The Dream Machine

Finished on Sunday, August 23rd, 2020

What we receive when looking back on a scientific discovery or breakthrough is the sanitized and simplified version with all of the ambiguity and complexity stripped away.

When discoveries are first made, they are rarely clear and clean. It's usually messy and ambiguous how this discovery will impact the world.

"the challenge had been to maintain a sense of common purpose among research groups scattered across a continent. His solution had been to revive Lick's idea of the principal investigator's meetings, and later to expand it to include the graduate-student conferences. And his solution now, at PARC, was to do the same thing, but more frequently: once a week the computer group would assemble, someone would talk about his work for an hour or so, and then the others would have at him. Taylor considered these meetings so important, in fact, that he made them mandatory, the one thing that CSL members had to do." pg. 339

Type 1 versus Type 2 arguments, mentioned by Alan Kay pg. 339

Invention requires a strong vision of a coherent system.

"One thing he (Bob Taylor) liked and put into practice was a style of research that could be paraphrased as, "Don't just invent the future, go live in it." This had been the philosophy, too, behind Projects MAC and Genie, in which the time-sharing system was supposed to be simultaneously the main research tool, the primary object of experimentation, and the tangible product. For that matter, it had been Taylor's own philosophy in pushing for the full-fledged Arpanet instead of just a few demonstration projects. By all means, Taylor told his recruits, let's get way out in front of the curve–five years, ten year if we can. And forget about the cost: Xerox is signing the checks for now, and Moore's law will solve the problem soon enough. But whatever you build, use it. In fact, get everybody in PARC to use it. Get them pounding on the technology every day, writing reports, writing programs, sending E-mail–anything and everything, so they can see for themselves what the problems and possibilities are. And then use what they learn to build better technology." pg. 339

"people needed the freedom to create. But their creations had to add up to something–and not just another bunch of unconnected gadgets, either. At ARPA that "something" had been human-computer symbiosis, broadly defined. Now, at PARC, it was the "electronic office," or whatever that might turn out to be. Yet in either case the goal was a system of information technology, a whole new way for human beings to work together. All the various gadgets had to be part of that system. And to achieve that goal, Taylor knew, he somehow had to get all these maverick geniuses moving in the same direction, without forcing everyone to move in lockstep. Some how he had to give them a sense of purpose and group cohesion, without crushing group spontaneity and individual initiative. Somehow, in short, he had to set things up so that they would follow their own instincts–and end up organizing themselves." pg. 338

"The lab would function as two parts of a whole. CSL (Computer Science Lab) would focus on developing new hardware and operating systems, broadly speaking, while SSL (Systems Science Lab) would focus on applications. And everyone would be working toward the final, integrated system–whatever that turned out to be." pg. 340

Two ideas emerging:

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