Innovating and Troublemaking are Often Complementary By Lester Donald Earnest (les at cs.stanford.edu) Senior Research Computer Scientist Emeritus, Stanford University 2016.03.20

This article is under development, with more stories and supporting references to be added. Comments and criticism are invited and an accompanying blog shows changes.

MIT, especially JCR Licklider and Larry Roberts. 1970s: Internet Protocols developed at Stanford University by a group headed by Vint Cerf, which enabled networks of different types to be interconnected in the 1980s. 1990s: The World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland, provided a standardized interactive user interface, enabling cooperative research, commercial development, and improved search engines.

By chance I contributed to each of those developments and am evidently the only person in the world who did that. Looking Back and Forth. I was born in 1930, so I am now over 85. I’ve had an Innovations that I initiated, enjoyable life so far and have accomplished becoming the first of their kind. In quite a bit but have done little bragging until most cases I had a lot of help from my now. However I have also engaged in more colleagues. than my share of confrontations with the result that many people view me as a • Interactive drawing and writing on a troublemaker. computer display (1959).

• Spelling checker (1961), an improved I now have 14 descendants including 5 great version of which was made by Ralph grandchildren with more on the way. I plan Gorin at my suggestion and spread to live until 2043 and if I manage to do that I around the world on ARPAnet beginning may start seeing great-great-great around 1974. grandchildren. • Search Engine (ROUT, 1961) used

Boolean search logic with keywords to Computer Networks are a result of four retrieve stories from a large collection, main developments so far, with more to implemented by a bunch of people at come. MITRE Corporation based on my 1950s: Creation of the SAGE air defense design. system, the first interactive computer system • Cursive handwriting recognizer (Curse, and the first computer network. Initiated by 1962) done just by me. the Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Hand-eye-ear robot which used (MIT) with funding from the US Air Defense computer vision to locate objects on a Command. table, then in response to verbal 1960s: ARPAnet, the first general purpose instructions, used a mechanical arm to network, was also initiated by people from manipulate them (1966), with the hand- eye part done by Karl Pingle, Jeff Singer

1 and Bill Wichman and speech 1. Legitimate recognition: after someone recognition done by Raj Reddy and his invents something useful, a historian or students. other neutral person figures that out and • Self-driving vehicle (Stanford Cart, calls attention to it. Simply documenting 1967) done by Rod Schmidt, which an idea without either making it work or unfortunately didn't work because of finding someone else to do that qualifies computer performance at that time but you as a daydreamer, not an inventor. was further developed by Hans 2. Mythmaking: in order to make an Moravec, then others, giving rise to interesting story a writer distorts the ongoing research that eventually did facts to make it appear that a certain work in the new millennium. person has made a technological • Programmable personal calendars breakthrough, or that an old idea is (LESCAL, 1968). actually new or that a name-change for • Document compiler with spreadsheets an old idea is a new invention. (PUB, 1971) with much help from Larry 3. Moneymaking: Public media seem to Tesler. evaluate the importance of inventions • Online restaurant reviews (California based on the amount of money they Yumyum, 1973) with help from Kathleen produce from commercial development Menke. and consequently recognize the big • Network news service (NS, 1974) using money-makers as “inventors” whether or the same Boolean search logic as the not they ever invented anything. 1961 search engine to access stories from Associated Press and New York I haven’t qualified under #1 so far because I Times newswires, co-instigated by John did my work quietly. I entered the computer McCarthy and done mainly by Martin field in the early 1950s when “open source” Frost. was the standard – we considered it an • Computer controlled vending machine honor when someone else picked up a (Prancing Pony, 1975) with help from hardware design or program we had written Ted Panofsky. and turned it into a commercial product. The • Social networking and blogging service ACM was then publishing journals devoted (FINGER, 1975), which I created to to giving away useful technology and I stuck snoop on people in my lab, then turned with that approach throughout my career, into a network service with help from choosing not to patent or secrete anything I Mark Crispin and Brian Harvey, then the did, aside from one software patent that I got users turned it into a social network. near the end of my career in order to make • Desktop publishing system using a laser some vulture capitalists happy. In fact I printer (1979) mainly done by Luis oppose software patents of any kind and am Trabb Pardo. happy that patent has lapsed.

Many commercial developments based on I have no desire to qualify under #2 or #3. those inventions have been successful and, One example of #2 is “Cloud Computing,” a though I have not completed the math yet, new name for a very old service going back they have clearly brought in many $billions to the early 1970s that many people now (perhaps hundreds). I now immodestly claim fictitiously claim is a new invention. to have initiated the development of more useful inventions than anyone else in world Examples of #3 qualifiers are Bill Gates, history, though that claim needs to be Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. None of them reviewed. appears to have invented anything but they did provide work environments where real You might reasonably ask how that could be inventors thrived and they became true since you never heard of me. The billionaires, so they are often erroneously reason is fairly simple. There evidently are identified as “great inventors.” three main ways of getting recognized as an inventor: More Mythmaking. I chose not to read Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs,

2 figuring that it would make me mad, but I Mathematics Department, including John have now started into his newer book, The McCarthy’s Artificial Intelligence Project, and Innovators and see that no one there is Edward Feigenbaum joined him in applying shown as having invented anything close to for multi-million dollar funding from ARPA the diversity of my list above. (the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) to start a On the other hand, that doesn’t prove much substantially expanded research laboratory, because it also lists only one of my which was funded. inventions, the hand-eye-ear robot, and does it in a totally phony way by quoting from one of John Markoff’s stories from his book What the Dormouse Said. Markoff is quoted as saying my talk “featured a film about a robot that acted as if it could hear and see things.” However that film, called Hear! Here! was not completed until about a year later. In other words, that story was a complete fabrication and went on to claim that Doug Engelbart had exhibited a SAIL Site technological breakthrough in the As a result of a chance encounter I was presentation he gave at the same recruited by Stanford to serve as Executive conference, even though that was a Officer of the new research group and came complete lie. there in December 1965. I found a hollow building in the foothills above the Stanford Doug Engelbart was a friend of mine and did campus that had recently been purchased present a nice talk on the state of the art in by Stanford and then designed its new timesharing systems but presented only one interior and got it set up with the newly new idea of any significance, namely the purchased timesharing system based on a , which essentially provided DEC PDP-6 computer. I then named it SAIL a way to do “point and click” graphical user and managed it for many years in a interfaces and was cheaper than the old somewhat strained relationship with Prof. light pens. The mouse became popular for a John McCarthy. time even though it introduced no new capabilities, but has since been mostly Our research projects included several superseded by other pointing schemes. aspects of artificial intelligence including: Robotics If Markoff had attended my talk he would Hand-eye-ear robot have seen that our SAIL computer ran Self-driving vehicle circles around Engelbart’s but he instead Mechanical assembly took the word of another seriously naïve Theorem proving author, Steven Levy, and made up a story Mathematical theory of computation saying the opposite. Soon see my story Automatic program generation titled “The Mother of all demos” was an Symbolic computation accidental fraud. Board games (Chess, Checkers, Go) Mars image interpretation In any case, given that Isaacson’s book DENDRAL (mass spectrometry) includes fake stories that he did not bother Multidimensional music synthesis to investigate, it should be dismissed as a Higher mental functions reference. Machine translation and a lot of other stuff.

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Over the years we trained many PhDs in Laboratory (SAIL). 1965 was a pivotal Computer Science as well as other graduate year for both the Computer Science degrees and many became faculty members Department at Stanford University and for around the world. One measure of success me. That department was spun off from the is the number of affiliates of SAIL who later received ACM Turing Awards, which many

3 view as the Nobel Prize of computer Science: seventeen so far. I bet that no other research group in the world can match that.

Entrepreneurs. Another measure of success is the number and significance of dozens of corporate spinoffs from SAIL including: In my spare time, I got dragged into Amazon bicycle racing in the early 1970s by my two Apple (to a degree) teenage sons and raced in the geezer class Cisco (more of a rip-off than a spinoff) (40+) then started officiating at thousands of D.E. Shaw local, national and international events Google including Olympics. I also rewrote all iRobot American bicycle racing rules for road, track Microsoft and cyclocross and got them adopted in PARC 1979. Rambus Rethink Robotics In 1984 I introduced the first dope control RSA regulations for American cycling and the Sun Microsystems next year also got blood doping prohibited, More listed here. which eventually spread around the world in many sports and recently nailed Lance For example, in 1968 Bill Gates and Paul Armstrong and his fellow crooks. Allen were introduced to computing as high school students by three guys from SAIL I managed to get a strong helmet rule (Steve Russell, Dick Gruen and Bill Weiher) adopted for American racing in 1986, over who moved to Seattle to help start a fierce opposition, and it too spread around computer timesharing service and took our the world saving thousands of lives and SAIL software with them. Following a SAIL preventing tens of thousands of serious tradition they recruited high school students head injuries. I did not anticipate that to debug their system software by trying to outcome but am proud of it. break it. Gates and Allen later went off to Harvard then dropped out to form a small In 1993 I initiated the creation of a new US company called Microsoft that later grew a national bicycle racing organization called lot. USA Cycling but unfortunately some corrupt commercial interests spent what it took to In 1975 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak get control of that organization and have were introduced to interactive computing in been using it ever since to scam athletes a visit to SAIL by the Homebrew Computer and other participants in the sport while I Club. We sneered at their plan to build dinky and others continue to plot their overthrow. computers but nine years later they started selling a lot of their stuff, some of which was Now let’s go back in time and review things initiated by people from SAIL, including the in a more chronological order. Macintosh by Jeff Raskin and their first tablet (Newton) by Larry Tesler, who had also developed a lot of the Mac software.

4 and I made repeated hauls and dumps until a newspaper photographer somehow showed up and I appeared in the next day’s San Diego Tribune newspaper.

Startup. I was born and raised in San Diego, California, and my earliest memory, at age two years and four months, was of my little sister, Patricia’s, birth. My dad took me to the hospital where I then discovered a fascinating drinking fountain that had a spigot and a conical paper cup dispenser. I went through many cups before being taken Following that, the supervisor of the home. construction crew and his wife arranged to borrow me for a weekend at their cabin in I turned out to be the oldest of my dozen the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego, cousins and was sometimes loaned out to where I managed to slip away to do as hike my five aunts and uncles who wanted to on my own and somehow slipped on a experiment with parenting, especially my moss-filled stream flowing over the top of a aunt Mildred and uncle Clif Rock, who never big rock and tumbled head first onto the had any kids. rocks below, getting somewhat beat up. As a result I became acrophobic and am unable I began innovating around age three but to get anywhere near the edge of a precipice soon learned that many people do not easily nor can I stand seeing others do that. accept new ideas, saying “Don’t change anything!” I subsequently figured out that I grew up as a bicycling beach boy. Taking such resistance can often be overcome by advantage of the mild climate, outside of making real trouble and since I enjoyed both school I wore only maroon swimming trunks, innovating and troublemaking I became summer and winter. fairly successful at turning new ideas into reality, but it wasn’t all easy. I later joined the Cub Scouts and rose through the ranks – Wolf, Bear, Lion -- until I When I was three years old our back yard was dishonorably discharged for artistic was separated from the playground of the misconduct, so I never got to be a Boy Benjamin Franklin Elementary School by a Scout. chain link fence, which enabled me to watch everything going on there. I became seriously interested in girls at about age 10 but had difficulty figuring out When a gasoline-powered cement mixer how their minds worked, a problem that is showed up and I saw workmen using still with me. wheelbarrows to transport concrete to the wooden forms for the foundation of a new I got an FBI record at age 11 as a result of kindergarten, I got out my new wheelbarrow dabbling in cryptography and then got into and went there to volunteer. The workmen more trouble. loaded me with several handfuls of concrete

5 After entering the Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School at age 12 I attempted to Along the way I became a four year date a tall, intelligent and gorgeous girl there letterman in football as well as an All who was also a 7th grader. I knew it would Conference Defensive Guard. We played be awkward to travel by streetcar, since I our home games in the Rose Bowl and couldn’t drive, but gave it a try anyway. She sometimes drew enough fans to fill two rows said she would get back to me and did the along the fifty yard line. next day, saying her parents had told her she was too young to start dating. Sigh.

Eastward and Back Twice. My dad had become a high level manager of Solar Aircraft in San Diego and in 1942, shortly after the beginning of World War II, he was recruited to manage a defense plant in Des Moines, Iowa. My mother, sister and I then made a train trip first to the East Coast, stopping in New Orleans, Washington DC, New York, then back to Chicago and Des Moines. My parents then drove my sister to Les in the center crouching lower one of my mother’s relatives’ farms in Iowa and me to my dad’s relatives in Nebraska so I also became manager of the basketball that we could spend the summe learning team, singer in the A Cappella Chorus, actor about farming, then come home together by in the campus theatrical group, played a lot train, a very interesting trip. of volleyball and worked as door-to-door ice

cream salesman in the evenings instead of By 1943 my dad had moved on to manage a studying. larger defense plant in Louisville, Kentucky and I went there by train to join him, followed During 1951-53 I was elected Pope of later by my mother and sister. When I Blacker House, adopting the title Pope entered high school there I found it curious Necrophilius I. My College of Cardinals and I that they were segregated four ways: upper were responsible for lowering student class white boys, lower class white boys, morals and, to measure progress, we white girls, and colored. I chose the lower administered Purity Tests semi-annually class school, which was called the DuPont consisting of one hundred yes-or-no Manual Training High School, because it questions beginning with “Have you ever had the courses I needed to qualify for thought a lewd thought?” and going on from studying engineering in college whereas the there. upper class school focused on humanities.

We also engaged in a holy war against the In the summer of 1947, at age 16, I talked competing Anti-Pope in Dabney House next my parents into letting me hitchhike back to door, which I resolved by having my San Diego to visit relatives, which took me Cardinals collect chicken feathers from five days to get there, then up to Oregon to nearby butcheries, then pick the lock on my visit more relatives. When I got there I opponent’s door, fill the room with feathers learned that my family was moving back to and install fans to blow it around. As it San Diego, so I rejoined them there and did turned out the feathers came with a lot of my final year of high school. chicken dung.

Finally on My Own. At age 17 I I then built a large and elegant wooden door somehow was admitted to the California at the entrance to the dormitory hall where Institute of Technology (Caltech) with a my room was located and renamed it as The scholarship, then ran wild and flunked out Vatican, a name that has been retained ever twice but still managed to graduate in 1953 since, over 65 years. with a degree in electrical engineering.

6 After college, over many years, I innovated in a number of fields including computer technology, bicycle racing, racial classification, research group management and entrepreneurship.

Professional Career Summary

SAGE provided interactive computer services to over a thousand people concurrently at 23 sites across North America using vacuum tube computers, each the size of a football field, and six levels of computer networks using modems and packet switching, though the terms “modem” and “packet” did not come into general use until the 1970s.

1953-56 Served in the US Navy as an Aviation Electronics Officer doing flight simulations of missiles and manned aircraft using an electromechanical digital computer that I rewired.

1956-60 Helped design the SAGE air defense system, first working for MIT then its nonprofit spinoff MITRE Corporation while worrying about the fact that SAGE was Bomarc Ground-to-air Launch a gigantic fraud on American and Canadian My responsibility was to design the weapons taxpayers. guidance and control functions. In my spare time I also earned an MIT Masters Degree in SAGE also introduced the “point and click” electrical engineering/computer science. for the first time, using many CRT displays and light guns 1960-62 Continuing with MITRE, I helped such as the one in the tray above, and was design Air Force System 438L for military the first computer network, setting the intelligence, another fraud. In my spare time, technological foundation of the Internet. working evenings and weekends, I developed the first cursive handwriting recognizer, including the first spelling checker, which clearly qualified as a PhD

7 dissertation, but I was not interested in [More to come] getting that.

In my day job I initiated the creation of the first search engine, called ROUT (Retrieval Of Unformatted Text).

1962-63 Worked at CIA headquarters on database design, a complete waste of time. My family and I were still living in Lexington, Massachusetts, so I commuted to northern Virginia on a weekly basis.

1963-65 Worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the World Wide Military Command and Control System, an even worse experience.

1965-80 I finally escaped to Stanford University, the best career move of my life. However in 1980, after many productive and enjoyable years, John McCarthy shut down SAIL and fired me. 1980-85 Founding President of Imagen Corporation, a successful but stressful startup.

1985-88 Returned to Stanford at John McCarthy’s request and became Associate Chair of the Computer Science Department.

1988-present Retiree, reformer, bicyclist and world traveler, now working on a Bucket List.

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