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Nation's Top Engineering Award Goes to Local Industry Figure for Leadership in Networked Personal Computing

Posted on: Tuesday, 24 February 2004, 06:00 CST

Robert Taylor Led Xerox PARC Team That Built the Alto

Personal Computer

¶ Local industry legend Robert W. Taylor was one of four individuals awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize for conceiving and developing the world's first practical networked personal computers. The $500,000 annual award, the engineering profession's highest honor, is presented by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). ¶ Taylor founded and managed the famed Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1972 he led a team that included Draper Prize co-winners Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson and Charles P. Thacker as they designed and built the Alto personal computer and its network environment. ¶ The Alto combined such groundbreaking features as a built-in network interface, bit-mapped display, removable disk, mouse, and keyboard. While familiar today, never before had such technologies as an overlapping, window-based graphical user interface and a full-page display that showed text in the right size, font, format and position been combined in a desktop machine and linked to other computers through an Ethernet local network. Today, millions of computers precisely reflect the Alto's vision of a network of powerful personal workstations. ¶ Following the creation of the Alto networked personal computer in the 1970's, a number of new companies developed the technologies into products. A list of these companies includes Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, 3Com, and Sun, among others. By the mid 1990's the Internet, which was fundamentally dependent on all these technologies created at PARC, was in full swing and growing.

¶ A Long Career of Guiding Innovation

¶ An acknowledged genius at assembling outstanding teams of researchers, suggesting avenues of exploration, and motivating colleagues to push the technological envelope, Taylor was instrumental in creating an exceptional record of innovation and accomplishment. Before Xerox PARC, Taylor was Director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA in the Department of Defense, where he supported key research underlying much of the fundamental technology in today's computer industry. ARPA funding decisions were not made by committee or peer review, but by Taylor himself. His prescient funding choices included ARPAnet, the first packet network and the direct ancestor of today's Internet, the first time-sharing operating system, and computer graphics work from which most of today's graphics is derived. ¶ In 1984 Taylor founded the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation, which he managed until his retirement in 1996. There Taylor built one of the most influential computer systems laboratories in the world. SRC developed the first multiprocessor workstation, the first fault-tolerant switched local area network, a precursor to Java language, the first electronic book, and the first self-managing storage system.

¶ Education and Awards

¶ Taylor earned his BA and his MA from The University of Texas. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and received its Software Systems Award in 1984. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1991. In 1999 the President of the United States awarded Robert Taylor the National Medal of Technology. ¶ Taylor's contributions to the rise of the computing and networking industries have been chronicled in many magazine articles and over a dozen books about Silicon Valley and technological innovation, including the best-sellers Dealers of Lightning, by Michael Hiltzkik (1999) and The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop (2001).

¶ Editor's Note: Text of the award, Taylor's Draper Prize acceptance speech, a biography of Taylor's career, and photographs are available upon request. Contact Leslie Schroeder at 415-999-1394 or Leslie@SchroederPR.com

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