O'NEILL: While this committee was coming up with the report, did you have discussions with the people on the committee about these issues? I mean, was it active...?
CLARK: You mean, were the committee meetings active? Well, yes and no. As I recall the sort of case study proposals of how well things would work if we only had this kind of stuff, and so forth. I tried to point out that it was going to be very hard to do real-time work, or even non-real-time, but display work, for displays. You see, the image
in mind was that of a typewriter, or teletype machine actually, as the principle means of interacting with this timesharing machine. And that's very limited. But there was other work going on at the time with these displays starting with WHIRLWIND and through MTC and TX-0 and TX-2, all of them display-based machines - screen display, CRT.
And that was going to be nearly impossible to do, even on a very small scale, on a few displays, on a time-sharing basis with the technology we had at the time. And I thought that would be a loss because I knew very well that that is your principle means of interacting with a computer if you start to do any kind of interactive work. But the committee was not interested in hearing stuff like that.
O'NEILL: Did they respond at all to your objections?CLARK: Not so much. I think they were simply swept aside or tucked in the, "Yes, that's an interesting consideration," department.
pp13
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Here is Clark's eureka moment where he conceived of the design that would become the Internet:
CLARK: Oh, yes, I mostly heard all of these people talking about the various problems, and maybe for the first time and not with that much zeal, and was quiet for most of the meeting, if not all of the meeting. But toward the end, just before we broke up, I do remember suddenly realizing what the meta-problem was. They hadn't quite realized what they had, all of the proponents of the network. And so, I must have lit up in some way that caught Larry's attention.
No, I passed him a note; that's what I did, I passed him a note saying that I thought I saw how to solve the problem. So they collared me once we left the meeting and wanted to hear about it. I just suddenly realized the fairly obvious thing that they had an n-squared (n2) interaction problem within computer nodes, and that that was the wrong way to go about it. It would be hard to fund and control, and everything else.
And so, the idea was to simply define the network to be something self-contained without those n nodes... without those n ARPA-supported big computers,
they had a number of PDP-10s, as I remember. I think that was PDP-10s time, I am not sure. But, in any case, leave them out; put them outside the network. They weren't part of the network, the network was everything from there in,
and that should be around a single, common message-handling instrument of some kind, so that the design of that instrument and all of the lines were under central control - ARPA central control. They could fund it, get projects started to design the parts, define its finest characteristics and so forth. You had from n to only one interactions, translations, or protocol translations, or whatever to get on the network, and one more to get off, instead of nsquared. Because they were all talking different requirements, and timings, and concerns and so forth.
pp29
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The question "Who really invented the personal computer?" is really not the point. Clark was certainly among the very small group who were there at the inception. It was the conditions, the values of the times that is really most interesting, and relevent to this day.
HSome of the statements that Clark made that are quoted above are unverified, and could be considered self serving and distorted, except for one thing. He never sought any acclaim or reward for what he had contributed. Once again, I don't claim to have had a friendship with him, much to my loss; but he never showed a hint of arrogance. I even had a few discussions with him about computer technology, assuming we were sort of at the same level. He never disabused me of this conceit, as others may have.
The earliest development of the technologies that paved the way for the technological advances that we now take for granted were done in the open source era. Until recently computer code could not be patented, only copyrighted. This is a major difference, as the ideas were in the public domain, but only the exact wording was owned by the writer. The restrictions of patented code (details here) , would make advances such as Clark's much more difficult.
His work was not isolated incidents of his mind, but the long slog of insight enhanced by coordinated effort of a group of talented people. This kind of achievement, probably more representative of most advances, does not lend itself to dramatic narrative, but just may be the way our complex world continues to improve.
I believe from my limited knowledge that Wesley A. Clark has lived a full life,-and continues to do so- and never felt any remorse that his insights have created the road for hundreds of people to become billionaires, while he is remains somewhere in the middle class. Most importantly, his life and work gives the lie to the conservative myth that creative invention would not happen without the incentive of amassing vast fortunes.
This has become a self fulfilling prophecy that obviates the ever greater personal satisfaction that comes with creating artifacts that benefit our world. It cheapens and debases us all, distorting our personal values while doing grave damage to our system of economic rewards.
I believe Wesley would share this view.
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