In his long career, Bob Taylor has had a hand in the creation of just about every major technology that today’s Net surfer takes for granted, including the personal computer, local area networks (LANs), asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networking, desktop publishing, and search engines. Between 1966 and 1969, Taylor was director of IPTO, where he initiated and secured funding for Arpanet experiments and hired a reluctant Larry Roberts away from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to get it under way. Like Licklider, Taylor came to computers while studying psychoacoustics in the ’50s. Taylor was a polymath, who majored in psychology, with minors in mathematics, English, philosophy, and religion. Taylor left ARPA in October 1969, just before the network went live. A year later, he founded and managed the computer science lab at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Later, he oversaw the building of Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, the lab that created the AltaVista search engine. He retired in 1996 and today lives on the San Francisco peninsula. “From my point of view,” he says, “technology advances proceed at a rather stately pace.”

Larry Roberts, 61

Without Larry Roberts, there would doubtless be some kind of email today, but it would probably be an unmanageable mess. Roberts wrote the first electronic-mail manager for the Net’s first (and still most) killer app. That alone would elevate Roberts to the pantheon, but it was only his last act at ARPA, and a mere bagatelle. Roberts joined ARPA in 1966. He designed and wrote the Arpanet’s original specification and oversaw the project until he left ARPA in 1973. Later, he founded Telenet, the world’s first commercial packet data communications company, bought by GTE in 1979 and later spun out to Sprint. Between 1983 and 1993, Roberts served as CEO of a packetized facsimile and ATM equipment company called NetExpress. From 1993 to 1998, he was president of ATM Systems, a division of Connectware. Today, Roberts is president and CEO of a Palo Alto, Calif.-based ATM and IP switching company called Packetcom. When asked if he knew where the Arpanet experiment would lead, Roberts says, “I really believed it would take over the telephone network and communications. But I really didn’t envision the kind of ecommerce we have today.”

Wes Clark, 72

During a 1967 ARPA workshop in Ann Arbor, Mich., Bob Taylor presented his scheme for a network of research computers to his fellows. One of the problems such a network faced was how to get the different machines to communicate seamlessly despite their technical differences. According to Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s history, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Taylor was outlining his plan when a note was passed up from someone in the crowd. “You’ve got the network inside out,” it read. It was from Wes Clark, a former Lincoln Laboratory engineer who in the 1950s had worked on the TX-0 and TX-2 computers, then considered state of the art. After the presentation, Clark proposed a sub-network of identical computers that would handle routing and other functions. That way, each computer-whether a TX-2 or Sigma-7-had only to be configured to deal with one other type of computer. Thus the idea for the interface message processors (IMPs) was born. “I would give Wes Clark more credit that any other single person on the technical side,” says Taylor. Clark has been a consultant since 1972. He is currently a principal and co-founder of Clark Rockoff & Associates in Brooklyn, New York.

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