Bob Taylor - No PCs or Internet without him

In the early 1980s, having read Alan Kay's 1977 article about the work at Xerox PARC on what he called "the Dynabook," I decided/realized that Xerox Palo Alto Research Center had to be the coolest place for a writer interested in the future of technology. I called their public affairs director, the late Gloria Warner, who told me she didn't have any contract work -- but she didn't tell me to stop calling. I called every Friday morning. One Friday, she said that she needed someone to work over the weekend on a slide show (they used acetates and overhead projectors for presentations then) for a product announcement. I started getting assignments. Then Xerox's PR department contracted me to write articles about interesting people at PARC -- a dream job! -- and they placed them in various publications. It didn't take long to get to Bob Taylor, who started talking about Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and the work at ARPA that led to PARC. I ended up writing my book, Tools for Thought, about the shoulders that Jobs and Gates were standing on -- not only Taylor, Engelbart, and Kay, but von Neumann, Turing, Shannon, Boole, Babbage and Lovelace.

Taylor was charming, acerbic, and droll. He died last Spring. If I had to summarize his role, I'd say he was the quintessential cat-herder who brought together the mavericks and geniuses who created the personal computer and the Internet. Wired wrote a tribe to him after he died. I devoted a chapter to him and the cats he herded in Tools for Thought: "The New Old Boys from the ARPAnet." And if you want to hear how it all came about in Taylor's Texas drawl, do pay attention to this video interview he did at the University of Austin