to make a perfect
artifact and one that can eventually do something perfectly is Bob Metcalfe
at PARC
enormous.

One of the keys to how all this worked was the PARC version of
Catch-22, known as "Error-33". One committed Error-33 by
putting any externally controlled system, in-house or out, on
one's critical path. This included vendors. Error-33 was avoided
by doing all that was necessary within a research group and then Dave Boggs
sharing. Thus, virtually all the PARC hardware — including two at PARC

big time-sharing main frames, the Altos, Ethernet, Laserprinter,

file storage, and the systems that followed — and software —
including operating systems, programming languages and
development systems, productivity tools, etc. — were
completely built inhouse by these few dozen researchers. Gary Starkweather ca 1971 at
PARC, and his hand-built first
laser printer (500 pixels/inch
This sounds disastrous, but there is an important collection of and 1 page/second)
theories in which the 1st order version and the 2nd order version

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 6

are completely different yet both are true. For example, in
programming there is a wide-spread 1st order theory that one
shouldn't build one's own tools, languages, and especially
operating systems. This is true—an incredible amount of time
and energy has gone down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you
can build your own tools, languages and operating systems, then
you absolutely should because the leverage that can be obtained
(and often the time not wasted in trying to fix other people's not
quite right tools) can be incredible.

All of these principles came together a little over 30 years ago to The “PARC genre” of Personal Computing: Alto personal computer,
eventually give rise to 1500 Altos, Ethernetworked to: each bit-map screen, overlapping window and icon interface, WYSIWYG
word processing, email, and DTP, multimedia, end-user authoring
other, Laserprinters, file servers and the ARPAnet, distributed to and scripting, Ethernet, Laserprinter, Peer-Peer & Client-Server
many kinds of end-users to be heavily used in real situations. Distributed Architecture, and connections to ARPAnet/Internet.
This anticipated the commercial availability of this genre by 10-
15 years. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

A few years later we had another thrill when we lugged Doug

Fairbairn's Smalltalk Notetaker computer onto an airplane and
did a full range of personal computing while in the air (and no
flight attendents asked us to turn it off while taxiing and
takeoff!). And, it’s still fun today to write and publish these
remarks using only descendents of the ARPA/PARC inventions.
But, while we are celebrating what did make it out to the larger
world, we should realize that many of the most important
ARPA/PARC ideas haven’t yet been adopted by the mainstream.

For example, it is amazing to me that most of Doug Engelbart's Doug Fairbairn’s/LRG’s Smalltalk Notetaker ca. 1978
big ideas about "augmenting the collective intelligence of groups
working together" have still not taken hold in commercial
systems. What looked like a real revolution twice for end-users,
first with spreadsheets and then with Hypercard, didn't evolve
into what will be commonplace 25 years from now, even though
it could have. Most things done by most people today are still
"automating paper, records and film" rather than "simulating the
future". More discouraging is that most computing is still aimed
at adults in business, and that aimed at nonbusiness and children
is mainly for entertainment and apes the worst of television. We
see almost no use in education of what is great and unique about
computer modeling and computer thinking. These are not First Altos in a school (1975) Adele Goldberg holds forth to a
technological problems but a lack of perspective. Must we hope classroom of enthusiastic students
that the open-source software movements will put things right?

The ARPA/PARC history shows that a combination of vision, a

modest amount of funding, with a felicitous context and process
can almost magically give rise to new technologies that not only
amplify civilization, but also produce tremendous wealth for the
society. Isn't it time to do this again by Reason, even with no
Cold War to use as an excuse? How about helping children of Today children in many parts of the world are starting to learn the
the world grow up to think much better than most adults do most powerful ideas of humanity by creating models of them on
distributed personal computers and networks using Squeak (a direct
today? This would truly create "The Power of the Context". descendent of Xerox PARC software). This work was origiinally
made possible by ARPA/PARC sponsorship and is now being
supported by Hewlett-Packard. Visit http://www.squeakland.org to
learn more.

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 7

References
Thanks to the fulfillment of "The ARPA Dream", personal computing and networking are now ubiquitous and inexpensive,
allowing many of these references to be quickly and directly accessed online by readers of these remarks.

Histories of the Alto HW & SW by its Inventors

Learning Research Group History

The following history contains a pretty full account of this work from the point of view of our research group. There is an
extensive citation of acknowledgements and influences.

Kay, Alan C., "The Early History of Smalltalk", in History of Programming Languages II, Bergin, T, Gibson, R (editors), ACM
Press, New York, 1996, pp 511-598. Includes the paper & transcripts of the presentation, discussion by Adele Goldberg, Q&A
with the audience. The preprint version of the history is available online: http://www.squeakland.org/Smallhistory.pdf

___________, "The Dynabook—Past, Present, and Future" Video of Banquet Talk, A History of Personal Workstations, 1988,
available from: ***

History of the Alto by Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker

It's worthwhile to compare the above with the two excellent history papers by Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker (cited below),
originally published in A History of Personal Workstations, ed. A. Goldberg, Addison-Wesley, New York, 1988. These histories
together provide three different, but pretty coherent perspectives on this work.

Lampson, Butler W., "Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Software", A History of Personal Workstations,
ed. A. Goldberg, Addison-Wesley, 1988, pages 291-344 http://research.microsoft.com/lampson/38-AltoSoftware/Abstract.html There is
also a video of this talk available from: ***

Thacker, Charles P., "Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Hardware", A History of Personal Workstations,
ed. A. Goldberg, Addison-Wesley, 1988, pages *** http://***.html. There is also a video of this talk available from: ***

Histories of Workstations and Personal Computing

For a wider view of what some of the key researchers of the larger community thought about interactive and personal computing
in the 50s, 60s and 70s, it is well worth perusing the entire book A History of Personal Workstations, ed. A. Goldberg, ACM
Press Addison-Wesley, 1988. There are rememberances by Licklider, Wes Clark, Gordon Bell, Doug Engelbart, and many others
including those who worked on the huge early SAGE systems on the one hand, and those who tried to fit calculators into a shirt
pocket on the other. A complete series of video tapes of all the talks is available from ***

Early Inspirations For Dynamic Objects

Watson, J., Molecular Biology of the Gene, W. A. Benjamin, New York 1965 How highly complex organizations might still be
able to work.

Halmos, Paul R., Finite-dimensional Vector Spaces, Van Nostrand, New Jersey, 1958 The power of “algebra in the large”

Carnap, Rudolf, Meaning and Necessity, A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947

Madison, Hamilton, Jay, The Federalist Papers http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/fed/fedpapers.html How highly complex organizations (of
people) might be made to work.

Barton, R. S., "A new approach to the functional design of a digital computer", Proc WJCC, 1961, reprinted in IEEE Annals
Perhaps the greatest single advance in computer design. http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/an/1987/01/a1011abs.htm Full text can be
viewed at: ***.***

Sutherland, Ivan, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Communications System", MIT PhD Thesis (1963) “When there was only one
personal computer.” The UR-vision: Very very early: interactive computer graphics, object-oriented design, real-time problem
solving. http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~waynec/history/PDFs/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 8

Dahl, O-J, and Nygaard, K., "SIMULA: an ALGOL-based simulation language", Communications of the ACM, Volume 9 ,
Issue 9 (September 1966, Pages: 671– 678 The catalyst than changed my POV. http://***

Wirth, N., Weber, H., “EULER: A generalization of Algol, and its definition”, CACM 9 Part I, Jan 1966, Part II, Feb 1966. How
to do an algebraic programming language beautifully and simply. It almost reinvented LISP from a different POV.

Minsky, Marvin, Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall, 1967 (Just a great book!)

McCarthy, John, "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I)", CACM 1960.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html The “Maxwell’s Equations” of programming languages – the greatest single
advance in programming thought.

________, et al., The LISP 1.5 Programming Manual, MIT Press, Cambridge 1962 (Another “just a great book!”)

Baran, Paul, RAND Reports on packet-switching and flexible routing in mesh-networks starting in early 60s:
http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html, http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/RM3420/

Kleinrock, Leonard, Communication Nets: stochastic message flow and delay, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964

Thomas Marill & Lawrence Roberts, "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers", Fall AFIPS Conf (Oct 1966)
http://www.packet.cc/files/toward-coop-net.html One of the early papers on the route to the ARPAnet.

Early Inspirations For Personal Computing & Networks

Bush, Vannevar, “As We May Think”, Atlantic Monthly (1945), also in: From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the
Mind’s Machine, edited by James M, Nyce and Paul Kahn. San Diego: Academic Press.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

Licklider, J.C.R., “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (1960) Reprinted in "In
Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider, 1915-1990". Digital Systems Research Center Reports, vol. 61. Palo Alto, Ca, 1990. The UR-paper
on the “ARPA Dream” http://www.memex.org/licklider.pdf

J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, "The Computer as a Communication Device", Science and Technology, April 1968.
Reprinted in "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider, 1915-1990". Digital Systems Research Center Reports, vol. 61. Palo Alto, Ca,
1990. http://www.memex.org/licklider.pdf

Sutherland, Ivan, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Communications System", MIT PhD Thesis (1963). “When there was only one
personal computer.” The UR-vision: Very very early: interactive computer graphics, object-oriented design, real-time problem
solving. http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~waynec/history/PDFs/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf

Clark, Wesley, "The LINC was early and small", A History of Personal Workstations, ed. A. Goldberg, Addison-Wesley, 1988
http://***.*** — a terrific retrospective by a true pioneer: the main designer of both the huge TX-2 computer on which computer
graphics was born and the smallish LINC (my vote for the first real personal computer).

Shaw, Cliff, "JOSS: a designer's view of an experimental online computer system", RAND, 1964 One of the first truly beautiful
interactive systems for end-users that really cared about them in every possible way. A classic.

Engelbart, Douglas C., and English, W. K., “A research center for augmenting human intellect”, Proceedings of the FJCC, Vol
33, Part one, (pp 395-410). December, 1968 — This is the companion paper to perhaps the greatest public demo of an interactive
computing system: to 3000 attendees of the 1968 FJCC in San Francisco.

Engelbart, Douglas C., "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop," in A History of Personal Workstations, ed. A. Goldberg, ACM
Press, New York, 1988, pp. 185-236 — an excellent retrospective.

Engelbart, Douglas C., "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop," (82-min. VHS video cassette recording) Doug Engelbart’s
presentation at the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations, Palo Alto, CA, January 9-10, 1986; Includes 20
minutes from the historic 1968 FJCC demonstration

Tom O. Ellis, J.F. Heafner, W.L. Sibley, The GRAIL Project: An Experiment in Man-Machine Communications. RAND
Corporation, Santa Monica CA, 1969 The first really great “intimate” GUI using gesture recognition. A classic.
http://www.rand.org/cgi-bin/Abstracts/ordi/getabbydoc.pl?doc=RM-5999&hilite=1&qs=GRAIL

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 9

Milestones on the road to the ARPAnet.

Baran, Paul, RAND Reports on packet-switching and flexible routing in mesh-networks starting in early 60s:
http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html, http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/RM3420/

Kleinrock, Leonard, Communication Nets: stochastic message flow and delay, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964

Thomas Marill & Lawrence Roberts, "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers", Fall AFIPS Conf (Oct 1966)
Early test of packet-switching. http://www.packet.cc/files/toward-coop-net.html

Early Education and Dynabook Inspirations and Influences

An early oral version (in 1968) of Minsky’s Turing Lecture made a great impression on me in many areas, especially the parts
about learning and education.

Minsky, Marvin, "Form and Content in Computer Science", 1970 ACM Turing Award Lecture, Journal of the Association for
Computing Machinery, Vol. 17, No. 2, April 1970.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/TuringLecture.html

Papert, early papers *** These are really great ideas, and were the catalyst to my now 35 year interest with “helping children
learn to grow up to think better than most adults do today”.

Bruner, Jerome, Toward A Theory Of Instruction, Harvard-Belknap Press, 1965. Still the best single book on how to think about
and design learning environments (precomputer, but still the best).

McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press, 1965, I had to learn
to understand this one first before being able to grok Understanding Media

________, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, Signet Press, 1964 You have to work to extract the gold from the dross, but
the gold is 100% pure and critically important for humans to understand.

Selected Historical Papers About The Dynabook

Kay, Alan C., “A personal computer for children of all ages”, Proc. ACM National Conf, Boston, Aug 1972

__________, “A dynamic medium for creative thought”, National Teachers of English Conf, Nov 1972

__________, and Goldberg, Adele, “Personal Dynamic Media”, IEEE Computer, March 1977

__________, “Microelectronics and the personal computer”, Scientific American, Sept 1977

__________, “Programming your own computer”, Science Year 1979, WorldBook Encyclopedia, 1979

US History
Franklin, B., " Speaking before the Convention in Philadelphia, 1787",
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/writings/franklin_on_const.htm

Madison, Hamilton, Jay, The Federalist Papers http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/fed/fedpapers.html

Selected Other Important PARC Research Documentation

Starkweather, Gary, ***

Metcalfe, R.M., Boggs, D.R., “Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching For Local Computer Networks”, Communications of the
ACM, Vol 19, Num 7, July 1976, online at ACM Digital Library

VPRI Memo M-2004-001 10

Ingalls, Dan. H.H., “The Smalltalk-76 Programming System, Design and Implementation”, in 5th ACM Symposium on Principles
of Programming Languages, Tucson, Jan 1978, online at ACM Digital Library, and at:
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/St76/Smalltalk76ProgrammingSystem.html

Goldberg, Adele and Robson, David, Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation, Addison-Wesley, 1983 How to do
what we did.

The ARPA-IPTO/PARC History and Community as seen from the outside

None of these articles and books quite captures the zeitgeist. The "infamous" Rolling Stone article by Stewart Brand perhaps
comes the closest. The Perry article about PARC is pretty good, and the Waldrop book gives a large and detailed picture of
Licklider and what he was able to start and influence. Chigusa Kita’s history paper about Licklider is the most meticulously
researched, by an extremely careful and diligent historian. The Rheingold book has a pretty good perspective from much earlier
interviews.

Brand, Stewart, "Fanatic Life & Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums", Rolling Stone Magazine, Dec 1972.
http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Perry, Tekla S., Wallich, P., "Inside the PARC: The 'Information Architects' " IEEE Spectrum (October 1985)

Reingold, Howard, Tools For Thought, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985 -- An interesting interview with Bob Taylor is at:
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/10.html

Hiltzik, Michael, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age, New York: Harper-Business, 1999

Waltrop, M. Mitchell, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal, New York:
Viking, 2001

Chigusa Ishikawa Kita, “J. C. R. Licklider 's Vision for the IPTO,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol.25, no.3,
pp.61-77.

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VPRI Memo M-2004-001 11