Robert Taylor (computer scientist)

Robert William Taylor ( born February 10, 1932) is an American computer scientist. He is regarded as one of the driving forces in the development of the Internet. Under his leadership, the ARPANET was developed in the Department of Defense of the United States in the 1960s, which is regarded as a forerunner of today's Internet.

Biography

Born in 1932 in Dallas, Taylor traveled with his father, a Methodist minister, through Texas. Later, he began studying psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and finished as the secondary mathematics, English and Religious Studies. After his studies, Taylor worked for several airlines, where he first had contact with NASA. After he had submitted a research proposal to the Air and Space Administration, this offered him a permanent position in 1961.

Career

Taylor was at NASA in Washington, DC during the Kennedy administration, for securing various scientific projects such as responsible the Apollo program for manned lunar landing. In 1962, Taylor met the new head of a research department at the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA ), JCR Licklider know. Licklider as Taylor had written a thesis on psychoacoustics and published in 1960 an article for a new, modern ways of computer use.

He also learned more visionaries like Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI ) in Menlo Park, California know. Taylor was instrumental role in the financial support of the objective of Engelbart project the computer display technology at SRI, which had the development of the so-called " computer mouse " to the target. The first public demonstration of, operated by a "mouse" interface later became known as " the mother of all demos " known.

In 1968 Engelbart at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, the leadership team of SRI on a large screen in front, like a computer, which was located at that time in Menlo Park, was operated from a distance with his he developed mouse.

In 1965, Taylor moved from NASA to ARPA, where he took over the position of Director. In 1970 he founded the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratories and worked as a manager. Taylor has also worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, and founded the Systems Research Center (SRC ) in Palo Alto. From the SRC, among other projects, such as Modula-3 programming language, the first multi-threaded Unix system and the first User Interface Editor, have been developed.

Awards

For his contributions to the development of the Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, he received several awards along with Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, and Charles P. Thacker. In 1984, the ACM Software System Award them was awarded, and in 2004 the prize of $ 500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize. In 2013 he became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.