Inventing the Future

by Joe Zachary

One cold and wet September morning in Colorado, my wife and I were eating in a café a few miles east of Monarch Pass. Four motorists were reliving their harrowing drive over the pass, where it was snowing heavily.

A nearby group of men rolled their eyes and snickered. They let the entire room know that they had just come over the pass themselves, but that they had done it on motorcycles.

Smiling smugly to ourselves, my wife and I left the café. We zipped up our rain jackets and prepared to pedal our 18-speed bicycles through the snow and over the pass.

Before we could start, a lone cyclist approached. He had just crossed Monarch Pass on a rusty one-speed bicycle, a gallon jug of water hooked over one handlebar.

As at the café, so it goes when computer scientists exchange war stories about the technology of their youth. It often happens at lunch, where a graduate student might reminisce about using a 100-megahertz microprocessor connected to a flickering video monitor.

“You had a monitor?” a junior professor interrupts. “I used a printing terminal dialed up to a time-shared minicomputer.”

“You had a terminal?” a senior professor laughs. “I had to pass stacks of punched cards to the operator of a mainframe.”

A retired professor just shakes his head. “I had to wait half an hour every morning for the vacuum tubes to warm up.”

I never used vacuum tubes, but I did work as an intern at IBM in 1978. My mentor there showed me a program he had written at the beginning of his career. Looking back, he told me, it seemed impossible that he had written it using the primitive tools of the mid-1950s. My mentor also said that he had loved his job at first, but had started to get depressed after 18 months because he had begun to fear that, before long, every possible program would be written, and there wouldn’t be anything left for him to do.

Computer scientists have always done amazing things with existing technology, and we have always struggled against the notion that we have reached the “end of history.” A typical person looks 10 years ahead and envisions doing the same things with computers as today but expects that computers will be more convenient, less time consuming, or less expensive. A computer scientist knows that applications of computing that are deemed too inconvenient, too time consuming, or too expensive today may be perfectly feasible in 10 years. The challenge is to invent and experiment with those applications now. The best computer scientists have made spectacular leaps beyond the status quo to realize a future that no one else was able to see.

Ivan Sutherland invented the graphical user interface in 1963, five years before joining the U’s computer science faculty. At a time when punch cards were the standard way of interacting with computers, he created the groundbreaking Sketchpad system. With Sketchpad, a user could produce graphical images directly on a computer screen using a handheld light pen. It would be another 20 years before computers with graphical user interfaces became widely available.

Alan Kay graduated from the U in 1969 with a Ph.D. in computer science. A few years later, at a time when computers were massive machines shared by hundreds of users, he came up with the idea of the laptop computer. Unable to build a laptop with 1970s technology, he instead collaborated on the design of the Alto, the first networked personal computer. Kay and his colleagues at the Xerox Corporation then built and used networks of Altos, inventing the office of a future that would arrive 20 years later.

I have been teaching computer science at the U since 1987, and during that time the technology has changed, not just somewhat, but completely, and several times over.

My colleagues and I teach our students how to apply current technology, but our bigger challenge has always been to prepare them to contribute to the rolling revolution that is computer science. One way we do this is by bringing them into labs, providing them with a massive amount of computer power, and inviting them to let their imaginations run wild.

I don’t know what computers will be like in 20 years, but here are two safe predictions: First, today’s computers will be regarded as positively primitive in comparison. Second, alumni from the U’s School of Computing will still be in the forefront.

I can hardly wait to sit down with them to lunch.

—Joe Zachary is a professor in the U's School of Computing.

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