The HLF Portraits: Robert Elliot Kahn
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The HLF Portraits6 / 66
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Inheritance (object-oriented programming)Line (geometry)Fitness functionVideo gameDegree (graph theory)Procedural programmingMultiplication signRight anglePrincipal idealMathematicianBasis <Mathematik>NumberElectronic mailing listFamilySurgeryOptical disc driveMathematicsDirection (geometry)Computer configurationExpected valueMusical ensembleSet (mathematics)Computer programmingClosed setOpen sourceQuicksortCapability Maturity ModelProduct (business)Reading (process)Mortality rateAxiom of choiceHypothesisStudent's t-testUtility softwareException handlingDependent and independent variablesProcess (computing)Information technology consultingSound effectMeeting/Interview
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Multiplication signEnterprise architectureStudent's t-testAreaUniverse (mathematics)QuicksortNetwork topologyVideo gameBasis <Mathematik>Social classMereologyNumberStandard deviationCommutatorLibrary (computing)Point (geometry)NeuroinformatikInteractive televisionBell and HowellSet (mathematics)FamilyAlgebraAxiom of choiceHypothesisTheoryMcCarthy, JohnFaculty (division)Programming languageQuantum mechanicsArithmetic mean1 (number)MathematicsComputer scienceLambda calculusFile archiverProcess (computing)BuildingDecision theoryComputer programmingData conversionField (computer science)Self-organizationRight angleMetropolitan area networkObservational studyDirection (geometry)Computability theoryRandomizationMeeting/Interview
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Electric generatorRoundness (object)Disk read-and-write headInternetworkingFigurate numberMultiplication signFrequencyTheorySet (mathematics)DistanceNumberSqueeze theoremStudent's t-testDirection (geometry)HypothesisParameter (computer programming)Beat (acoustics)MereologyPosition operatorQuicksortBell and Howell2 (number)Band matrixPerpetual motionPhysicalismQuantum mechanicsPolygonMaxima and minimaDegree (graph theory)Metropolitan area networkWave equationPay televisionNegative BinomialverteilungUbiquitous computingDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Software developerTerm (mathematics)Faculty (division)Computer programmingFamilyPoint (geometry)Field (computer science)Similarity (geometry)Office suiteData managementCircleUniverse (mathematics)Enterprise architectureResultantPlanningCross-correlationGame theoryLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
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Field (computer science)InformationMobile WebTelecommunicationWeb 2.0Multiplication signTraffic reportingComputer fileForm (programming)WeightFigurate numberStudent's t-testFaculty (division)NeuroinformatikSoftware frameworkDivisorRight angleMoment (mathematics)Computer architectureSpacetimeEigenvalues and eigenvectorsProcess (computing)CalculusAttribute grammarComputer programmingVirtual machineQuantumComputer networkOrder of magnitudeUtility softwareImage resolutionNichtlineares GleichungssystemOrder (biology)FehlererkennungWater vaporWorkstation <Musikinstrument>Object (grammar)MereologyDifferent (Kate Ryan album)DigitizingPrimitive (album)Density of statesPhysical systemData miningDimensional analysisPlastikkarteSpreadsheetIndependence (probability theory)File formatBitAreaInternetworkingGoodness of fitNumberGroup actionExtension (kinesiology)LogicRoboticsArithmetic meanContext awarenessWordARPANETLine (geometry)Statement (computer science)Point (geometry)Semiconductor memorySoftware1 (number)Source codeInformation securityMomentumComputer wormReal numberComputer virusGame controllerBuffer solutionTransformation (genetics)Machine visionDiagramRevision controlTheoryCross-correlationKey (cryptography)HypothesisUltraviolet photoelectron spectroscopyScaling (geometry)Latent heatView (database)IBM PCDependent and independent variablesLocal ringRow (database)Bell and HowellWhiteboardInformation managementImplementationData structureOffice suiteCommunications protocolTheory of everythingBasis <Mathematik>Neighbourhood (graph theory)Matrix (mathematics)QuicksortResultantBuildingComputer configurationInformation technology consultingTable (information)RoutingMeeting/Interview
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Category of beingOffice suiteMultiplication signTelecommunicationPhysical systemRight angleSoftwareArithmetic meanSet (mathematics)Term (mathematics)FacebookMessage passingPlastikkarteMachine visionComputer programmingCollaborationismQuicksortEmailNeuroinformatikSoftware developerStatement (computer science)Sound effectSpeech synthesisBit error rateGoodness of fitExistenceConfidence intervalElectric generatorCASE <Informatik>Error messageFitness functionVector potentialBitWeb 2.02 (number)Process (computing)InformationEquivalence relationPlanningSystem callMoment (mathematics)Flip-flop (electronics)Meeting/Interview
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Universe (mathematics)Self-organizationAxiom of choiceResultantNeuroinformatikMoment (mathematics)Interactive televisionCoprocessorCharge carrierStapeldateiSpacetimeComputer networkAreaFinite-state machineMultiplication signSolid geometryComputer programmingField (computer science)Dependent and independent variablesBuildingMessage passingExpected valueARPANETDecision theory1 (number)Physical systemSoftwareVirtual machineState of matterView (database)Bell and HowellLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
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WeightMereologyTelecommunicationField (computer science)NeuroinformatikSigma-algebraNumberHookingGroup actionSet (mathematics)QuicksortVirtual machineMeasurementIntegrated development environmentSoftware testingSoftwareMultiplication signService (economics)InformationMaizeUniverse (mathematics)Operator (mathematics)Radical (chemistry)Computer networkVideo game2 (number)ARPANETInternetworkingAreaCollaborationismCartesian coordinate systemInstallation artProcess (computing)Axiom of choiceWave packetDemosceneCommunications protocolDisk read-and-write headOffice suiteType theoryFigurate numberAddress spaceComputer sciencePlanningNatural numberBitFrame problemFunctional (mathematics)Multilateration3COM <Marke>Self-organizationMeeting/Interview
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IP addressNoise (electronics)Multiplication signBand matrixSoftwareImplementationWeightInternetworkingCommunications protocolBitCASE <Informatik>Virtual machineLink (knot theory)Message passingARPANETData transmissionSet (mathematics)Wind tunnelSoftware developerDifferent (Kate Ryan album)MereologyNegative numberSeries (mathematics)Context awarenessPhysical systemLattice (order)Program slicingFrequencyRouter (computing)Operator (mathematics)SatelliteGateway (telecommunications)WCDMANeuroinformatikRoutingRight angleRegulator geneAddress spaceSoftware testing1 (number)Computer architectureAttribute grammarCode division multiple accessTheory of relativityVector potentialPoint (geometry)Fundamental theorem of algebraMeeting/Interview
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InformationDimensional analysisIndependence (probability theory)Right angleSet (mathematics)Different (Kate Ryan album)QuicksortTerm (mathematics)Similarity (geometry)InternetworkingPosition operatorUbiquitous computingNeuroinformatikWordARPANETMultiplication signExtension (kinesiology)Direction (geometry)Object (grammar)Point (geometry)Universe (mathematics)BitAuthorizationEquivalence relationField (computer science)Series (mathematics)AreaSemiconductor memoryOrder of magnitudeTelecommunicationStatement (computer science)Web 2.0MereologyComputer architectureContext awarenessInformation managementOpen setUltraviolet photoelectron spectroscopyScaling (geometry)Latent heatCommunications protocolLine (geometry)Sinc functionOptical disc driveImplementationVacuumRouter (computing)Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
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Object (grammar)BitRevision controlDigitizingMobile WebComputer architectureVirtual machineData storage deviceSoftwareGoodness of fitComputer programmingNeighbourhood (graph theory)File formatKey (cryptography)InformationNichtlineares GleichungssystemPhysical systemInformation securityFiber (mathematics)Computer wormConfidence intervalComputer virusElectric generatorRoboticsVector potentialSet (mathematics)Process (computing)PlanningRight angleForm (programming)Electronic visual displayCategory of beingCollaborationismQuantumSoftware developerSound effectMatrix (mathematics)FacebookEquivalence relationMultiplication signSpreadsheetMessage passingEmailComputer fileWeb 2.0AreaInternetworkingSource codeSystem callMomentumTransformation (genetics)Machine visionDensity of statesMeeting/Interview
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Internet forumBit rateComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
Professor, I'd like to begin relatively at the beginning of your life and with your childhood,
00:24
and I'll just start with a question about the expectations your parents might have had for you. What was the culture of your childhood? Well, my dad was a high school principal. He had gotten a college degree in accounting, did business consulting on the side.
00:42
My mother was a homemaker. They were both products of the Depression. My mother was very interested in reading and cultural things. My dad was more business-like,
01:01
I would say. My mother had a heart attack when she was a young woman. The first attack was April 12, 1945, which, if you look at the history books, you'll recognize that was the day that Franklin Roosevelt died. I think that's what kicked it out, kicked it in for her.
01:23
During much of her childhood, my sister and I, which was two of us in the family, actually played a more serious role in actually running the household. We cooked the meals and took care of things. My mother was unable to do that between 1945 and 1952 or 1953. She
01:44
actually had something like eight heart attacks. That's rapid maturation for you. We were kind of grown up as little kids, I would say, too quickly. She ended up going through what was then known as closed heart surgery in 1953 because they concluded that she
02:06
would probably not survive a ninth heart attack. Closed heart surgery was pretty draconian stuff. You didn't do that unless the odds there were better than doing nothing. I think the mortality
02:22
rate the week of the surgery was 50%. In five years, 95% of the patients died. It was a very complex procedure. She actually lived 40 years after that. She was one of the longest live survivors. I suppose I'm particularly inquiring about the effect on you. Is it affecting your
02:46
schooling? Are you distracted by this? Are you all the more intense for it? No. Other than the fact that we had these responsibilities, I think pretty normal childhood. My dad was masterful at masking the concerns he might have had about this
03:07
clearly disrupted everything, but he made it seem like it was perfectly normal. I don't know how he did that, how he got through that, but we had a fairly normal childhood with this one exception. I think as a kid growing up, I was just happy to find time to go pursue things I
03:29
found interesting. The things that were most interesting to me were sports. I like to play sports of all kinds. This is in New York. We lived in Brooklyn at the time. Moved to Flushing
03:41
Long Island when I was about 13. What was sports? Stickball on the streets. It's the kind of things that a New Yorker would do growing up. Are you excited by school? I'm searching for what may not exist, which is a book or a course that you took that started you on your way.
04:06
No, it was not a book, not a course. If anything, I was most strongly influenced by my parents. That's for sure. I mean, they had, I think, very high expectations for their kids that they'd certainly go on to college and who knows what after that. But, you know, I was
04:27
pretty much a kid that was unencumbered growing up. I liked mathematics. I liked to do puzzles. I had a chemistry set as a kid to play around, listen to music. I would say there was nothing
04:45
in my upbringing that would have necessarily pointed in the direction of that little kid is going to become a scientist. That little kid will become a mathematician. I think nobody really knew. They couldn't tell. In fact, if you fast forward after I got my PhD degree,
05:05
I think it's fair to say because I actually heard it from my thesis advisor that even when I got out of college, they weren't sure what the future held for me. Oh, okay. Well, this is very interesting to the process of understanding how one becomes,
05:22
in the end, who one is. So, what is your major in, not high school, but college? Where are you going? What are you expecting for yourself? Well, I don't know that I had great families on a trip. If you're in a car traveling through, you don't have any expectations for the next hour. You can see what happens.
05:41
You have to make choices. You have to choose a major. You have to… That's correct. So, because of illness in the family, we were a fairly close-knit family. I did apply to college in a number of places, some well-known schools that would come out right at the top of your list and got accepted, but I decided to stay in New York with the family.
06:06
There was a program at the City University of New York. I don't know whether they called it City University. It may have been just a set of colleges in New York had for an engineering degree. So, I decided early on that if I went on into college,
06:24
what I probably want to do is industrial engineering. That was my thought as a kid. I was always interested in how things worked. What was the mechanism? Industrial engineering seemed to be a logical fit to a young mind, because
06:42
these are things that if industry is interested, they must have utility somewhere. Right, indeed. How well did you do as a student? As a student, I was good. I was maybe even excellent, but I was not the best. Spectacular. For example,
07:04
it was a program that they had where you spent two years at Queens College, which was one of the city colleges, and then the next two and a half years at City College, or maybe three years at City College downtown. It was just north of Harlem, upper New York City. That's
07:28
mainly liberal arts kind of stuff, and then the engineering stuff out of City College later on. Turns out that, I would say, within weeks of being there, it was maybe even sooner than that
07:44
when I had to pick the major. Industrial engineering was not an option. They didn't have it. So, I ended up selecting chemical engineering, maybe from my chemistry set as a kid. Who knows why. It turns out I really didn't like the labs, all the chemicals and the fumes. So, I switched
08:03
fairly soon on into electrical engineering, which seemed to have more of a mathematical basis to it. Right, and it proved useful in time. Well, and it's in fact what I did get my degree in. So, the final degree came from City College. I graduated from there in January 1960. You must be doing well enough to have somebody
08:26
encourage you in the idea of going to graduate school, because you do. Oh, I didn't need anybody to encourage me. I mean, it was in the DNA. As I was saying before, I was a pretty good student. I had a sister who was
08:40
more competitive. She passed away, unfortunately, last year. But, you know, if I were to go and get a 99 in a math course, guess what? She'd get 100. I mean, it was a competition of sorts, but she was meticulous. She'd spend time studying. She'd really do her homework,
09:00
and I was more carefree. I'd go out and play stickball, and oh yeah, I forgot to do my homework. So, I'd rush it in the last effort, because it was all too easy for me. And, in fact, I got my wrist slapped a number of times, because I actually didn't hand in homework that I was supposed to do, because it was too easy. I mean, why go to the bother of,
09:24
well, it wasn't quite like this, but two plus three, what's that? You look at the questions, and they're so easy that it just wasn't worth taking the time to actually do them. So, I got my wrist slapped. About your character as a scholar, but not your ability.
09:42
That's right, maybe. And you go to Princeton for graduate work? I won an NSF fellowship. When I graduated from City College, I made the decision to spend like a year or so in industry to get some practical experience. And so, I did, and I ended up taking a job at Bell Laboratories. At the time,
10:05
the headquarters of Bell Labs was actually in Manhattan, at 463 West Street. It was in the south of 14th Street, down near Greenwich Village. And that was, again, partly a pragmatic choice, because it allowed me to stay with family a little longer. But while I was there,
10:24
I actually won a fellowship and decided to go to Princeton, which was close enough to New York that I could commute back and forth if I actually needed to. I know that you're not yet able to jump into computer studies because they don't exist.
10:42
Is it in electrical engineering that you specialized in Princeton? That's right. And again, just because it's a big life and not very much time to talk about it, broadly, when did you begin to focus your attention on a particular field? You have to do a dissertation as a graduate student. How does that begin to form as a goal?
11:10
Well, I would actually step back one year's worth, because when I was going to City College, we lived in Flushing by then. We moved from Brooklyn. And much of the time that I was going
11:26
there, I would draw that with one of the members of the faculty. The name was Egon Brenner. I haven't seen him in ages. I don't know where he is these days. But he kind of sort of became
11:40
a quasi-mentor, a very dogmatic kind of personality. And I think he later moved on from there to other universities. But in the last year I was there, he suggested that we have a set up a special seminar for credit. And it was just me and him. And it was one of these,
12:01
let's go explore a topic that is not taught in the classes. We'll just pick a random. I don't even remember what it was at this point. But I remember it peaking me. For the first time, somebody took the time to go pick an area that is not in a textbook, that you don't
12:20
read about. It's not a matter of teaching me, it's jointly exploring to see what we could figure out. I think that triggered something in me that lasted for a very long time. But it was not the thing that caused me to go to graduate school. That was sort of, as I said, in the DNA, I was going to do that no matter what. But now I was there, I was now more
12:46
focused on trying to uncover things, discover things. And so the program at Princeton required you to take certain credits or certainly had to pass oral exams at the end of the second year.
13:02
And I spent most of those first two years actually in the carrels, the upstairs part of Fine Hall, which was the home of the math department, interestingly enough. It's where a lot of, I think, the history of computing probably evolved. They had a hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, and they celebrated it there. I gave
13:25
one of the talks, there were many. But he did his thesis work at Princeton. I think a thesis titled something like On Computable Numbers, which seemed a strange notion to people at the time. They had other people in the department that were working on related subjects. It was a professor
13:46
named Valonzo Church, who was working on Lambda Calculus, which later, I think, was part of the basis of the programming language Lisp that John McCarthy came up with. So it had a role. And there was a fellow, Kurt Girdle, that was there, and a number of other people that were
14:04
working on various aspects of what you could call the theory of computing today. Were you having conversations with them, or were you and your carrel? No, these were people from ancient history. Oh yeah, ancient history, okay. It's like I was in the building where Abraham Lincoln was, and I never met the guys.
14:22
No, these were not people I knew directly. But what about the people around you, your community of graduate students? Well, you know, I was pretty much, I mean, I knew them all. We saw them at, I saw them at various occasions. We came together. This was not,
14:41
it was not a social club by any means. And when I was in the library at Fine Hall, the carrel's up on the top, it was, I was into the books. What's quantum mechanics about? What's this theory of algebraic topology? I mean, I was sort of learning about all
15:01
kinds of things that really interested me, but pretty much on my own. And then when it came time to take the carrels, I went through them and got through them okay. In fact, they had a fairly strict regimen over there. I mean, their standards were high. I mean, but they weren't so much focused on injecting knowledge into you. I mean, City College was more
15:25
of a teaching school, and it was great at that. I mean, you really got a very good education there. But Princeton was more about sort of developing the social side of individuals, which I probably needed at the time, because I just didn't have a whole lot of social
15:42
interactions as a kid growing up. I want to get you to write a dissertation. What are you going to do it on? Well, I didn't know when I started, but at the end of the second year, as I was saying, they had these very high standards,
16:01
and I got through them. I think there were 30 some odd people in that class, very few of them, if any, got through. Maybe I was the only one. I don't know. The social side of it was more in the graduate college. When I was there, it was a graduate college. It was off campus. The
16:20
university was mainly an undergraduate enterprise. The graduate students were off, right next to the golf course. There was a social gathering there. In fact, one of the challenges that I took for myself was to become the social organizer of the graduate
16:40
school. I don't know why, but maybe it was because I didn't do much of that before. So I would call all of the mixers with the girls' schools. We'd arrange them there. But your intellectual challenges are the ones that are going to probably change your life, although no doubt the social- I'm just trying to give you the background. Yeah, understood.
17:00
And I arranged the seminars. So for example, 1960 or 61, that year the Metropolitan Opera had gone on strike, the musicians, I think. I was very interested in opera as a kid. I can't tell you why exactly, but I just found it a very invigorating enterprise. So I used to
17:25
show up at the old opera house in New York, which was on 39th Street and 7th Avenue. But it was sold out in perpetuity. I mean, tickets handed down from generations. The only way you could get in was to show up at like three or four in the morning on a Monday and get the
17:43
handful of tickets in the upper reaches of the family circle or whatever they called it. I mean, you could barely see anything, but at least you could hear it. So I used to do that. So one of the things I did was when I got there, I called up Rudolph Bing, who was the managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, and I asked if he would come down and give a seminar. And
18:08
to my surprise, he said yes, I'd be delighted. So we hosted him in very interesting sessions that we had there. It was a nice follow-on because I actually got tickets to the opera as a
18:20
follow-on because he was persuading people that, you know, opera was something you really ought to go to. And I said to him, with all due respect, Mr. Bing, I mean, nobody likes opera here more than I do, and you can't get tickets. He says, well, that is a problem, isn't it? And so he gave me the name of a person in the opera who was about to issue tickets for a Subscription B series, some eight or 12 operas in the year. He says,
18:45
watch your right hand and see what happens. And I wrote him, said, Mr. Bing suggested I do that. And I got two tickets from the center in the mezzanine. So it was a wonderful experience there. But having said that, I'm now going to tell you
19:01
about how I went from the first part of my tenure at Princeton to the second part. At the end of the second year, I wasn't sure what I was going to write about at all. I didn't know what part I was even interested in. So I wanted to just take time and let my mind
19:21
kind of relax. I had been fortunate to play varsity golf in high school and college. I knew golf was not my long-term future, even though I was not a bad golfer at those times. And so I decided to take the summer off and do nothing but play golf, see if I could get
19:42
really good. I like to challenge myself in those ways. So I played with another fellow who was in the graduate school at the time. His name was Sue Smith. He came from, I think, Vancouver or someplace out in British Columbia. And we did nothing that summer but play golf,
20:01
seven days a week, four rounds a day, carrying our clubs. This is almost unheard of. We get up at seven in the morning. 930, we finished round one, back on the first tee. Noon, we finished round two. We have a tuna fish sandwich and a Coke on the sloping front lawn of the clubhouse. 1230, we're back on the first tee. Three o'clock,
20:22
we're done with round three. We lived within walking distance, almost over the golf course. So we go and go to sleep for two hours. Five o'clock, we're back on the first tee again, done by 730 or 8. And we did that every day, and my game got really good during that period.
20:40
And then it was over, and I had to go figure out what to do. And so I started working on my thesis. The advisor I had at Princeton at the time, John Thomas, was a very interesting person in many, many ways. I believe he could have advised anybody in any field.
21:02
It didn't matter what the field was, because he would basically ask generic questions. Like, you know, you'd meet with him and he'd say, well, what have you accomplished this past week? You explained it to him. What are your plans for the following week? How do you plan to approach this? I mean, they could have applied to anything. But he pretty much left it
21:27
up to me to do what I was doing, my PhD work. I didn't learn about it until later, but at some point he asked me if I would work with another faculty member who had just arrived
21:41
there named BD Liu, who was a young graduate. He'd been at Bell Labs in Brooklyn Poly, and he and I started to work. And so I had done one piece of work when John was my advisor, and then we did another piece of work when BD showed up. And when I wrote my PhD thesis, I sort of took this piece, the A piece, and the one with BD Liu, the B piece, and put
22:05
them together. So my thesis was sort of an A plus B thesis stitched together. And I never thought much about that until his retirement party. And he invited all of his graduate students to come, and he had quite a number of them. I was number six, I think. And when it came
22:23
time to introduce me to the gathering crowd, which he did, and recite some things about it, he said, Bob, Khan probably doesn't know this, but he is the only graduate here who actually wrote two PhD thesis. And I said, really? How come I don't know that? I sort of see what he was probably
22:43
hinting at. What he said was, you know, we didn't tell you at the time, but we all felt that you had done enough work for the PhD degree in the first four or six months, but again, spent enough time in the program. So we asked you to work with BD, just so you get the experience. Now, the reason that's important is when I got this honorary degree
23:06
from Princeton, the president had a dinner the night before. And they asked to say certain things about your history and background. And so I told them the story about how I got to be really good at golf. And I said, you know, it's hard to really explain that we could play these,
23:25
that many rounds of golf for a day for that many months. But the only one who could validate it is this fellow, Stu Smith. And I haven't seen him in 30, 40 years. Well, back of the audience, his hand goes up, hi, Bob. Turns out Stu was then chairman of the physics department
23:40
at Princeton. So there he was, later became head of research for the university. And the other story I told him at the time, just again, relating interesting stories is when, you know, I heard I had gotten an honorary degree, I called up the officer and said, I think you made a mistake. I already have a real one. He said, no, no, we intend to give
24:03
you the honorary degree, but you have to show up, which of course I did. And it was a very lovely ceremony, but at the dinner, what I said was, you know, after thinking about what my advisor said at my graduation, they had really written two PhD thesis. I thought it was only justifiable
24:20
that I get the honorary degree. So picking the subject though, just sort of, it came partly naturally, partly with kind of prompts from the advisor. He'd say, well, things like, you know, what about this? Or what about that? And I kind of listened to him.
24:41
But does the direction of your thesis work affect your future direction? How important was the subject of the dissertation to your development as a thinker? Well, I think they were interesting topics. I think they're still relevant today. And it
25:05
was not like we solved a little sidebar problem or something. I mean, one result was to show that if you wanted to sort of squeeze an analog signal into the minimum bandwidth, the parameters
25:23
you had to work with were parameters that would be solved from the Schrodinger wave equation from quantum mechanics. Why that correlation was there, who knew? And I did a lot of work on sampling theory to show a general basis for it in like the me part of the thesis. But I think
25:42
what that established was that, you know, I had the ability to do some, you know, conceptual work, not necessarily to show the relationship between that and real practical utility later on, although I could see it in my mind's eye. But when I graduated from Princeton, I was offered a
26:03
job on the MIT faculty. And while I was there, I guess I was probably the youngest one on the faculty at the time. And I was told by the fellow who ran the group, a fellow named Jack
26:20
Wozencraft. There were a lot of really good people on the faculty, many of whom are known far and wide. Claude Shannon was in that group. Erwin Jacobs, who had started a number of companies on the West Coast and became a good friend of mine, was in that group. There were five or six really extremely good people. And I remember Jack Wozencraft said, you know,
26:46
always open anytime you have an issue, come and talk to me. And it was always open. He was very pragmatic kind of guy, but also very good conceptually. And I would say four out of five times that I'd walk into his office, he'd keep working at what he was doing in his
27:05
desk. I'd sit in the chair next to him and talk, and he'd hear me and he'd correspond, but he'd not look up. And sometimes he'd get up and we'd be on the board having had it. And one day I just kind of casually said to him, how come sometimes you get very invigorated and we're having it on
27:26
the board. And most of the time I feel like I'm really interrupting whatever it is you're doing. He said, no, not at all. He said, but you know, for what it's worth, he said, when you come to all the problems you bring are all very interesting problems.
27:43
Take this equation and solve for the eigenvalues of something because, you know, it's the way you formulated the problem. He said, but I can't figure out what to do with the answer to the problem. He says, I'm not very motivated to work on it. So he said, okay, you're bringing this problem. So as I told you, the answer was 2.4 and 7.6. What would you do with the
28:03
answer? What's your next step? And if the answer is you don't know, then you can see why I wouldn't be motivated to go work on it. Whereas to me, it was just intellectually interesting. So I think my early days kind of had honed this side of my capabilities. But what Rosencraft did
28:25
was make it very clear to me that if you wanted to be successful at a place like MIT, being smart wasn't sufficient. Everybody here is smart, he said. And so you've got to distinguish yourself in some way. And the thing we value the most is making a difference in society.
28:46
I thought that was pretty interesting, made a mental note of it. And he said, at that time, he says, you know, this is purely gratuitous. He says, but if I were you, he says, I would and I don't think he was thinking about this as, here's a way to get popcorn out of the table.
29:05
But if I were you, I take a leave of absence for a year or two, apprentice yourself to somebody who knows how to make things happen, and then come on back. And I took that seriously, thought about it, and then decided to do exactly what he recommended. And I decided to
29:22
take a job at a local, I guess you could call it a consulting firm, it was a small company called Volparanica Newman. I think they might have had 10 or $20 million of revenue at the time, it was not a big company. And they had started out mostly in the architectural acoustics business, doing things like designing symphony halls. And these were people out of Harvard
29:45
and MIT who were in the architectural acoustics field, psychoacoustics, the design of the acoustic attributes of symphony halls. And I was the first one there who was in the communications field. I mean, I had started at Bell Labs after college, went back to school.
30:06
Communications was my field, that's what I taught at MIT, at Datton Systems. But here I am in a firm where I'm the only one with that kind of background. They had just started getting into the computing field. Just as you came in?
30:24
Well, within that year. And they were supported by a relatively new part of the Department of Defense called ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. This was an agency that Eisenhower had decided to establish in the late 1980s as a direct result of the Soviet launch of
30:47
Sputnik. And the question was, well, how come they did it first when we had all the capability to do it? And the answer was it was nobody's responsibility. So, I mean, the Air Force went
31:00
up this high and the Navy was on water and the Army was on land, but who was dealing with space? Nobody at that time. So that's what ARPA was set up to do, maintain a technological visual, look at interesting technological options. And so they had funded the BB&N to work on some
31:20
advanced computer related stuff. And they had gotten very interested in computer networking, unbeknownst to me, really. But when I got to BB&N, I got interested in computer networking without knowing about ARPA. So I started to work on this subject. And I was writing reports of various kinds until the gentleman who was running the group that had hired me in,
31:45
I think their notion was that maybe I'd just stay there. They weren't anxious for me to go back to MIT. But he said, you know, why don't you take those reports and send it to this fellow, Larry Roberts, who had just gotten hired at ARPA? Because I think he might be
32:03
interested. So these were documents about error control and buffer control and routing. I mean, all the topics that you'd have to deal with conceptually. And for me, that was getting one's fingers dirty, because I'm not working on a practical problem. Never occurred to me at that
32:22
time that I'm actually getting involved in building anything. Never built anything, other than maybe what my director said as a kid, or my chemistry said. So here are these documents, and they show up at ARPA. They invite me to come down and chat with them, which I dutifully did. So that's how I first learned about who they were. And they told me
32:42
they're playing through this net. And I thought, great, you know, good luck. And then there's what's called an RFQ, request for quotations on a four node net. And as you read through it, I looked at it and I said, this looks very familiar. I mean, it was stuff that was,
33:04
almost I could have written it. It had diagrams from things I had done. I had no idea. I was not involved in formulating that at all, other than Jerry thought this was a good thing to send. So then one day a gentleman at BB&N, who they had then just hired from Lincoln Labs,
33:25
this guy, he builds things. And he had a team of people with him. He shows up, he says, I understand that you have a document from DARPA about a network. And I said, who are you? Well, it turns out he and I ended up working together on the actual building of the net.
33:47
I mean, I was sort of, I came to kind of the system designer, and his team actually did the implementation. And that's what became the very first packet switched network, the ARPANET.
34:00
The moment that will lead to so much. How much are you, and again, I get a sense of how practical you are as you progress in your interest and so forth. But are there moments when you're anticipating a larger world or wishing this for the network? Or just going one step at a time and not necessarily being a visionary about it?
34:28
Oh, it's always hard to introspect about yourself. I would say I always had a vision of what this could look like, whether that makes me a visionary or not, I don't know. But
34:44
the fact that you have the notion that this could lead to something doesn't mean you necessarily believe that's in the cards. You know, any more than you say, well, gee, if I can really give a good speech here, that could be a stepping stone to becoming president of the United
35:01
States. Well, that's a very different statement than deciding that this is something that you could actually make happen. So you didn't necessarily think you knew what would happen, but you knew what? I was trying at the time to just sort of describe on paper what it
35:40
was like. And so we ended up working together, and I think it was really good because we ended up together creating the very first pack in there. It wasn't smooth, it wasn't, you know, like start here and just smoothly create it. It had fits and starts, things were tried that
36:01
didn't work, things that were suggested that weren't adopted. But finally, in the end, it worked out really well. And when it was all done, the fellow for whom we had done it, Larry Roberts, invited me to come and join him at DARPA. I ended up potentially running the office. So I mean, I think they recognized the contribution that I had made. But you know,
36:23
I sort of got into it. Just because I thought without even knowing about their existence, it was an interesting problem that computers, talking to computers sounded interesting to me, getting programs to work with programs. But more importantly, since I came out of the
36:47
network to enable that. You have to remember that most people were of the opinion that the telephone system was what you would use for communications in the early days. But it took a long time to set up a call. The computer wants to send a burst of information to have it be
37:04
immediately accessible somewhere else. You don't want to wait 10 or 20 seconds for something to dial up. The speeds were slow. A few hundred bits a second maybe in those days. Certainly not kilobits initially and not megabits. Today they're in gigabits and beyond.
37:26
So the speeds were low. The setup time was large. A lot of errors on it. Computers can't tolerate even one bit error in some cases. And it was a very inefficient use of the network. Just imagine if you had to drive from Washington DC to Los Angeles in your
37:46
18 or 20 foot car by first reserving the whole road. And then that road can't be used by anybody else until your car gets to the final destination. Then they release the road for somebody else to use it. It's very inefficient use of that infrastructure.
38:02
How, maybe oddly put, but how negative was the broader scientific culture about the possibility of connecting computers? Was this the sort of thing that people said isn't necessary, isn't going to happen? Are you fighting any implicitly, any negative expectations?
38:23
Well, many of the people, I would say most of the people I talked to in my field thought I was throwing my career away to work on this problem, because at the time these computers were fairly large. I mean most of the computers were batch processors. They weren't interactive at all,
38:42
and this was an interactive computer network so that you could interact with the computer somewhere and get a response instantaneously no matter where the machine was, let's say, at least in the US. So we weren't talking about intergalactic stuff, although some people were. But the idea that you would want this kind of a network was questioned by a lot of people.
39:06
There were very few time-sharing systems around, which were the interactive ones. That was a fairly new idea. DARPA had supported many organizations to actually house them, and I think many of the universities had them. NSF, I think, had bought some of the National Science Foundation for the
39:25
universities, and a few of the big companies had them. I know we did at Bell Labs. In fact, I cut my teeth in programming at Bell Labs in 704, which was before they had solid state
39:40
machines, and then eventually became 709, 7090, and so forth. But it didn't seem like this was really a worthwhile area because there was no business space for it. If AT&T was the dominant carrier in the United States, they were used to dealing
40:02
with hundreds of millions of customers, not 10 or 100. That wasn't a business. I think people often misjudged them because they said, oh, they don't understand, but I think they understood probably better than most people gave them credit for. It was just a business
40:21
decision not to get into it. But I was pretty self-driven at the time. My view was, you know, it seems like a good idea to me, and that's what I want to work on. Well, that's what I did. I wasn't so much worried about the collateral damage that might occur.
40:41
I wasn't worried about my career so much as I found this an interesting problem, so let me go work on it. I mean, if there's any message that you would want to give to a young person that I derived from my experience is, you know, don't do foolhardy things. I mean,
41:01
if somebody tells you you jump off a 100-story building, I would recommend against very strongly. But if you really think that you have an idea that's worthwhile, you know, and you don't see any obvious things that will be so negative as to really be, and I didn't hear, trust your
41:22
instincts, which is what I did. And, you know, years later people said, oh, good choice. But it wasn't that obvious early on. There was that moment, I think epic actual moment, when you're demonstrating in the early 70s at a conference, the result of this
41:44
ability to have computers communicate with each other. It was actually 1972. It was in October at the Washington Hilton. You know, we, even though the communication part of the net, the part that was based on something called
42:01
packet switching, what's a packet, some bits with an address on it as to where to send it, maybe a return address for somebody to acknowledge it. You know, they weren't, we weren't working on the computing part of it. That was not my background at the time. I later not only learned an awful lot about computing and computer science,
42:22
but ended up running the office that was responsible for all that research. So, I got a hands-on, seat-of-the-pants training in that field, and I've been pursuing it ever since in many different ways. But, you know, back in those days, this was the communications piece that I was focused on. So, at that time, the best you could
42:43
say was, okay, if I put a packet in here, it came out here. But you couldn't do anything with it other than say, okay, it came out here. And in fact, you know, that's one of the challenges that led me to think about how would we make this net really useful.
43:01
And mice, I mean, on the day that the first computers were starting to be attached, they couldn't do anything. Give it a packet and say, I got the packet, that's about it. But it actually connected into all the applications so that people could make use of it. More things needed to be done. This was not my area of expertise at the time. There were a
43:30
number of others, they came out with, I think, was one of the important contributions in the field, computer protocols that allowed computers to talk to each other.
43:42
And so now the question was, how do we take this net and take this definition of protocols and get it to actually be built and work? And, you know, we tried for a while, but it wasn't happening with enough, you know, panache. I mean, nobody was thinking it seriously enough. So I had proposed to Larry Roberts that
44:05
we organize a demonstration of this, and that would be kind of a forcing function to get people to get their stuff up and working. And I think Larry liked the idea enough, but the suggestion I made as to when to do it wasn't to his liking. And he suggested another time, which was his late
44:25
October timeframe. He made the arrangements for it to occur there. It was called the International Computer Communications Conference. I think it was the very first one that they had ever run in Washington at the Hilton. And we had everybody who was anybody at that demonstration
44:41
for the whole week. Well, most of the workers on it were US. It might've been a few from, you know, from Europe, but it was mainly the US community that was supported by DARPA. So he came back and, you know, said, yeah, let's go do that there. And so I spent from
45:04
roughly, I would say June of 1971 through October of 1972, just planning and organizing. I would go to different groups around the country and figure out what they had to do to get their machines up and running, how to get things connected. I was in contact with
45:26
most of the key people. There was a fellow named Bob Metcalf, who probably today best known for his work on ethernet, founding a company called 3Com that was years later. But he wrote all the scenarios and he had this beautiful scripted type. So, I mean, you could look at his stuff
45:43
and you could probably read it from 20 feet away. And he came up with all the scenarios. I worked with a fellow named Al Veza, who was a deputy head of lab for computer science at MIT at the time, I think. And Al worked with me on, or maybe he got that job later,
46:03
but he was working with JCR Licklider at MIT. He ended up helping me actually do the installations there. BB&N supplied a node on the ARPANET. We connected it to the rest of the net. We got 40 terminals supplied and people could actually see it in operations. Raised
46:23
floor a path through it like a maze. You could try this one, try this one. It was an amazing demonstration, although I must admit not everybody thought that this was a good idea. Still. Still because if you took somebody who was in the business of providing information services,
46:43
1972, remember we're not in a networked environment yet. So they probably had a machine somewhere or a set of machines. And they probably had a way for their customers to dial into those machines. And they would say, look, I'll give you all 40 terminals, but you have
47:00
to use my machine. Because they wanted to showcase their service. And if I said, now I want to be able to show you can get to any service, freedom of choice among competing alternatives. Didn't want that. That was not in their business interest to support it. So there are always these concerns. Anytime you put a piece of infrastructure
47:21
out for people to use, it's going to affect everything that neighbors that infrastructure. And sometimes in unpredictable ways. So we saw that all throughout and we still are seeing it today. Because there's a big life again, very little time. I want to ask you just targeted questions
47:43
about the nature of collaboration in your work. I mean, of course you and Vint Cerf are so associated with the internet as we now know it. I'm wondering, and that I know happened at UCLA, I think. How did you come together with Vint Cerf? Was it his invitation to you?
48:07
Was it your invitation? No, it was actually, I first heard his name from Steve Crocker, who was I think Vint's best friend back then. And he says, the guy out there, you ought to meet sometime. I just made a mental note of it.
48:23
But when we actually built the very first four node net of the ARPANET, there were three of them in California. UCLA was the first, SRI in Menlo Park the second, University of Utah in Santa Barbara third, and then the University of Utah fourth.
48:43
Those nodes went in one a month, September, October, November, December, during 1969. And I went out to do the testing of that to make sure it worked okay. I think I went out multiple times, but the first time was probably just a one node test to see if that first node survived the journey. And so UCLA had been funded by DARPA to work on
49:06
us at a measurement lab of some sort. And they hooked their computer, which was, I think, Sigma-7 at the time. And Vint was the person designated to work with us on that. I went out with a fellow from BBN named Dave Walden, but Vint was doing the software for the
49:23
Sigma-7, and we'd run the test. Vint would do the host part of it. A lot of those tests we could do without the computers, because there was a teletype connected to the IP, so we could do teletype to teletype tests. But if we wanted to use the actual external computer, that's where he came in. And so he and I had many occasions to work together
49:43
that time, and certainly on the four node test. So that's how we first met. But this was all about ARPANET. The notion of internet hadn't really yet surfaced, because we had only one network. And it's like, you know, a telephone system with one telephone doesn't require much of
50:02
an extra capability. In fact, there's nobody to talk to. But on the ARPANET, we had all these different computers to talk to, but it was a single net. In the early 1970s, we got into developing more nets. I was actually pretty much the designer
50:23
of something called the Packet Radio Net, kind of a forerunner of today's CDMA network, a direct sequence spread spectrum network, if that means anything to you. It was a network that differed in its operation than a network that divided frequency into channels,
50:43
or one that took a single channel and divided it into time slices. This was a network that said, like your audio system in a human, you can use the whole bandwidth all the time, and people can share it. So if you had a room where you had 10 people, and two of them were
51:03
talking Chinese, and two were talking Russian, two were talking French, and two were talking English, and you focused enough, you could probably understand the English one, even if you had all this background interference, because you weren't understanding any of it. It was like background noise. That was the idea here. So we built this radio net. We built a net on
51:22
Intel Sat 4 to connect to our European researchers. It's interesting that Irwin Jacobs from what was then Linkabit, who later became the founder of Qualcomm, another big company now, and the wireless business, was a principal designer of the protocols we used on that, and built some of the equipment along with others. So we had these three different nets,
51:45
and that was really the genesis of the internet. How do we make the three nets work together? That didn't show up until, you know, 1972-3 timeframe. But it certainly wasn't there in 1968,
52:02
69, 70. We didn't even have in 1970 implementations of the ARPANET protocols, much less the internet ones. And if you think about the way your protocol on the ARPANET might work, you know, we're calling them packets at the time, we're calling them messages.
52:21
Send in a message, say we're supposed to go, it would be broken into packets, and then they get reassembled at the other end and delivered. Well, where would it be delivered? You'd address a wire on the net. So send it to whatever connected to that wire. In the ARPANET case, it was a computer, so you knew exactly where it was going. In the internet world, we suddenly had a wire from the ARPANET went to another network.
52:45
Which might have lots of computers. And in fact, that network might send it to another network. And so how do you identify who this is supposed to go to? That's why we introduced the notion of an IP address. This was something that I worked on together. And that way, you know,
53:05
once it left one network to go to the next one, the next network would know how to route it. How would it do that? We put a little device between the networks. We called them gateways. Today you call them routers. But those gateways basically looked at what was showing up
53:21
and said, oh, I know where this is supposed to go, this IP address. I'm going to send it to that wire on this next network. And so it would be routing it network through network until it got to the final place. So that was one reason why the old protocols needed to be updated. But a more interesting reason was that with the introduction of both packet radio and packet
53:42
satellite, both wireless systems, you introduce a whole other series of challenges. One is, you know, in a radio net, you can have static. You could have interference. You could be driving behind a mountain. The signal is blocked. You could be in a tunnel. You can't get the
54:05
signal. There are ways to work around it. You can bounce signals in different paths. You can put repeaters in tunnels. But in the early days, we just dealt with that as a fundamental challenge and said, we need a way to deal with reliability in transmission.
54:21
The ARPANET just assumed that if you sent a message, it would get to the destination. I mean, unless something cataclysmic had happened, like the machines had failed totally, in which case you press the reset button and start over again. But this was the challenge for us. And so, Vint and I did that. But that was not until 1973 that we wrote the paper. It was
54:46
published by IEEE in May of 74. But we actually presented it at a meeting. It was a NATO workshop in the University of Sussex in September of 1973. And I think it got people's attention at that time. Again, as one of the big contexts, the federal government's interest in this,
55:10
getting the potential importance of it broadly. Let's go from that earlier negativity or wondering about all of this to the point where people are now understanding the potential
55:22
value of this. Where is support coming from for the next development? Well, you have to understand, in the early days, there were some people who were absolutely behind this. When I said I was hearing from many people that this was throwing a career away, the people that were supporting it were absolutely sure that this was a good thing to
55:44
do. And they had their reasons. It wasn't necessarily industrial. It wasn't necessarily GDP related, although it later turned out to be very GDP related. And of course, all the researchers who had committed to working on it were intentionally
56:00
interested. So I don't want to leave the impression that nobody was interested. There were a set of convinced believers, but it was a small set. The world had not yet discovered this. And of course, I think if it were only the ARPANET, it probably never would have had the global reach. Because even though we tried, there was a link to Norway having to do with some seismic
56:28
research work that we were doing with the Norwegian. It was a link back to Britain, but it became increasingly hard to make these links go global because of various regulations that
56:41
required too many people to have to agree to everything after a while. It became potentially not in their business interest to keep agreeing. But more importantly, I think, was the concern as to empowering other people around the world to be part of it. That was, I think, one of the most important attributes of the internet architecture that, I say,
57:07
we developed. Although the ideas really came from some work that was pretty much documented in a paper that Barry Leiner wrote called A Brief History of the Internet. So there's some
57:21
ideas that are trivial to me, some to the two of us, some to other people. But for the most part, making the internet be an open kind of activity where people could plug and play meant that you didn't have to go to any one place for permission. The architecture was sort of
57:40
open to anybody to play with that. You had to worry about your own implementations, getting access to the, you know, if you wanted a router, maybe you had to buy it from somebody. But if you could figure out how to, you could build your own, plug it in. So it was a very important part because they now empowered everybody around the globe to be in charge of what happened in their country. The end of this, because we've spent most of the time in the
58:07
beginning, so that's the most important to know for this interview. But I wonder if you could then now, in addressing younger people interested in the sciences, technology, if you were starting
58:24
out now, what sort of direction or field do you think is the next big thing? Well, you know, it's a little like saying, well, what would the field of electronics had looked like
58:42
if we bypassed vacuum tubes completely and had semiconductors back in, you know, 1910 or 1890 or something like that? It's really not possible to rerun history, you know. What would society look like if people really had ESP? One of my favorite series is something called the
59:03
Lindsman series, an author named E.E. Doc Smith, and it's all about conflict between good and evil in the universe and a set of capabilities that have been developed whereby selected people have the ability to communicate instantaneously, mind to mind, with other like-minded people
59:24
around the globe. Well, you know, if you postulate that existed in the Garden of Eden, what would society look like? I mean, you can't go back and rerun history like that. But still, when you're at a certain point in a career at the beginning, there are various directions one
59:41
can go. Are there fields of inquiry that interest you, for example, as a sense of where one might invest a career? I think it was all latent in me to some extent and just took something else to bring it out.
01:00:00
either opportunity. I tend not to get much involved in things where I can't make a difference. I'd rather spend my time on doing things that will make a difference. Furthermore, when you take something as pervasive as the internet, it didn't happen because of the efforts of one person alone. This is not like, even Columbus sailing the
01:00:27
ocean. We had a bunch of ships and a bunch of people. It was a whole support team there. Who knows how many captains were in that activity. To think about what it takes to
01:00:40
make something like the internet happen, there were hundreds of leadership positions that had to be played. There's a father of the internet or some similar kind of thing in virtually every country. I tend not to like the term father because it sort of sounds like it came from one person, when in fact lots of people have claimed paternity for different things.
01:01:04
So when you actually see what it takes to make something like that happen, you realize that it's hard to plan it. Take the history of the United States. It's what happens step by step as we went along. Could the founding fathers of this country foresee what would be happening
01:01:26
two or three or 500 years in the future? No way. They set out a set of principles and hoped it would stand us in good stead if we had the right people in charge of things. I think that's true of technology too. It was certainly true of the internet.
01:01:43
When we started, and I would date it back to 1973 as an internet activity, there were only these very big computers. In the span of 40 some odd years since then,
01:02:03
technology has scaled by a factor of at least a million, maybe 10 million. Computers are that much faster now than they were back then. The speed of communication lines is that much faster now than it was back then. That would have been unimaginable at that time.
01:02:21
You could have imagined it, but how practical was it to expect it would show up in – I can imagine teleportation. How realistic is it to assume it's going to happen in the next year or two or ten or a hundred? Would you even want to try it? Who knows what could possibly happen in between here and there? Furthermore, you can buy probably a million or ten million
01:02:45
times as much memory for the same price. I remember buying a megabit of memory when I got to DARPA in 1973. It occupied a room bigger than this room we're sitting in here now. It cost about a million dollars for a megabyte. Today, you can probably buy a terabyte
01:03:03
and a little memory stick for a few hundred bucks or less. Things have changed dramatically. I think in the next decade, you're going to see these protocols continue to work over a scaling up of now a billion since the start and maybe a trillion. Very little in the history – I can't name anything in the history of
01:03:24
technology that has essentially – I'm not saying it hasn't changed in detail, but in conception, and with the initial specifications maintained itself over
01:03:40
scale ups of that order of magnitude. Lots of people are involved in inventing everything along the way, and it gives them a context and a framework in which their new inventions and capabilities can be created. We didn't have the World Wide Web. In fact, the World Wide Web is probably the first major statement on information management.
01:04:03
I doubt it's going to be the last, any more than the ARPANET was the last word on computer networking, because the internet just opened up all kinds of other possibilities. It's one of the areas that I've been thinking about ever since leaving DARPA in 1986. What is the equivalent of what we did for moving bits to managing information as a logical extension of the
01:04:27
digital object architecture, which I think has those primitives, because it's independent of the underlying technology and should be able to scale indefinitely in every dimension that I now know of. I've still got problems, namely even if you could in a hundred years or
01:04:44
a thousand years say, here's the information that I want. I say, well, it's in this digital object, and you can go get that digital object. There's no guarantee you're going to unlock the information that's in it. It may be encrypted. You don't have the keys, or you can't get the
01:05:00
keys. It may be in a proprietary format that you don't understand, or for which you'd have to get a program that was written 400 years ago that only runs on a particular piece of software that no longer exists, that only runs on a particular machine that you can't get any
01:05:20
more. Actually manifesting the information that's been packaged properly is going to be a challenge going forward. I think there are ways that we can work around that, but we still need to understand what things are. Have you ever heard of a program called VisiCalc?
01:05:43
The very first spreadsheet program written by some guys up in Boston, I think for the IBM PC, maybe for one of the other machines as well. Today, if you've got a program written in VisiCalc, you're just going to say, well, what should I use to open it with? That's if you actually had the
01:06:01
file unencrypted, because it's got a proprietary format in there. So somebody said, oh, I know, you can go to that machine over there and get a copy, and then it says, well, okay, but it only runs on DOS 1.0. Well, where do I go for that? Even in recent years, it's been difficult to maintain all of the things you need for proprietary data formats.
01:06:26
But if you took a spreadsheet and said, well, okay, let's just make sure you understand that what's in this digital object is a spreadsheet, call it a matrix, whatever terminology you like,
01:06:41
and you're able to click on something and find out, okay, here's what a matrix is. It's got somebody stored that in the form of, okay, 17 rows, 42 columns, and here are all the ijth entries. If you're assuming you could do that, then a thousand years in the future, you could take
01:07:02
that, feed it into something that knows how to manipulate. Maybe it's a quantum something in the future or beyond quantum, whatever that is. And now you can put it into the proprietary form of that moment, knows how to deal with the displays and the printers and whatever else
01:07:21
that you want to use. Maybe there are mind implants that we've got. Who knows? But you don't have to worry about extracting the information because you've described it instead of preserved it in a certain form that you may not be able to get at. So those are the kind of things I'm dealing with today, and this has been a 30-year challenge. It really started back in the 80s right after I left DARPA with some work on mobile
01:07:44
programs, which people found offensive because right after we did it, it was a lovely idea. I worked on it with Vint. Called them knowledge robots or no-bots. You can actually instruct as to what you want to do, ship these things around. The problem was people were
01:08:06
just becoming aware of viruses and worms and all of these negative things that can happen in the fiber security region. And they said, we do not want to have a system that somebody else's programs show up on our machines. Now, there were ways to deal with it, but it was
01:08:23
too high a hurdle to have to leap. So we sort of said, okay, let's take the mobility piece out of the equation. And as a kid growing up, we used to have ice cream trucks that came by our neighborhoods and ring their bells. It was called the Good Humor Truck. I don't know if you've ever encountered that. But there was no reason that it had to be that way. You
01:08:43
couldn't walk to the neighboring store. The ice cream could be fixed and you go there. So that's what became the digital object architecture. It was this mobility thing minus the mobility, if you can imagine that. It's like a digital version of cash where you take a dollar bill and get rid of the paper, but maintain the value in the bits.
01:09:03
So it was that kind of thing that happened in that course. Well, you may not consider yourself a visionary, but you've helped us have a vision of where maybe the next step is. And lots of people are going to be involved in almost everything that's transformative in society. I mean, you asked me earlier, you know, where does this award come
01:09:25
from? You know, the real momentum to create the internet came from multiple sources. So initially, it came from the DARPA research program. In 1983, I set up a program called Strategic Computing,
01:09:43
which was the first big computer program to leverage the research results. And we put in enough money to help build out infrastructure for the research community. That's what made it possible for the internet to start to take hold. People needed local area nets, they needed workstations, or whatever, to actually build up their local capabilities. Eventually, it took
01:10:06
industry to make a big push in the 90s when things opened. It took the US government to come in and say, yeah, we'll let you use these facilities that the government has created for societal purposes writ large. And the voucher bill in 1993 enabled that. The web made it
01:10:26
more interesting for people. Of course, there were some things from the early days that stayed on. I mean, email is still around. Whether it will have a long-term future or not remains to be seen because a lot of the kids today prefer texting or other kinds of
01:10:42
ways of dealing with things. But I think there's always a need for being able to send messages that are addressed, and so it'll probably still stay around for a long time. But we didn't have the equivalent of the Facebooks and the Instagrams and a lot of the social networks. And who could have predicted what the effect of all of that will be?
01:11:02
And we were seeing ramifications of that all over the globe. So I can't predict what the next world will be about, what new developments will take place. But I'm sure voice will play a more important role. I'm sure cooperation and collaboration will play a bigger role. And I'm sure new kinds of technologies
01:11:24
will be invented along the way that have properties that we just didn't understand. I mean, like when the laser came along, kind of opened up a whole new set of possibilities. When the transistor came along, opened up a whole new set of possibilities. When
01:11:43
the plan and process for fabricating it, a new set of possibilities. And even if you go back into the 1800s, who knew what the potential of electricity was, or electromagnetism, or radio for that matter? So I think there's going to be a future that
01:12:04
is wide open to the younger generation. Exercise your imagination. Try to have the confidence that the things that you can imagine can be made to happen, seek out ways of making them happen, and trust your instincts. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you.
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