Robert Taylor has never been stingy with his managerial genius or visionary insight, generously spreading such talents through sundry settings and subject matters in the computer and communications fields. In each of the three major phases of his career, Taylor's contributions have had extraordinary impact.

In 1966, as director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of ARPA in the Department of Defense, Taylor initiated the project to build a nation-wide computer network. This project produced the ARPAnet, the world's first packet network, and the direct ancestor of today's Internet.

Taylor's office also supported key research underlying much of the fundamental technology in today's computer industry, including time-sharing (e.g., the Multics project at MIT, from which the Unix, Vax VMS, and Windows NT are descended), computer graphics (including work at Harvard and the University of Utah, from which most of today's graphics is derived), and artificial intelligence. Such research doesn't just happen. Given limited funding, crucial decisions must be made on what projects to support. Because of the way ARPA operated, such decisions were made primarily, not by subordinates or peer review, but by Taylor himself. IPTO's remarkable record of funding successful projects was the result of Taylor's vision.

The second phase of Taylor's career was centered at the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which he founded in 1970 and managed until 1983. This laboratory (together with the System Science Laboratory, many of whose members were recruited by Taylor) virtually invented personal distributed computing. Its accomplishments include:

The Alto and Dorado, powerful personal machines with bit-mapped displays and graphical user interfaces - direct ancestors of the Macintosh.

The Ethernet, the first and most successful local area network.

Pup, the first working internetwork. (Internetworking is the technology that enabled the transformation of the ARPAnet into today's Internet.)

Client-server computing in the form of file, printing, directory, and e-mail servers.

The remote procedure call, the programming paradigm used in modern software for implementing distributed systems.

The electronics and software for laser printing, including the first general page description language and digital type faces based on splines. (This is the technology underlying Postscript.)

What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) word processing programs -- a direct ancestor of Microsoft Word.

Most of what we take for granted in today's Windows and Macintosh networked personal computer systems were invented at CSL. Indeed, it was a visit to CSL by Steve Jobs in 1979 that led to the Apple Macintosh. Taylor did not simply run CSL; he built it from scratch, and he provided the vision that enabled the lab to create systems that were much more than the sum of their parts.

CSL's work led to the Xerox 9700, the foundation of a multi-billion dollar high-end computer printing business. CSL gave rise to the Xerox System Development Division, which produced the Star, the first modern office system. People from CSL founded companies that are leaders in the computer industry today: 3Com (Bob Metcalfe--local area networks), Adobe (John Warnock and Chuck Geschke--Postscript computer printing and fonts), and the applications division of Microsoft (Charles Simonyi--Microsoft Word and Excel), as well as several smaller companies. Other major companies have built their businesses on the published and demonstrated work of CSL: Novell (file and print sharing), Apple (the Lisa and the Macintosh), Sun (workstations), and Microsoft (Windows).

In 1984, Taylor founded the Systems Research Center (SRC) of Digital Equipment Corporation, which he managed until his retirement in 1996. In this third phase of his career, Taylor built SRC into one of the leading computer systems laboratories in the world. SRC developed the first multi-processor workstation (Firefly), the first fault-tolerant switched local area network (Autonet), the first efficient, portable, object-oriented, type-checked, garbage-collected programming language (Modula 3, which influenced the design of Java), the first electronic book (Lectern and Lectrice), and the first self-managing storage system (Petal).

The common denominator underlying these prodigious centers of research is Taylor's remarkable guidance. His genius for assembling outstanding teams of researchers, suggesting avenues of exploration, and motivating colleagues to push the technological envelope has resulted in a truly exceptional record of innovation and accomplishment.

Taylor earned his BA and his MA from The University of Texas. He was born 10 Feb 1932 in Texas.