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Innovating and Troublemaking Are Often Complementary 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 computer mouse, 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.
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