 "Photo: Mary Kang/The Daily Texan")
Robert Taylor remembers the day he embarked on his journey to create the intergalactic network, the foundation of today’s Internet. Before him sat three different computers, each one connected to a different location.
“So an obvious idea — that it’s silly to have to move from one of these chairs to the other one,” Taylor said. “I didn’t want geography to be in the way of people with mutual interests.”
About 900 people came to watch John Markoff, a technology writer for the New York Times, conduct an interview with Taylor, the man credited with creating the Internet, Thursday evening at the Lyndon B. Johnson Auditorium. The event, part of the Dell Distinguished Lecture Series, was co-hosted by the Graduate School and the Department of Computer Science.
“I think his vision for the use of technology is his biggest contribution to our society,” said John Dalton, assistant dean in the Office of Graduate Studies. “The way we use the Internet today is because of his vision.”
The night also featured prominent technology authors Mitchell Waldrop and Michael A. Hiltzik, who discussed how ideas about the modern-day computer seemed far-fetched only a few decades ago.
“Nobody was talking about personal computers, that would be science fiction,” Waldrop said. “There was this concept of time-sharing, and there was this idea that computers are fantastic, and one day, every city would have one. People would tap in and buy computing time as needed, kind of like an electric utility.”
The star of the show, however, was the 77-year-old Taylor. After earning a masters degree in psychology from UT in the early 1960s, Taylor took a position as a civilian manager in the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. He said former President Dwight Eisenhower initiated the agency after the Russians’ successful Sputnik endeavor.
Taylor then took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he oversaw the development of several technologies that would be instrumental in the field of networking and personal computers.
“If you’re looking for the magic of PARC, it was him,” Hiltzik said. “He had an incredible instinct for knowing what technology should be able to do, how it should be formulated to reach that goal and how far it could be pushed at whatever stage it was at in a given moment.”
Taylor received the National Medal of Technology from former President Bill Clinton in 1999. He said that although he dislikes traveling, his friends convinced him to visit the 40 Acres.
“I couldn’t think of anything to object to,” Taylor said. “If I said no, I’d just be hard to get along with.”
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