It's time for me to start commenting on my history with the key people in the history of the modern computer.
Start with Doug Engelbart. I knew Doug from my monthly board meeting of the Portola Institute in Menlo Park. Doug was part of a circle of Menlo friends, most of whom were runners. I visited Doug’s office at SRI by invitation once. He is credited with inventing the mouse. His mouse was clunky and had 6 keys on it. Those were the days when we did line editing. Each change required citing the line and replacing the whole line, even for a change of one letter. Doug’s office had a small monitor that matched one on the other side of a wall. The goal was to write back and forth between the monitors.
Another friend, a very close friend of ten years, Stewart Brand, helped Doug to present his work to the public in San Francisco. Doug, with Stewart’s help, created the ‘Mother of All Demos.’
Stewart deserves a role as a personal and Internet computer father but has not been credited in his recent biography. Stewart convened the first Hackers’ Conference. Hackers were the backbone of the personal computer. Stewart also created the Well, the first active and long lasting community website.
My other friend from that circle was Bill English. Bill created and ran the Xerox PARC research center for nearly 15 years. PARC was the source of much if not most of the personal computer. Steve Jobs has publicly admitted that most of the first Apples came from PARC. Bill, as manager, will not get the credit he deserves. But people who understand management will know that he is responsible for the dozens of brilliant inventions that came out of his project.
Bill and I were on the board of the Point Foundation (Whole Earth Catalog money). We met quarterly for three years all day. His wife Roberta was a good friend. I spent time with them both in Tokyo where Bill was trying to create a Japanese keyboard. His system wasn’t used.
Lastly, I have had daily coffee for fifteen years with Scott Prevost who developed natural language for Microsoft’s Bing, then created AI for Adobe, a leader in the field. Scott is certainly a prime mover in AI.
All four of these men look like Prince Charles, now King Charles. Only Stewart is not an engineer. All four would prefer not to carry on a social conversation. Except for Stewart you would not look twice at any of them, you wouldn’t try to seek them out for a discussion. But all were/are calm, moderate, subdued and kind. Their conversation was intelligent but never provocative. Again, except for Stewart none had interests outside of work, except Bill loved Japan and Japanese art and Scott is interested in the politics of the gay male community.
All were/are confident, strong, honest and very male.