Robert Taylor, Innovator Who Shaped Modern Computing, Dies at 85

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/robert-taylor-innovator-who-shaped-modern-computing-dies-at-85.html

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he went on to do graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin. It was there, while working on his master’s thesis in experimental psychology, that he developed a fascination with new forms of human-computer interaction.

His thesis research focused on how the ear and the brain localize sound. To analyze his data, he had to bring it to the university’s computing center, where a staff member behind a protective glass wall helped operate the center’s mainframe computer. The operator showed him the laborious process of entering his data and his program onto computer punch cards, the standard of the era.

“I was appalled,” Mr. Taylor recalled years later in an interview at the university, “and after I thought about it for a while, I was angry.” The data entry process, he said, was “ridiculous.”

“I thought it was insulting,” he added.

Children using a Xerox Alto, widely described as the forerunner of the modern personal computer. Credit Xerox        

He left the Pentagon in 1969 and taught for a year at the University of Utah before joining the newly formed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in California. There, he joined a small group of researchers who were refining many of the technologies that had been pioneered by Mr. Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute and who were also creating new ones, including graphics-based personal computing.

Mr. Taylor’s team built a prototype personal computer called the Alto, and another group, led by Alan Kay, added a software system that pioneered the so-called desktop metaphor, in which documents are represented by graphical icons on the computer display.

That technology in turn became the inspiration for Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers and for Microsoft’s Windows software.