“People are at the heart of the story of technology,” said CHM President and CEO Dan’l Lewin, as he kicked off the annual Fellow Awards ceremony this year. And CHM’s 2023 Fellows certainly are remarkable people.

Rodney Brooks, Thomas E. Kurtz, and Barbara Liskov were honored for their outstanding merit and significant contributions to the advancement of computing and the evolution of the digital age. They join 95 other remarkable individuals in the CHM Hall of Fellows.

Tom Stuermer, senior managing director of data and AI at Accenture, expressed an optimistic anticipation of technology’s evolving narrative as he acknowledged the Fellows’ contributions. Headline sponsor Accenture’s sustained collaboration with CHM represents a “shared duty to steer these transformations and these forces towards a brighter future for us all,” he said.

Tom Stuermer, senior managing director of data and AI at Accenture.

A video tribute to the Fellows included remarks from science and technology journalist John Markoff, who noted that all three simplified computing with their work and thus extended the reach of the field from a narrow circle to a much broader community, democratizing it in the process. Megan Smith, who served as the 3rd chief technology officer of the US, noted that people from all over the world can now see themselves in the industry. And, venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson lauded the honorees for taking on bold challenges and inspiring those who want to see change in the world.

Rodney Brooks

Cohost and CHM Trustee Eileen Fagan introduced Rodney Brooks, who has dedicated his life to pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and robotics in a career that’s been “a testament to relentless innovation.” His contributions include new methods of robot perception, enabling machines to sense and interact with their environment in ways previously unimaginable. His research has influenced applications in space, health care, autonomous vehicles, and other areas and continues to shape the future of robotics.

In a brief documentary created from CHM’s recent oral history interview with Brooks, he spoke about his life and career.

A former doctoral student of Brooks, and now dean and professor at MIT, Cynthia Breazeal presented the award to Brooks “For the advancement of robotics and consideration of its implications for humanity.” She remembered that Brooks asked his students how much computational power they thought a fly possessed and noted that “nature, not symbols, was Rodney’s muse.” Despite intense criticism, he took a bottom-up approach to research, believing that intelligent life could emerge from simple, interactive, specialized behaviors. A fearless advocate of women in the field, he seeks to inspire others to do good.

In his acceptance speech, Brooks shared memories of working on robots at MIT and his thoughts on the current hype around AI. He traces his success and outlook on life back to his childhood.

Brooks is an optimist and still fearless. He is currently at his sixth startup, working hard on a new class of robots and believes there’s much more invention to be done and fun to be had.

Thomas E. Kurtz

Dan’l Lewin introduced Thomas E. Kurtz, best known as a co-creator of the BASIC programming language, which played a pivotal role in making computers more accessible. The development of the Dartmouth time-sharing system revolutionized how computers were used in education. A brief documentary explained how.

By video, Bill Gates presented the award to Kurtz “For the co-invention of the BASIC programming language, which brought the power of computers to beginners around the world, and the Dartmouth Timesharing System.” Gates remarked that he did all his early programming in BASIC and a form of it was included in Microsoft computers from the very beginning.

Accepting the award for Kurtz, who was unable to attend in person, was his granddaughter, data scientist Sarai Mazyck. She shared his memories of traveling once a week from New Hampshire to Boston to have punch cards processed on MIT’s new computer. That ended when Dartmouth got its own computer in 1959, and Kurtz and John Kemeny collaborated to bridge the divide between the sciences and humanities by encouraging liberal arts students to “have a go at computing.” That was the motivation for developing a simple, easy-to-use programming language as well as a time-sharing system.

Kurtz summed up the two guiding principles of his work: 1.) systems should be extremely easy for the casual user; and, 2.) always choose simplicity over efficiency.

Barbara Liskov

Eileen Fagan introduced Barbara Liskov, whose groundbreaking work laid the foundation for many software systems and elevated the principles of modularity, extensibility, and robustness in software design. She was among the first women to earn a doctorate in computer science in the US and only the second woman to receive the Turing Award.

Liskov’s groundbreaking career was explored in a short documentary.

Tech entrepreneur and Chair Emerita of the MIT Corporation Diane Greene presented the award to Liskov “For practical and theoretical contributions to programming language and system design that continue to shape modern computing.” She noted that Liskov saw the leverage in making it easier for everyone to build software and solved limitations in abstraction and distributed computing, as well as developing protocols for dealing with malicious attacks, among other contributions.

Liskov accepted the award, and in her remarks credited a “lucky break” for the start of her career in 1961. A Berkeley graduate with a degree in math, she was offered a job as a programmer at a time when she didn’t know computers existed. She discovered a field she loved that fit her skills. Another lucky break didn’t look like one at the time.

Liskov remarked that she and others in the field have had a huge impact on people, that she believes has been mostly for the good. Looking to the future, she thinks that many issues arising around AI have technical solutions that can mitigate problems like bias and misinformation.

Inspiring the Next Generation

The event closed by noting that the three honorees’ words of advice to the next generation could be combined in a powerful statement full of wisdom and life experience: Through the beauty and power of mathematics (Kurtz) we can strive to be fearless (Brooks) and stay open to the full breadth (Liskov) of opportunities around us.

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CHM Fellows are nominated in a public process and selected by a distinguished committee that includes past Fellow Award honorees. Learn more.

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Congratulations to our new 2022 Fellows!

On October 15, CHM recognized the achievements of four honorees whose creativity, persistence, vision, and global influence in the field of computing have helped shape our everyday lives. Nominated in a public process, they were selected by a distinguished committee that includes past Fellow Award honorees.

Tech leaders, innovators, and visionaries from around the world gathered to celebrate and offer tributes to Don Bitzer, Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, and Leonard Kleinrock. Here are some highlights from one of Silicon Valley’s longest traditions, cohosted by CHM President and CEO Dan’l Lewin and Laurie Yoler, General Partner at Playground Global. The event was made possible by the generous support of headline sponsor Accenture.

Don Bitzer

The first honoree, Don Bitzer, was recognized for pioneering online education and communities with PLATO and coinventing the plasma display.

Mladen Vouk, his colleague at North Carolina State University, noted that Don tackles difficult problems with creativity, gusto, and always a smile. 2021 Fellow Ray Ozzie presented the award to his former teacher.

In his remarks, Don said that in creating PLATO, with its innovative courseware language, touchscreen, and multimedia terminals, he and his team imagined what they would need into the future—and they achieved it. But sometimes it’s dangerous to be able to do new things.

CHM, says Don, teaches that the creative development of ideas takes time and perseverance and people working together. Only then can the rocketships of Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy’s smart watch, or the sci-fi tech of Star Trek perhaps become reality.

Adele Goldberg

Next up, Adele Goldberg was honored for the promotion and codevelopment of the Smalltalk programming environment and for contributions that advanced the use of computers in education.  

In paying tribute to Adele, CHM Trustee John Mashey noted that “Almost every computing device people use owes something to Adele’s lifelong PEP.” John Shoch, cofounder of Alloy Ventures, who was responsible for introducing Adele and Alan Kay, presented the award.

In her acceptance remarks, Adele spoke about working at Xerox PARC on innovative ideas like Notetaker, a system called Twinkle, and of course Smalltalk, which she took out of the lab and into the world.

Adele believes that life is not a plan you make and execute but rather a series of opportunities. She’s a self-motivated learner whose experience has shown her what’s needed for modeling the physical and social worlds with tech—the vision of Alan Kay’s Dynabook still yet to be fully realized.

Dan Ingalls

Dan Ingalls was honored for the creation and codevelopment of the Smalltalk language and programming environment.

Gilad Bracha, Technical Fellow at F5, first learned Smalltalk in 1984 and fell in love with it, appreciating that early introduction to object-oriented programming throughout his career. Ted Kaehler, a longtime colleague from PARC, presented the award to Dan, crediting him with a genius for choosing ambitious goals and being an extraordinary leader, open to contributions from everyone, and bringing out the best in his teammates.

Dan says it was luck that brought him to Xerox PARC in 1971, and there he “breathed inspiration.”

Dan credited Xerox management for standing by through five generations of Smalltalk until it was a commercially acceptable language, and he expressed gratitude to the people in the many small teams he worked with throughout his career.

Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock was honored for his pioneering work on the mathematical theory of computer networks and roles in the ARPANET and in expanding the internet. 

Nick McKeown, a senior vice president at Intel, claims Leonard’s book on queuing theory changed his life as a PhD. Hearing Len give a talk about the power of the network, he was struck by Len’s simple principle to avoid congestion on the internet: “Keep the pipes full, just full, but no fuller.” Academic colleague Jim Kurose presented the award, noting how Len’s work has touched hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—who have been students in his classes and read his books and papers.

Len stressed that the creation of the internet was a joint effort by an army of pioneers. But, the technology was preceded by earlier visionaries, who imagined many aspects of today’s globally connected world, like Nicola Tesla, HG Wells, Vannevar Bush, and more. The world had to wait for the technology to catch up to the vision. Len is a strong believer in the value of joining theory and real-world applications. And also in the inspiration of . . . poetry.

Len’s final message was a reminder of how necessary it is for today’s innovators to carry their vision as far as they can and then to pass it along to the next generation. An important message indeed.

In Closing

Dan’l Lewin reminded the audience that history is really about the present having a conversation with the past. Building on the world-changing contributions of all of our Fellows, we must continue to inspire and empower new generations to use technology to shape a better future.

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On December 9, 2021, the Computer History Museum celebrated Lillian Schwartz for her pioneering work at the intersection of art and computing. During a long and productive career, Lillian created an extraordinary series of art films with early computer animation technology. The fourth and final Fellow to be honored this year, she joins a distinguished group of tech pioneers who have been inducted into CHM’s Hall of Fellows.

The virtual program was kicked off by CHM President and CEO Dan’l Lewin, who gave a preview of the remarkable “digital twin” of CHM being developed by headline sponsor Accenture. Joined by CHM trustee and cohost Andy Cunningham, founder of Cunningham Collective and Zero1, the inspiring event that showcased Lillian’s significant contributions to art and computing.

Enjoy some highlights from the show!

Experimentation

In the 1960s, computers were primarily used by large corporations and few people had ever seen one. In the art world, artists were exploring new mediums and techniques, and Lillian Schwartz was part of a community of both artists and technologists. Her multimedia, interactive sculpture Proxima Centauri was exhibited in 1968, in a now famous Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.  

At the exhibit opening, Lillian met Leon Harmon, a scientist at Bell Laboratories, who invited her to come to the lab to try out a graphics program. She did, and then stayed for a decades-long residency. At Bell Labs, IBM’s 7094 mainframe was being used to create two dimensional art, computer animation, and computer-generated music. Lillian worked with computer scientist Ken Knowlton to make software to express her creative vision, and her art films of the 1970s were shown widely in museums to great acclaim.

Months of painstaking work, including hand-painted imagery, resulted in just minutes of a computer animated film. Here’s an excerpt from Lillian’s 1970 film, Pixillation, with music by Gershon Kingsley.

Innovation

What we now know as computer art began with Lillian, says Dr. Zabet Patterson of Stony Brook University, who wrote a book on Bell Labs and the origins of computer art. She describes how Lillian was dazzled by the computers’ arrays of flickering lights on her first day at Bell Labs. 

Lillian experimented with combining elements of painting and computer graphics and she also wrote programs and created editing techniques and color filters. She invented new ways of analyzing and generating images, and her “ingratitude” for existing technology challenged engineers and scientists to push the boundaries of the possible. Her films and graphics remain foundational works, collected by renowned art museums around the world. 

Curiosity

Even before she went to Bell Labs, Lillian had used novel materials in her work, particularly her sculptures. Her curiosity compelled her to learn the traditional method and then “push the medium,” and it was this interest in experimentation that led her to technology.

Distinguished curator and video and media art expert Barbara London worked at MOMA for three decades and has known Lillian since the 1970s. She offered a tribute to Lillian’s ingenuity and noted how she navigated the exciting and constantly evolving terrain of digital art at a time when computers were the size of a room and existed in an almost exclusively male domain. “Lillian has managed to make breakthroughs with every medium she has ever handled,” London said, and in doing so expanded others’ perceptions and knowledge of the world.

Courage

Lillian’s life and career is all the more remarkable considering her serious physical challenges and the bigotry and sexism she faced. 

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1927, Lillian was the youngest of 13 children. Hardship forced them to work at a young age, and they were subjected to anti-Semitic attacks, but Lillian created art however she could, even sculpting with bread dough. She became a US cadet nurse, and she and her husband, a doctor, were stationed in Fukuoka, Japan, after World War II, where she contracted polio.

Creativity

Legendary programmer and CHM Fellow Ken Thompson, a colleague of Lillian’s at Bell Labs, presented the award. The two were also neighbors and first met when Ken went to investigate the model of Spock’s brain Lillian was showing the neighborhood kids on Halloween. He recalled how she created a massive mobile from broken disc packs and magnetic tape at Bell Labs.

In her acceptance speech, Lillian thanked the scientists who helped her make the computer a tool for her art.

Collaboration

Artists and technologists continue to collaborate today. World-renowned digital artist Refik Anadol and David Luebke, vice president of graphics research for Nvidia, shared how they’re building on Lillian’s legacy. Anadol creates immersive environments using “data as a pigment,” as he explains, to engage in digital painting. Luebke’s field of 3D graphics empowers artists with technologies like graphics cards and algorithms to train computer models.

Anadol believes that anything we can compute or quantify, including wind patterns and Wi-Fi signals, can become a pigment for an imagined work. In this way, says Luebke, the artist acts like a curator, thinking about the specific data to collect and use. It’s very similar to creating a training set for artificial intelligence, and inspires engineers to build new tools for artists. Watch the video below from 7:58 to see what Anadol has created with Nvidia’s StyleGAN.

Change

Collaborations between humans and machines will continue to multiply opportunities in art as well as many other fields of endeavor. Inspired by the courage, curiosity, and creativity in which Lillian Schwartz embraced new tools and new ideas, we can look forward to our changing technological future.

And, we can take to heart her one word of advice: “Experiment.”

For all footage from CHM’s December 9 event, “Breaking Boundaries: Celebrating Creativity With Computer Art Pioneer Lillian F. Schwartz,” video extras, and related content, visit our dedicated page to 2021 CHM Fellow Lillian Schwartz.

About the 2021 CHM Fellow Awards

The 2021 CHM Fellow Awards marks the Museum’s first-ever virtual Fellow Awards. CHM will celebrate the 2021 Fellows in a yearlong four-part series of thought-provoking virtual events and engaging digital content that explores the story and impact of each honoree and the present and future of tech for humanity.

Learn more about this year’s honorees and the 2021 Fellow Awards.

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I remain a techno-optimist, but as our field matures unbridled techno-solutionism can be naïve and even harmful. We must adopt a more tempered, systemic concern with socially responsible computing.

— Andries van Dam

Visualizing A Better Future

At first glance Andy van Dam’s career seems a patchwork. He’s made major contributions to graphics, hypermedia, courseware, electronic publishing, and teaching. But then you realize that for him, these are all facets of a single quest dating back more than 50 years: to apply the power of interactive computers to the basic ways we learn and create. And even more important, to explore these topics not off in some isolated lab—but with a rotating cast of brilliant undergraduates at the heart of a teaching university.

The grail of this quest is a vision of fully interactive documents, ones with graphics and other media we can play with, tease apart, and experiment on rather than simply study. He says he’s not quite there yet.

Andy was among the 1960s pioneers who defined the basic ways we use computers today: clickable links and word processing, interactive graphics and electronic books, graphical interfaces and flexible courseware. But where visionaries like Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart had their eyes on global publishing or accelerating cultural evolution itself, Andy’s goals were more immediate. The systems he built with and for his students solved problems one at a time, and each fed into the design of the next. But as this timeline shows, that didn’t make them less influential.

Finding A Home

When Andries van Dam was nine months old, his parents moved from their native Netherlands to Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies). Soon World War II broke out. Andy and his mother were interned in a Japanese concentration camp for over three years, where malnutrition and disease killed many. His father was in an even harsher work camp. Only after the war did his parents know whether the other was alive. But when they returned to the Netherlands they discovered the rest of their extended family were victims of the Holocaust.

In 1952, Andy’s family emigrated to the United States where his father worked at Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution. Andy was 13. Like his parents he felt he owed it to those who had died to make the most of his opportunities. He took a string of part-time jobs in the food industry, a delight after his malnourished childhood, and asked for a typing course as a Bar Mitzvah present. With his newly acquired English language he wrote a prize-winning essay for the American Legion on why he was proud to be an American.

When he attended Swarthmore College, Andy met two fellow students who would change his life: his future wife Debbie and an older student, Ted Nelson, who would pioneer hypertext. Ted cast Andy and Debbie in his student show, likely the first rock opera.

In 1960, Andy began graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, first in electronics and then on computerized information retrieval within the newly formed computer science department. But then he saw a film about Ivan Sutherland’s groundbreaking graphics program, Sketchpad, and he switched to computer graphics for his doctorate.

1940

Andy as a toddler with his mother in Jakarta, 1940. His parents had moved there from the Netherlands for his father’s job as a marine biologist but were then caught up by the Japanese occupation. Courtesy Andy van Dam

1948

Andy (right) with his parents and baby sister in the Netherlands, 1948. They were part of a tiny postwar Jewish community, and Andy’s parents fought a long legal battle to reclaim their house from Nazi collaborators who had appropriated it. Andy had to learn the basics of being a Dutch child, from traditional songs and stories to wearing uncomfortable wooden clogs. Courtesy Andy van Dam

1959

Andy and future wife Debbie on the Swarthmore campus, 1958. She studied French and would make a career teaching it as a high school subject. The couple would have three daughters. Courtesy Andy van Dam

1960

Future hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson, circa 1960. Ted’s rock musical was titled “Anything and Everything.” A year older than Andy, he was son of movie star Celeste Holm. Ted was bursting with ideas for everything from new kinds of movies to ways of organizing information. Swarthmore Bulletin

1963

Andy’s master’s thesis dealt with improved schemes for sorting and searching aperture cards. These were a literal hybrid of analog and digital—microfilm embedded in a computer-sortable punched card. Large institutions used them to store millions of images in room-sized installations, from blueprints to photographs.

1964

The Art of Teaching

Meanwhile, Andy’s wife Debbie was teaching high school French. He wondered…could he teach high school kids computing, at the time a graduate level subject? It worked, he loved teaching, and he became a professor instead of pursuing his original goal of doing research in industry.

Brown University hadn’t been at the top of Andy’s list. But he was impressed by the school’s emphasis on teaching—the chairman of the department excused himself from Andy’s interview to teach a freshman class.

Against convention, Andy began using undergraduates as teaching and research assistants, including many women. Each year’s TAs would train the next. He organized skits and other fun activities for team-building.

Andy was asked by a major publisher to turn his 1966 thesis into a very early graphics textbook. But he had no time. He recruited James Foley as coauthor, and over the next decade they wrote the “bible” for hundreds of thousands of graphics students and practitioners.

In 1967 Andy co-founded the predecessor to the leading graphics professional organization SIGGRAPH. In the 1970s, Andy and his graphics students would help pioneer the first international graphics standards.

1966

Andy was asked to turn his 1966 thesis into a very early graphics textbook, but had no time. He recruited James Foley (right) as coauthor, and over a dozen years they wrote the core text for hundreds of thousands of graphics students and practitioners. Two editions with a growing pool of coauthors would follow. Courtesy Jim Foley.

Pioneering With Students

Years after attending Swarthmore, Andy and Ted Nelson reconnected at a 1967 computer conference. Ted wowed Andy with a vision of a connected world using computers—like the web today plus more. A core concept was the now familiar clickable link, which can join not just words but pictures and video too.

With Andy’s undergraduates, Andy and Ted built the Hypertext Editing System (HES) in 1967, one of the very first hypertext programs as well as one of the first word processors. It was a compromise between Ted’s global hypertext vision, which he called Xanadu, and Andy’s wish to also develop something useful for producing printed documents. The Apollo moon program was one user.

The next year, Andy was blown away by Doug Engelbart’s famous demo of his oNLine System (NLS). He got students working on a successor to HES he called FRESS, combining the best of Ted and Doug’s ideas plus their own.

These were the start of 56 years—and counting—of cutting-edge projects Andy would do with his students, in effect creating an ongoing research lab powered largely by bright, motivated undergraduates guided by several doctoral and masters students. As Andy proudly says, “I’ve never done anything on my own. I’ve always relied on students.”

1967

In 1967, Andy cofounded the predecessor to the leading graphics organization and conference, SIGGRAPH. His role was later recognized with this 1998 “baseball card.” Courtesy Andy van Dam

1968

Andy at Brown with graphics terminal and star graphics students Rice, Carmody, and Gross. All three would also help create the Hypertext Editing System (HES). From the beginning, Andy had great fun with his students, both because that’s who he is as a person and because it leavens the hard intellectual work they do together. Courtesy Andy van Dam.

Andy demonstrating Hypertext Editing System (HES), which he and his students based on the work and help of visionary hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson. In modern terms, it felt like a word processor that also let you add and follow the kind of clickable hypertext links we use on the web. HES got newspaper and even TV coverage. Courtesy Andy van Dam

Detail of light pen on HES screen, a $200,000 (at the time!) IBM 2250 graphics terminal. Light pens served as pointing devices, like the mouse. Sponsor IBM offered to help commercialize HES, and early venture capitalists were interested, but Ted Nelson and Andy didn’t reach agreement. Courtesy Norm Meyrowitz

1969

FRESS combined and extended Andy’s favorite features from HES and Engelbart’s NLS. The most important was to follow NLS by adding multiple users, which allowed online collaboration. FRESS had an acronym, but was really named after fresser—German/Yiddish for glutton—since it was such a memory hog. It used 128K of RAM, a quarter of the IBM mainframe’s memory! Note that this screenshot is of FRESS running in an emulator on modern equipment. Courtesy Norm Meyrowitz

1974

1975

The cutting-edge Brown University Graphics System (BUGS) created by Andy and students from 1965 on included powerful custom hardware like Hal Webber’s mid-1970s Simale, pictured, to quickly calculate shapes in 3D, a basic function for manipulating 3D graphics. Simale could also handle 4D, making it popular with mathematicians. Starting in the late 1970s, Andy and his students helped spearhead the first major efforts to create international standards for computer graphics. Courtesy Hal Webber

1980

Started in the late 1970s, the Electronic Document System for Navy technicians combined visual hypertext with color graphics. Designed for teaching, it dynamically adapted its content to the student’s level and progress. Pictured is the mockup for a laptop-like reader, just a bit chunkier than the Chromebook your child may take to school today. By Gregory Lloyd – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16605568

1982

Early workstations like Apollos offered graphical displays only found on $100,000 terminals five years before. While still pricey, they let Brown’s CS department experiment with Professor Bob Sedgewick’s ideas for a fully electronic classroom, pictured—a radical idea in the early 1980s. It was the start of an initiative called the “Scholar’s Workstation.” Courtesy Andy van Dam

1983

When the Apple Macintosh made graphics affordable, Andy and Norm Meyrowitz worked with CHM’s CEO Dan’l Lewin, then at Apple, to create a discount program for student purchase. Andy’s former student Andy Hertzfeld (right, at Woz’s wedding) was a core Mac developer, and introduced Andy to Steve Jobs (left). They argued heatedly over the Mac’s lack of networking capabilities. Courtesy Andy Hertzfeld

1984

Andy cofounded IRIS (Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship) with faculty member Bill Shipp (seated) and former student Norm Meyrowitz. Their goal was bringing graphical computing to every discipline. Norm led other former students in creating hypermedia system Intermedia and later headed IRIS. Courtesy Andy van Dam

1987

Norm Meyrowitz’s cutting-edge multimedia hypertext program Intermedia was launched from IRIS. It ran under Apple UNIX on the Macintosh and inspired scholarly “webs” in English, Classics, Biology and other domains. Meyrowitz would later help pioneer Web multimedia. Courtesy Norm Meyrowitz

New Dimensions

When the internet took off in the 1990s, the once far-out clickable link Andy and Ted Nelson had demoed in 1967 became front page news. Hypertext, in the form of the web, had gone world-wide. The web itself had risen from the 1980s hypertext community first inspired by Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart, Andy, and his former students.

Meanwhile multimedia, which was reaching crisp maturity on ever-faster PCs with CD-ROM drives, got knocked back to whatever simple images and sounds could trickle over a squawking dialup connection.

As the world shifted, Andy’s army of current and former students played various roles. One set was pivotal in the new online world, from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, to adding back multimedia with Shockwave and Flash, to helping shape the fundamental language (XML) that lies behind the pages we click on today. Others, along with Andy, turned away from the small computer screen to virtual reality, and touch interfaces, and table-sized installations.

1992

Andy has been involved in dozens of startups, most notably Electronic Book Technologies with former students Steve DeRose, Greg LLoyd, Jeff Vogel, Dave Sklar and others. EBT’s products combined electronic publishing with hypertext, a novel combination at the time, and influenced XML, the language of the modern web. Courtesy Norm Meyrowitz

1995

A number of Andy’s students were hired by Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, to do rendering software, modeling, and lighting for Toy Story and other groundbreaking films. Pixar was pivotal in the computer animation revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. On this page, Catmull and Pixar investor Steve Jobs handwrote their thanks to Andy. Courtesy Andy van Dam

2004

Starting in the 1980s, Intermedia and IRIS helped kick off hypertext literature at Brown and beyond. Most works remain firmly onscreen, but pictured is celebrated avant garde novelist Robert Coover (left) within an experiment in immersive 3D hypertext literature. The environment is Brown’s room-sized Virtual Reality CAVE. Courtesy Norm Meyrowitz

2010

Annual teaching assistant (TA) dinner at Andy’s house. In the last five years the number of TAs has doubled to 45. After 56 years, Andy’s interview process for new TAs is rigorous and finely honed, but he’s also willing to take a chance on people, sometimes accepting B students who’ve worked hard. He seeks diversity in thinking as well as background. A portion of TAs go on to conduct research with Andy. Past TAs include nine heads of top CS departments, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Washington. Courtesy Andy van Dam

2013

Andy as Daenerys, Mother of Dragons from the Game of Thrones series, in skit produced by teaching assistants for his introductory computer course. Andy has appeared as a witch, a rapper, and in many other roles. Courtesy Andy van Dam

2015

2016

Dash is a browser-based hypermedia system Andy and students have developed since 2017, drawing on his 50 years of electronic media experience. The class Andy teaches with former student Norm Meyrowitz teaches students to create their own hypertext systems, and to learn hypermedia authoring in Dash. Courtesy Andy van Dam

The Art of Team-Building

When Andy started using undergraduates as teaching assistants (UTAs) and research assistants in 1965, the practice was so controversial he disguised them as “graders” for a couple of years. Five annual UTAs a year has now become 45, most helping with Andy’s giant introductory course. The program has been inclusive from the start, training many hundreds of women and other underrepresented groups. Over the years, nearly half of Andy’s TAs have been female..

New teaching assistants go through a rigorous interviewing and training process by Andy and the current head TAs. Shared activities like kayaking and skits make them a team. The skits started in the early 1970s and are always written and performed by the TAs for the class, sometimes with Andy as a cameo performer.

Each year, a few undergraduate TAs or RAs continue working with Andy as an advisor and mentor. And a few of those become his collaborators and friends, pushing forward efforts that have helped make Brown CS—and computing—what they are today.

Many educators learn with their students. But Andy has developed this into a way of life, running what amounts to a rolling research lab for the last 50 years largely based on undergraduates.

2017

Andy and his wife and daughters Scuba dived as a family; he is also an avid hiker and mountain biker. Andy has explored the outdoors with generations of former students as well, backpacking the Grand Canyon in recent years. Sharing both physical and intellectual challenges is part of how he connects as a mentor. Courtesy Andy van Dam

Tech For Good

When Andy started out in his career hypertext, graphics, and online collaboration were new. As early as the 1970s he taught about ethical issues related to computing, but going from dream to global reality brought many unintended consequences, from fake news to worries about surveillance and the digital divide.

As part of a department-wide effort Andy is now including socially responsible computing topics with every course he teaches, getting students to think about the impact on society of what they create. Together they are thinking deeply about how technologies can be more inclusive and ethical, to benefit everyone.

2019

Announcement of socially responsible computing program, Brown Computer Science Department. The program adds special ethics and social impact courses, as mentioned in the announcement here, as well as embedding specially trained STAs (tbds) in computing courses on other topics. Courtesy of Brown University

Andy van Dam has led the way in promoting technology that serves humanity, infusing generations of computer scientists with his energy and vision of ethical tech that promotes the common good. And he isn’t finished yet.

To participate in CHM’s FREE September 23 event, Visualizing A Better Future: Celebrating CHM Fellow Andy van Dam, register here.

About the 2021 CHM Fellow Awards

The 2021 CHM Fellow Awards marks the Museum’s first-ever virtual Fellow Awards. CHM will celebrate the 2021 Fellows in a yearlong four-part series of thought-provoking virtual events and engaging digital content that explores the story and impact of each honoree and the present and future of tech for humanity.

Learn more about this year’s honorees and the 2021 Fellow Awards.

Headline Sponsor 

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On March 18, 2021, in a dynamic virtual experience presented by headline sponsor Accenture, CHM celebrated Raymond Ozzie for a lifetime of work in collaborative software and software entrepreneurship. Perhaps best-known as the creator of the much-loved, early collaboration software Lotus Notes, he also built a number of other companies and succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft’s chief technology officer. The first of four Fellows to be honored this year, Ray Ozzie joins a distinguished group of tech pioneers who have been inducted into CHM’s Hall of Fellows over the last 30 years.

Accessible to a global audience for the first time, the virtual program drew attention to Ozzie’s significant contributions in computing history, explored how they’ve manifested in our digital present, and looked ahead to the future. Along the way, we heard from those Ray has touched with his kindness, empathy, integrity, leadership, and, oh yes, skills as a technologist. Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, and Mitch Kapor shared memories and tributes along with countless friends and colleagues in a very active chat feed.

In case you missed it, here are some highlights from the show. Enjoy!

How It All Started

Ray credits the opportunity to use the computer-based teaching system PLATO at the University of Illinois in the early 1970s for sparking his life-long passion for technology and what it can do to bring people together. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) gave him a glimpse into what the internet would become, with online gaming, discussion, community, and collaboration. He also had a life-altering experience collaborating remotely through PLATO with a fellow programmer who, Ray learned later, was a quadriplegic using a stick to type. Ray saw the potential of computers as different—and special—communication tools.

One of Ray’s first jobs in the early 1980s was at startup Software Arts, which produced Visicalc, the first spreadsheet application for personal computers. Cofounders and 2004 CHM Fellows Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were brilliant technologists, but more importantly for Ray, they ran the company as a family. He felt as if people cared about each other, there was no infighting, and everyone was moving in the same direction together through the ups and downs. Dan and Bob were also very generous with introductions in what was then a very small industry. It was through them that Ray met Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and his team.

Dan Bricklin offered a tribute to Ray, noting his commitment to getting into the messy details and solving hard problems to build solid foundations for products, companies, and communities.

Ray’s Lotus Notes, built in the late 1980s, was asynchronous, distributed computing with public-key encryption and security built into the design of a robust, enterprise level system. For decades it prompted users to greet “breakthrough” products and features with, “Notes had that!” Notes was a catalyst to the rapid adoption of the web and internet as we know it.

Building Teams and Companies

For most of his career, Ray worked for commercial enterprises, but the largest startup he founded was Groove Networks, which developed collaboration software. Microsoft bought the company and used the technology for SharePoint. Ray sees it as a great learning experience because he had to develop not only the technology, but also the go-to-market strategy.

Not many people know about Safecast, but it has created the largest citizen-science data set in existence today. Ray talks about its origins in the aftermath of the tsunami that resulted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. The Safecast experience morphed into Ray’s current company, Blues Wireless, which develops small connected devices to embed in products to gather transparent feedback from customers.

When Ray’s company, Groove Networks, was bought by Microsoft, Ray became a chief technology office at the tech giant. A few months later, when Bill Gates left to devote his time to his foundation, Ray split his role with Craig Mundy, and became Microsoft’s chief technology officer, where he learned firsthand about change management in a very large organization. His colleague and now Microsoft vice president of AI and research, Lili Cheng, shared her experiences working with Ray.

Lili Cheng believes that Ray’s willingness to listen, the way he builds teams, how he thinks about and lives communication, his character and spirit all contribute to his innovative style and manifests in the products he builds.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Ray offered his own tribute to the incredible people in the tech industry, who he has learned from and watched pay it forward. He is most proud, he says, of how his successful companies and products have supported and affected people in their ecosystems as customers, suppliers, and employees, allowing them to earn money to put their kids through college, meet spouses at work, or touching their lives in an indirect way.

Ray is excited about the future, focusing on opportunities for IoT technologies (internet of things) to help us monitor and understand our environment to make it better by identifying polluters, for example, or to connect people with assets and supply chains that are visible and improve customer service. He believes the pandemic accelerated fundamental changes in how we work, in healthcare, in financial systems, and more, providing opportunities for entrepreneurs to change the landscape of the future.

As we think about that future, Ray offered a look back at his private collection, reminding us where today’s technologies came from.

For a Lifetime of Achievement

Ray Ozzie has devoted his life to building software and companies that connect people, helping them to collaborate for the greater good. His innovations underpin many of the technologies that shape our lives today. Where did his passion and energy come from and where did it take him? Ray tells us in his own words.

Two special guests offered their tributes to Ray and personal stories about him. The first, a billionaire today, said that Ray saved him from becoming a bartender.

The second special guest, a tech wunderkind, remembers Ray’s phenomenal recall of the digits of Pi.

Lotus cofounder and CHM Fellow Mitch Kapor, who hired Ray and invested in Lotus Notes, presented the award. He believes that Ray’s integrity and their trust in each other were fundamental to their relationship and made all things possible.

Accepting the award, Ray thanked his “one of a kind” wife, Dawna Bousquet, for always pushing him in the direction of what makes him happy rather than the easier path, risking failure as a serial entrepreneur over the decades. Ray described how his future career was shaped in childhood in his grandfather’s workshop.

After offering his gratitude to all those who taught him technology and leadership skills, inspired him to consider the impact of innovation, and instilled in him the idea that no vision is too large to be realized, Ray offered priceless advice to young people. Building can be the purest form of activism.

With those inspiring words, the audience was invited to join in a unique demonstration of tech collaboration in the arts. The world’s first beatbox champion, Butterscotch, used words from the audience in real time to compose the lyrics of an inspiring new song with a vision for the future.

Decoding Tech, Trust, and Connection

A panel discussion moderated by legendary tech journalist and Editor-at-Large for Wired Steven Levy explored issues and implications today of the connectivity revolution that Ray helped bring into being. The panel included Microsoft Partner Researcher, founder of Data and Society, and visiting NYU professor danah boyd; tech media pioneer Esther Dyson; and Emmy-nominated writer, comedian, and activist Baratunde Thurston.

“He didn’t just do collaboration software, he actually collaborated,” said Esther Dyson of Ray Ozzie. “And, he understood that he was building the structure around collaboration among people.” But, while connectivity has given us so much, in another way we have a nightmare on our hands, noted Levy, asking the panel what have we lost from the early days of systems like PLATO. For Thurston, what’s at issue is the tremendous concentration of power.

danah boyd noted that the internet has always been used for both good and bad. Tech mirrors and magnifies the culture, which is constantly being made and remade based on the (tech) tools we have around us. We can not assume that tech tools will create the networks and the culture we want for a healthy society.

Esther Dyson pointed out that human beings are vulnerable to short-term thinking, which may not actually serve us very well as a society. The internet creates a platform for everyone to be “racing faster,” but as a culture we need to think about how to get people to resist that and think more long-term, an issue that transcends the internet. Thurston argues that the individual can no longer “just say ‘no’.” It’s not a fair fight when a person is up against concentrations of computing power and financial power using applied mathematics and behavioral science to direct our actions to what is no longer a real choice. Democracy is messy and requires engagement and negotiation, not just clicking to opt out of it. And, listen to the people who are telling us that not everything is alright for them to make a system that’s better for everyone. Dyson had an idea for how that might work: letting people pick their own algorithms.

Ray Ozzie joined the panel to share his thoughts on the evolution of the connectivity revolution that he helped to spark. For him, it’s been both foreseeable in some ways and surprising in others.

The panel as a whole echoed Ray’s hope that tool builders will work to solve the social and political problems that have developed as repercussions of the way that communications technologies have evolved. Thurston noted that the robots we feared have actually turned us into robots that serve them, with social norms mandating that we react to and manage data constantly and at high speed. Ray hopes that some entrepreneurs will start to experiment with other mechanisms and he believes the pandemic has created an opportunity for new perspectives on how we do our work, on social tools, organizational tools etc. danah boyd encourages technologists to resist designing for everyone and aim at those who resist. Esther Dyson encouraged using AI to fix problems, not mirror them. And, Levy concluded the panel by taking it back to PLATO, where it all began for Ray, hoping we can realize its vision to let us “be ourselves, connected.”

For all footage from CHM’s March 18 event, “Building a Better World through Tech for Collaboration: A Celebration of Ray Ozzie,” video extras, and related content, visit our dedicated page to 2021 CHM Fellow Ray Ozzie.

About the 2021 CHM Fellow Awards

The 2021 CHM Fellow Awards marks the Museum’s first-ever virtual Fellow Awards. CHM will celebrate the 2021 Fellows in a yearlong four-part series of thought-provoking virtual events and engaging digital content that explores the story and impact of each honoree and the present and future of tech for humanity.

Learn more about this year’s honorees and the 2021 Fellow Awards.

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