This book is recommended . He often says the phrase But the computer revolution has begun. Or rather, they started it. It was started by certain people, with certain values, and they had a vision, ideas, a plan. On what basis did the revolutionaries create the plan? For what reasons? Where did they plan to lead mankind? At what stage are we now?
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Tricycles.
That's what Tracy remembers most about the Pentagon.
It was the end of 1962, or maybe the beginning of 1963. In any case, it hadn't been long since the Tracy family had moved from Boston for their father's new job at the Department of Defense. The air in Washington was electrified by the energy and pressure of the new, young government. The Cuban crisis, the Berlin Wall, the marches for human rights - all of this turned the head of fifteen-year-old Tracy. Not surprisingly, the guy gladly jumped at his father's Saturday offer to take a walk to the office for some forgotten papers. Tracy was simply in awe of the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is indeed a delightful place, especially when viewed up close. The sides, about 300 meters long, stand on a slight rise, like a city outside the walls. Tracy and her father left the car in the huge parking lot and headed straight for the front door. After going through impressive security procedures at the post, where Tracy signed and received a badge, he and his father headed down the corridor into the heart of the Free World's defenses. And the first thing Tracy saw was a serious-looking young soldier moving back and forth down the corridorβpedaling an oversized tricycle. He delivered mail.
Absurd. Complete absurdity. However, the soldier on the tricycle looked extremely serious and focused on his work. And Tracy had to admit: tricycles did make sense, given the very long corridors. He himself had begun to suspect that they would take forever to get to the office.
Tracy was surprised that his father worked for the Pentagon at all. He was quite an ordinary person, not an official, not a politician. The father looked more like a grown-up child, an ordinary tall guy, slightly chubby, in a tweed tracksuit and black-rimmed glasses. At the same time, he had a slightly mischievous expression on his face, as if he was always thinking up some kind of trick. Take, for example, lunch, which no one would call normal if dad took it seriously. Despite working at the Pentagon (read out of town), my father always returned to have lunch with his family, and then went back to the office. It was hilarious: Father told stories, spouted terrible puns, sometimes starting to laugh to the end; but he laughed so contagiously that all he had to do was laugh with him. The very first thing he did when he got home was to ask Tracey and his 13-year-old sister Lindsey, βWhat did you do today that was altruistic, creative, or interesting?β And he was really interested. Tracy and Lindsey reminisced all day long, sorting through the things they had done and trying to sort them into designated categories.
The dinners were also impressive. Mom and dad loved trying new dishes and going to new restaurants. At the same time, dad waiting for the order did not let Lindsay and Tracy get bored, entertaining them with puzzles like "If the train is moving west at a speed of 40 miles per hour, and the plane is ahead of it by ...". Tracy was so good at them that he decided in his mind. Lindsay, on the other hand, only portrayed a shy thirteen-year-old girl.
βOkay, Lindsey,β Dad asked then, βif a bicycle wheel rolls on the ground, do all the spokes move at the same speedβ?
"Of course!"
βAlas, no,β answered dad, and explained why the spoke on the ground is practically motionless, while the spoke at its highest point moves twice as fast as a bicycle β drawing graphs and diagrams on napkins that would have done honor to Leonardo da Vinci himself. (One day at a conference, some guy offered his father $50 for his drawings.)
What about the exhibitions they attend? On the weekends, my mother liked to take some time for herself, and my father would take Tracy and Lindsay to see paintings, usually at the National Gallery of Art. Usually these were 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 view paintings based on the βcolor substitutionβ technique (he was a psychologist at Harvard and MIT). For example, if you cover one eye with your hand, move 5 meters away from the painting, and then quickly remove your hand and look at the painting with both eyes, the smooth surface will curve in three dimensions. And it works! He, Tracy, and Lindsey wandered the gallery for hours, each staring at the paintings with their eyes closed.
They looked strange. But they have always been a bit of an unusual family (in a good way). Compared to school friends, Tracy and Lindsey were different. Special. Experienced. My father loved to travel, for example, so Tracy and Lindsey grew up thinking it was only natural to travel around Europe or California for a week or a month. In fact, their parents spent far more money on travel than on furniture, which is why their large Victorian-style house in Massachusetts was decorated in the style of "orange boxes and boards." In addition to them, mom and dad filled the house with actors, writers, artists and other weirdos, and that's not counting dad's students, who could be found on any floor. Mom, if necessary, sent them directly to my father's office on the 3rd floor, where there was a table surrounded by piles of papers. Dad never stitched anything. On his desk, however, he kept a bowl of diet candies that were supposed to curb his appetite, which Dad ate like regular candy.
In other words, the father was not the man you would expect to find working at the Pentagon. However, here he walked with Tracy along the long corridors.
By the time they got to their father's office, Tracy thought they must have walked the length of several football fields. When he saw the office, he felt ... disappointed? Just another door in a corridor full of doors. Behind it is an ordinary room, painted in ordinary army green, a table, several chairs, and several filing cabinets. There was a window from which one could see a wall filled with similar windows. Tracy didn't know what a Pentagon office was supposed to look like, but certainly not that kind of room.
In fact, Tracy wasn't even sure what his father was doing in that office all day. His work was not secret, but he worked in the Ministry of Defense, and his father took this very seriously, not particularly talking about working at home. And the truth is, at 15, Tracy didn't really care what dad was doing there. The only thing he was sure of was that his father was on his way to a great business, and he spent a lot of time trying to get people to do things, and it all had something to do with computers.
Not surprising. His father was enthusiastic about computers. in Cambridge, with members of my father's research group had a computer that they rebuilt with their own hands. It was a hefty car, about the size of several refrigerators. There was a keyboard next to it, 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 machine day and night, recording programs. On weekends, he would take Tracy and Lindsey out so they could play too (and then they would go get hamburgers and fries at Howard Johnson's cafe across the street; it got to the point where the waitresses didn't even wait for their orders, just preparing burgers as soon as they saw the regulars). Dad even wrote an e-teacher for them. If you typed the word correctly, he gave out "Acceptable". If wrong - "Dumbkopf". (This was years before someone pointed out to my father that the German word "Dummkopf" didn't have a b in it.)
Tracy treated things of this kind as something natural; he even taught himself how to program. But now, looking back more than 40 years from a new age perspective, he realizes that maybe that's why he didn't pay much attention to what his father did at the Pentagon. He was spoiled. He was like those kids today who are surrounded by 3D graphics, playing DVDs and surfing 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 didn't know (he didn't have much reason to think) that for most people the word computer still means a huge, semi-mystical box the size of a room wall, a sinister, implacable, ruthless mechanism that serves them - big institutions - by squeezing people to the numbers on punched cards. Tracy didn't have time to realize that his father was one of the few people in the world who looked at technology and saw the possibility of something completely new.
Father has always been a dreamer, a guy who constantly asks βwhat if ...?β. 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, gain their individuality. Become a new medium of (self)expression. They will provide democratic access to information, provide communication, provide a new environment for commerce and interaction. In the limit, they will enter into symbiosis with people, forming a bunch capable of thinking much stronger than a person can imagine, but processing information in ways that no machine can think of.
And the father at the Pentagon did everything possible to turn his faith into life. For example, at MIT he ran , the world's first large-scale personal computer experiment. The project managers had no hope of providing everyone with a personal computer, not in a world where the cheapest computer cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they could scatter a dozen remote terminals across campuses and residences. And then, by distributing time, they could order the central machine to distribute small chunks of processor time very, very quickly, so that each user would feel that the machine was responding to him individually. The scheme worked remarkably well. And in just a few years, Project MAC not only brought hundreds of people into interaction with computers, but also grew into the world's first online society, growing into the first online bulletin board, email, freeware exchangeβand hackers. This social phenomenon later manifested itself in the online communities of the Internet era. Moreover, remote terminals have come to be seen as the "home data center", an idea that has been circulating in technology communities since the 1970s. The idea that inspired a galaxy of young geeks like Jobs and Wozniak to bring to market something called a microcomputer.
Meanwhile, Tracy's father was on friendly terms with a shy guy who approached him almost on the first day of his new job at the Pentagon, and whose ideas for "Human Intelligence Amplification" were similar to those of a human-computer symbiosis. was before the voice of the wildest dreams. His own bosses at SRI International (later to become Silicon Valley) thought Douglas was a complete lunatic. However, Tracy's father gave the first financial support to Engelbart (at the same time protecting him from the bosses), and Engelbart and his group invented the mouse, windows, hypertext, a text editor, and the basis for other innovations. Engelbart's 1968 presentation at a conference in San Francisco astonished thousands of people - and later became a turning point in the history of computers, the moment when the rising generation of computer professionals finally realized what could be achieved by interacting with a computer. It is no coincidence that the younger generation received training assistance with the support of Tracy's father 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 brought their father's vision of "symbiosis" to life, in the form that we use decades later: our own personal computer, with a graphical screen and mouse, a graphical user interface with windows, icons, menus, scroll bars, etc. Laser printers. And local Ethernet networks to link it all together.
And finally, there was communication. While working for the Pentagon, Tracy's father spent much of his time flying, constantly seeking out isolated research teams working on topics consistent with 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. April 25, 1963 he outlined a key part of his strategy: to unite all individual computers (approx. not personal - the time has not yet come for them) into a single computer network covering the entire continent. The existing primitive network technologies did not allow the creation of such a system, at least at that time. However, the mind of the fathers was already far ahead. Soon he was already talking about the Intergalactic Network as an electronic environment open to everyone, "the main and main environment for information interaction for governments, organizations, corporations, and people." The e-community will support e-banking, commerce, digital libraries, investment guides, tax advice, selective dissemination of information in your area of ββspecialization, announcements of cultural, sports, entertainment events, etc. and so on. By the late 1960s, this vision inspired the successors chosen by the pope to implement the Intergalactic Network, now known as the Arpanet. Moreover, in 1970 they went further, expanding Arpanet into the network of networks now known as the Internet.
In short, Tracy's father was involved in the movement of forces that essentially made computers what we know them to be: time management, personal computers, the mouse, the graphical user interface, the explosion of creativity at Xerox PARC, and the Internet as the crowning glory. Of course, even he could not imagine such results, at least not in 1962. But that is what he was aiming for. After all, that's why he ripped his family out of his beloved home, and that's why he went to Washington for a position with a fair amount of the bureaucracy he so hated: he believed in his dream.
Because he chose to see it come true.
Because the Pentagon - even if some of the tops have not yet understood this - laid out money for it to become a reality.
As soon as Tracy's father folded his papers and prepared to leave, he took out a handful of green plastic badges. "That's how you make the bureaucrats happy," he explained. Each time you leave the office, you need to badge all the folders on the table: green for public materials, then yellow, red, and so on, in ascending order of secrecy. A bit silly considering that it rarely needs anything other than green. However, there is such a rule, so ...
Tracy's father slapped green papers around the office, just to make anyone looking think, "The local owner is serious about security." "Okay," he said, "we can go."
Tracey and his father left behind the office door, on which hung a sign
β and began their return journey down the long, long corridors of the Pentagon, where earnest young men on tricycles delivered visa information to the most powerful bureaucracy in the world.
To be continued ...
(Thanks for the translation. who wants to help with the translation - write in a personal or email [email protected])
Source: habr.com