The Dream Machine: The history of the computer revolution. Prologue

This book is advised by Alan Kay . He often says the phrase "The computer revolution has not yet happened." But the computer revolution has begun. More precisely - it started. She was started by certain people, with certain values ​​and they had a vision, ideas, a plan. Based on what prerequisites did revolutionaries create? For what reasons? Where did they intend to lead humanity? At what stage are we now?

(For the translation, thanks to Oxoron , who wants to help with the translation - write in a personal or mail magisterludi2016@yandex.ru)


Tricycles.

That's what Tracy remembered most of all at the Pentagon.
')
It was the end of 1962, or the beginning of 1963, in the courtyard. In any case, quite a bit of time passed from the moment the Tracy family moved from Boston for the sake of new fatherly work in the Department of Defense. The air of Washington was electrified by the energy and pressure of a new, young government. The Cuban crisis, the Berlin Wall, marches for human rights — all this has turned the head of fifteen-year-old Tracy. Not surprisingly, the guy happily seized on his father's Saturday offer to walk to the office for some forgotten papers. Tracy was just in awe of the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is a really amazing place, especially when viewed from close range. The sides, about 300 meters in length, stand on a small elevation, like a city behind walls. Tracy and her father left the car in a huge parking lot and headed straight for the front door. After going through impressive security procedures at the post where Tracy signed and received the badge, he and his father went down the corridor to the very heart of the Free World defense. And the first thing Tracey saw was a serious looking young soldier moving back and forth along the corridor - pedaling an enlarged tricycle. He delivered the mail.

Absurd. Absurd. However, the soldier on a tricycle looked extremely serious and focused on work. And Tracy had to admit: tricycles really made sense, given the very long corridors. He himself had already begun to suspect that they would get to the office forever.

Tracy was surprised that his father even works for the Pentagon. He was quite an ordinary person, not an official, not a politician. The father looked more like a very grown-up child, an ordinary tall guy, slightly plump, in a tweed jumpsuit and black-rimmed glasses. At the same time, he had a slightly mischievous expression on his face, as if he always thought through some kind of mischief. Take, for example, a dinner that no one would call normal if dad took it seriously. Despite working at the Pentagon (read outside the city), the father always came back for lunch with his family, and then went back to the office. It was fun: the father told stories, cast out terrible puns, sometimes starting to laugh to completion; but he laughed so contagiously that all he could do was laugh with him. The very first thing on his return home, he asked Tracy and his 13-year-old sister Lindsey: “What did you do today altruistic, inventive, or interesting?”, And he was really interested. Tracy and Lindsay recalled the entire past day, sorting through the committed actions and trying to sort them into designated categories.

Dinners were also impressive. Mom and dad loved to try new dishes, and go to new restaurants. At the same time, the dad waiting for the order did not let Lindsay and Tracy get bored, entertaining them with puzzles like “If the train moves west at a speed of 40 miles per hour and the plane is ahead of him by ...”. Tracy was so good at them that he decided in his mind. Lindsay only portrayed a shy thirteen-year-old girl.

“Well, Lindsay,” the father asked then, “if the wheel of the bike rolls on the ground, do all the spokes move at the same speed”?

"Of course!"

“Alas, no,” answered the pope, and explained why a needle on the ground is almost immobile, while a needle at the highest point moves twice as fast as a bicycle — drawing graphs and diagrams on napkins would honor Leonardo da Vinci himself. (Once at a conference, some guy offered his father $ 50 for his drawings).

And the exhibitions they attend? On weekends, my mother loved to devote a little time to herself, and her father would take Tracy and Lindsay to admire the paintings, usually in the national art gallery. Usually it was the Impressionists beloved by the Pope: Hugo, Monet, Picasso, Cezanne. He liked the light, the radiance that seemed to pass through these canvases. At the same time, my father explained how to treat pictures based on the technique of “color substitution” (he was a psychologist at Harvard and MIT). For example, if you close one eye with your hand, move 5 meters away from the painting, then quickly remove your hand and look at the painting with two eyes, the smooth surface will curve in three dimensions. And it works! He and Tracy and Lindsay wandered around the gallery for hours, and each of them looked at the pictures with his eyes closed.

They looked weird. But they were always a bit unusual family (in the good sense of the word). Compared to school friends, Tracy and Lindsay were different. Special Experienced. My father liked to travel, for example, so Tracy and Lindsay grew up thinking it was natural to travel around Europe or California for a week or a month. In fact, their parents spent much more money on travel than on furniture, which made their large Victorian house in Massachusetts decorated in the style of “orange boxes and boards”. In addition to them, mom and dad filled the house with actors, writers, actors and other cranks, and that’s not counting the father’s students who could be found on any floor. Mom, if necessary, sent them directly to his father's office on the 3rd floor, where the table was surrounded by piles of papers. Dad never stitched anything. On his desk, however, he kept a vase with diet candies, which were supposed to curb appetite, and which dad ate like regular sweets.

In other words, the father was not the person whom you would expect to find working in the Pentagon. However, here he walked with Tracy along long corridors.

By the time they got to their father’s office, Tracy thought that they should have gone through several football fields. Seeing the same office, he felt ... disappointed? Just one more door in the hallway full of doors. Behind her is an ordinary room, painted in a common green army color, a table, a few chairs, and several cabinets with folders. There was a window from which one could see a wall filled with the same windows. Tracy did not know what the Pentagon office should look like, but certainly not such a room.

In fact, Tracy wasn't even sure what his father was doing in this office all day. His work was not secret, but he worked in the Ministry of Defense, and his father took it very seriously, not really spreading about the work at home. And truthfully, at the age of 15, Tracy didn’t really care what daddy was doing there. The only thing he was sure of was that his father was on his way to a great cause, and he spent a lot of time trying to get people to do some things, and it all had something to do with computers.

Not surprising. His father was delighted with computers. In Cambridge, at Bolt Beranek and Newman , Dad's research team members had a computer that they did on their own. It was a hefty car, the size of several refrigerators. Near it lay the keyboard, there was a screen showing what you were typing, a light pen - everything you could dream of. There was even a special software that allowed several people to work simultaneously using several terminals. Dad played with the car day and night, recording programs. On weekends, he would take Tracy and Lindsey so that they could play too (and then they followed the hamburgers and fries at Howard Johnson's cafe across the street; Dad even wrote an electronic teacher for them. If you typed the word correctly - he gave "Acceptable." If it was wrong - "Dumbkopf". (This happened years before someone told his father that the German word "Dummkopf" did not have the letter b)

Tracy regarded things of this kind as something natural; he even learned to program himself. But now, looking into the past for more than 40 years, from the point of view of the new century, he understands that this may be why he did not pay much attention to what his father did at the Pentagon. He was spoiled. It was like those kids today that are surrounded by 3D graphics, play from DVDs and surf the net, taking it for granted. Since he saw his father interacting with a computer (interacting with pleasure), Tracy assumed that computers are for everyone. He did not know (had no particular reason to think) that for most people the word computer still means a hefty, semi-mystic box the size of a room’s wall, an ominous, uncompromising, ruthless mechanism that serves them — large institutions — compressing people to numbers on punched cards. Tracy did not have time to realize that his father was one of those few people in the world who looked at technology and saw the possibility of something completely new.

The father has always been a dreamer, a guy constantly asking "what if ...?". He believed that one day all computers would be like his car in Cambridge. They will become clear and familiar. They will be able to respond to people, will find their individuality. Become a new medium of (self) expression. They will provide democratic access to information, provide communications, and give a new environment for commerce and interaction. In the limit - they will enter into a symbiosis with people, forming a bundle capable of thinking much more strongly than a person can imagine, but no machine will be able to guess the information in ways.

And the father at the Pentagon did everything possible to transform his faith in life. For example, at MIT, he launched Project MAC , the world's first large-scale personal computer experiment. Project managers didn’t even hope to provide everyone with a personal computer, not in the world where the cheapest computer cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they could scatter a dozen remote terminals across campuses and residential buildings. And then, distributing the time, they could order the central machine to distribute small pieces of processor time very, very quickly, so that each user would feel that the machine responds to him / her individually. The circuit worked surprisingly well. At the same time, in just a few years, Project MAC not only involved hundreds of people in interaction with computers, but also turned into the first global online society, expanded into the first online bulletin board, email, freeware exchange - and hackers. This social phenomenon later manifested itself in the online communities of the Internet era. Moreover, remote terminals began to be perceived as a “home information center,” an idea that has been circulating in technological communities since the 1970s. An idea that inspired a galaxy of young geeks like Jobs and Wozniak to present something called a microcomputer on the market.

Meanwhile, Tracy's father was on a short leg with a shy guy who approached him practically on the first day of the new work at the Pentagon, and whose ideas of "Strengthening human intelligence" were similar to the ideas of human-computer symbiosis. Douglas Engelbart was before this the voice of the wildest dreams. His own bosses at SRI International (which later became Silicon Valley) considered Douglas a complete madman. However, Father Tracy gave the first monetary support to Engelbart (at the same time covering him from the bosses), and Engelbart and his group invented the mouse, windows, hypertext, text editor, and the basis for other innovations. Engelbart’s presentation in 1968 at a conference in San Francisco amazed thousands of people — and later became a turning point in the history of computers, a moment when the younger generation of computer professionals finally realized what they could achieve by interacting with computers. It is no coincidence that representatives of the younger generation received training assistance with the support of Father Tracy and his followers at the Pentagon - parts of this generation later gathered at PARC, the legendary Palo Alto Research Center owned by Xerox. There they embodied the fatherly vision of “symbiosis” in life, in the form that we use decades later: our own personal computer, with a graphic screen and a mouse, a graphical user interface with windows, icons, menus, scroll bars, etc. Laser printers. And local Ethernet networks to connect all this together.

And finally, there was communication. While working for the Pentagon, Father Tracy spent most of his work time on air travel, constantly searching for isolated research groups that worked on topics related to his vision of human-computer symbiosis. His goal was to unite them into a single community, a self-sustaining movement capable of moving towards his dream even after he left Washington. On April 25, 1963, in a note to “members and followers of the Intergalactic computer network,” he outlined a key part of his strategy: to unite all individual computers (not personal ones — the time for them had not yet come) into a single computer network covering the entire continent. Existing primitive network technologies did not allow the creation of such a system, at least at that time. However, fathers mind was already far ahead. Soon he already spoke of the Intergalactic Network as an electronic medium open to everyone, "the main and main medium of information interaction for governments, organizations, corporations, and people." An e-pool will support e-banking, commerce, digital libraries, Investment Guides, tax advice, selective distribution of information in your area of ​​specialization, announcements of cultural, sports, entertainment events, etc. etc. By the end of the 1960s, such a vision inspired select dad's successors to implement the Intergalactic Network, now known as Arpanet. Moreover, in 1970 they went further, expanding Arpanet to the network of networks now known as the Internet.

In short, Father Tracy took part in the movement of forces that essentially made computers as we know them: time distribution, personal computers, a mouse, a graphical user interface, an explosion of creativity in Xerox PARC, and the Internet as the crown of everything. Of course, even he could not imagine such results, at least not in 1962. But it was precisely this that he sought. In the end, this is why he tore the family out of his beloved home and that is why he went to Washington for a position with a fair amount of bureaucracy so hated by him: he believed in his dream.

Because he decided to see how it becomes a reality.

Because the Pentagon - even if some of the tops of this have not yet understood it - laid out money for making it come true.

As soon as Father Tracy folded the paper and prepared to leave, he took out a handful of green plastic badges. “So you make the bureaucrats happy,” he explained. Every time you leave the office, you need to label with a badge all the folders on the table: green for public materials, then yellow, red, and so on, in order of increasing secrecy. A bit silly, considering that rarely requires something other than green. However, there is such a rule, so ...

Father Tracy stuck green papers around the office, just so that anyone who looked would think: "The local owner is seriously thinking about security." “Okay,” he said, “we can go.”

Tracy and her father left behind the back door of the office, on which hung a sign



- and began the journey back along the long, long corridors of the Pentagon, where serious young people on tricycles delivered information to / from the most powerful bureaucracy in the world.

To be continued…

(For the translation, thanks to Oxoron , who wants to help with the translation - write in a personal or mail magisterludi2016@yandex.ru)