1965 Stanford University Bachelor of Science, Mathematics
2005- Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale, CA
Vice President, User Experience and Design
Yahoo! Research Fellow
< Oversee the company’s user experience activities.
< Contribute to strategic innovations.
2001-2005 Amazon.com Seattle, WA
Vice President, Shopping Experience
< Created and managed the usability group.
< Managed various service teams, including data mining, market research and the data warehouse.
< Managed various product development teams.
1997-2001 Stagecast Software, Inc. Redwood City, CA
Co-Founder & President
< Raised $6 million from venture capital firms and professional investors.
< Managed product development, marketing, sales, and business development.
< Released two award-winning versions of an innovative education software product.
< When the market was proven to be too small, downsized to a breakeven level and departed.
1980-1997 Apple Computer, Inc. Cupertino, California
4/93-8/97 Vice President & Chief Scientist
= Negotiated license to bundle Netscape Navigator with Macintosh systems.
= Negotiated license to include Java in all Apple operating systems.
= Chaired meetings of the company’s fellows and principals
= Led the corporate strategy team for technical markets
= Managed development teams of 2 to 100 people, including:
3/97–8/97 VP, Advanced Technology
= Disbanded the research group I’d run from 1986-90, rescuing two worthwhile programs, QuickTime for Java and what became the Search Kit, which powers Sherlock, Help, etc.
3/96–2/97 VP, AppleNet Division
= Ran a profitable product division.
= Sold the Apple Internet Mail Server (AIMS) to QualComm; they renamed it the Eudora Internet Mail Server (EIMS).
= Products included:
Apple Internet Server Solution 2.0, 3.0
Apple Internet Connection Kit 1.0, 1.1, 1.2
1/95–9/95 VP, Advanced Development, Apple Online Services
= Managed teams in Cupertino, CA and Boulder, CO.
= Developed prototype Internet-based eWorld replacement.
9/92-4/93 VP, Engineering, PIE Division
= Completed an alpha version of Newton software on prototype hardware.
4/90-9/92 VP, Advanced Products
= Managed Newton hardware and software engineering.
= Redefined the Newton PDA, reducing cost by a factor of eight and weight by a factor of five.
= Persuaded Apple’s Board to invest in ARM, a joint venture with Acorn Computers and VLSI Technology. Apple’s profit on their $2.5 million investment was $700 million.
= Recruited and managed the Newton marketing team.
= Signed Sharp Corporation to manufacture the first Newton and sell their branded version.
10/86-3/90 VP, Advanced Technology
= Grew an advanced development team from 30 people in Cupertino, CA to 200 people in Cupertino, Los Angeles, Cambridge, MA and Columbia, MD.
= Responsible for:
Õ identifying and demonstrating new technologies, interfaces, architectures, and standards
Õ transfer of ripe technology into product development
Õ internal and external research for business, technical, and educational computing
Õ management of the Apple Fellows, the company’s most senior technologists
Õ operation of the corporate library, supercomputer facility, and IT security
= Managed numerous technology projects that resulted in products, including:
Õ HyperCard, Bill Atkinson’s innovative hypermedia authoring tool
Õ AppleScript, still Apple’s preferred application scripting language
Õ QuickTime, still Apple’s strategic multimedia standard
Õ Magic Cap (spun out to General Magic)
= Expanded Apple's R&D program into new areas such as animation, 3-D graphics, speech synthesis, massively parallel systems, distributed computing, and scientific visualization.
1986 Director, Advanced Development
= Successfully handed off technologies that resulted in products, including:
Õ MacApp 2.0. Adobe used it to develop Photoshop for the Mac
Õ Macintosh II technologies: video card; API’s for color graphics and sound.
= Member of the team that almost licensed the Mac OS to Apollo Computer
1983-86 Manager, Object-Oriented Systems
= Led a staff of seven in the development of Clascal, the Lisa Tool Kit, Object Pascal, and MacApp 1.0, all of which became Apple products.
= The Lisa Tool Kit and MacApp were the first commercial object-oriented frameworks.
= Compugraphic used the Lisa Tool Kit to develop the world’s first desktop publishing application.
1980-83 Section Manager, Lisa Applications Software
= Built and managed a team of twenty software engineers and managers.
= Brought the Lisa Office System from conception to completion (except for integration and final testing) in two years, including LisaWrite/Draw/Graph/Calc, the desktop, the window manager, and the graphics package (QuickDraw).
= Designed and implemented the Lisa Alert Manager.
= Conceived LisaProject (progenitor of MacProject) and contracted out its implementation.
= Chaired the committee that prioritized user interface changes.
= Personally tested the Lisa user interface in one-on-one trials with thirty users.
= Ran user tests for a mouse designed by Hovey-Kelley (an IDEO predecessor) to improve their mouse button and cord (PDF).
Members of the teams I led at Apple included:
= Steve Perlman, cofounder of WebTV, now CEO of Rearden Studios
= Brad Silverberg, former Microsoft executive
= David Nagel, former CEO of PalmSource
= Shane Robison, EVP/CSO/CTO of HP
= Marc Porat, cofounder and former CEO of General Magic
= Tom Malloy, VP of advanced technology at Adobe Systems
= Reid Hoffman, founder and CEO of LinkedIn
= Bill Atkinson, developer of MacPaint and HyperCard and co-founder of General Magic
= Alan Kay, former Apple Fellow and HP Senior Fellow
= Kent Beck, pioneer in software design patterns and extreme programming
= Toby Farrand, CTO of Digeo
1973-1980 Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Member of the Research Staff
= Conducted research in object-oriented systems and computer-aided publishing.
= As an outspoken proponent of the modeless user interface, interactive page makeup, and microprocessor-based personal computers, wrote position papers for management and implemented prototypes of each technology.
= Proposed concepts that have become central to the graphical user interface (GUI), including:
Õ the use of icons in a human interface to a filing system (1973 with Jeff Rulifson, inspired by a suggestion in a semiotics text) [first implemented in 1975 by David C. Smith in Pygmalion]
Õ the pop-up menu (1974) [first implemented in 1975 by William Newman and Dan Ingalls]
Õ the raster-copy primitive (1973) [first implemented in 1974 as part of BitBLT by Dan Ingalls]
Õ the select-and-type, cut-and-paste, modeless user interface (1973) [first implemented in Gypsy in 1974-75 in collaboration with Tim Mott]
Õ the event loop used in applications to implement a modeless interface (1974) [ibid]
Õ a technique for italicizing text as it is displayed (1974) [ibid]
Õ menu items containing type-in fields (1974): a progenitor of today's dialog box [ibid]
= Developed low-cost user interface testing techniques that were adopted and enhanced by others at Xerox and Apple and are now used throughout the industry (1973-74)
= Contributed to the design and implementation of the Smalltalk object-oriented programming system, including:
Õ the browser, debugger, inspector, and performance analyzer (1976), which comprised the user interface of the first graphical IDE (integrated development environment)
Õ improved versions of the compiler and decompiler (1979)
= Consulted to the System Development Division on the Xerox Star user interface and DBMS.
= Conducted a market research study on computer typesetting of music.
= Acted as project lead for the debugging of Notetaker (1978), a portable multi-processor Smalltalk machine, and for the development of its Ethernet interface. Contributed to the hardware design.
1968-1973 Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Research Assistant
< Participated in original research in artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, natural language representation and symbolic programming languages.
< Designed and implemented PUB, an early and powerful scriptable markup language (1971). It produced paginated documents with front and back matter and cross-references.
4/68-7/68 Systems Concepts Santa Monica, CA
Software Engineer
< Designed and implemented the first version of the SDS Sigma 7 macro assembler.
1963-1968 Information Processing Corporation Palo Alto, CA
Founder and President
< Managed up to four employees in a closely held software company, the fourth or fifth “data processing” company in the Palo Alto phone book.
< Co-developed a successful investment analysis product for real estate agents.
< Developed technical and administrative software under contract, including:
= for Tymshare: a compacting storage allocator
= for SRI: a simulation of nuclear fallout
= for Stanford University Clinics and the San Jose School District: room-scheduling tools
= for various clients at Stanford: statistical, engineering and text-analysis applications
= for Hewlett-Packard: systems software for an early real-time computer
1962-1964 Stanford University
Research Assistant
< Developed software for biochemical research, including a program to display organic molecular structures on the CRT of a LINC (the first personal computer) in the lab of Josh Lederberg.
< Developing the output formatter for SUBALGOL, a dialect of ALGOL-60.
1997- Stagecast Software, Inc. Burlingame, CA
1998-2004 ARM Holdings plc Cambridge, England
1990-1997 ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) Holdings, ltd Cambridge, England (co-founder)
Negotiated the spinout of the ARM microprocessor development team from Acorn Computers plc. Acorn had designed the ARM and was the only company using it in products. Recruited the ARM CEO, Robin Saxby. Advised management as a board member for 13 years. ARM has become the world’s leading microprocessor intellectual property design and licensing company.
2000- The Gorilla Foundation Woodside, CA
1991-1994 Computer Science & Telecommunications Board Washington, DC
1976-1978 Peninsula School Menlo Park, CA
< USPTO #5390281, #5477447, #5621903, #5644735, #6236396 (Apple Newton)
< Several others pending, including:
o 20060167757 (automated selection of products for online comparison)
< Super Techies: Larry Tesler–the trail from Xerox PARC to Yahoo by Dan Farber, ZDNet video program, July 16, 2007, first interview in the series
< Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer, New Riders, 2006. One of 10 interviews.
< Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge, MIT Press, 2006. One of 40 interviews.
< "Of Modes and Men", profile by Tekla Perry, IEEE Spectrum 42:8 (Aug. 2005), pp. 48-53.
< The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely, PBS video documentary, 1996, episode 2: "Riding the Bear."
< “An interview with Wayne Rosing, Bruce Daniels, and Larry Tesler: a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple’s Lisa” by Chris Morgan, Gregg Williams and Phil Lemmons, Byte (1983, issue 2), pp. 90-114.
< "A CHI Retrospective: 1962-1982" (slide show from lecture), SIGCHI Puget Sound Chapter (June 2004), Seattle, WA.
= Personal stories and insights gained from that early period of user interface history.
< "A case study in the design of a text editor" (tutorial), SIGGRAPH 80 (Jul. 1980).
= How Tim Mott and I had designed Gypsy back in 1974-75. Excerpts appear on slides 28-39 of the aforementioned CHI Retrospective.
< "Early Raster Animation: The Stanford Card Stunt Program" (clip from lecture, with Larry Breed, Bob Herriot and Don Wise), Bay Area Computer History Perspectives (May 1994), Cupertino, CA.
= Breed & Earl Boebert (1961) created the first bit-mapped animation language. I (1962-63) and a team led by Barry Flachsbart (1964-65) made it usable by non-programmers. Herriot (1967) improved the area-fill algorithm. Wise kept the software working until 1970.
< "Object-oriented user interfaces and object-oriented languages” (keynote address), Proc. of the 1983 ACM SIGSMALL symposium on Personal and small computers (Dec. 1983), pp. 3-5.
= The advantages of implementing what I dubbed a “direct drive” user interface in an object-oriented language. Compares and contrasts Smalltalk with Clascal and the Lisa Tool Kit.
< "Novice programming comes of age" (with David C. Smith and Allen Cypher), Chapter 1 of Your Wish is My Command: Programming by Example, Henry Lieberman, ed., Morgan Kaufmann (2000).
< “The Smalltalk-80 compiler” in Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation, Goldberg & Robson, Addison-Wesley (1983).
< “Interactive Image Analysis of Borehole Televiewer Data” (with C.A. Barton and M.D. Zoback), in the Proc. of the Symposium on the Application of Geophysics to Engineering and Environmental Problems, Knoxville, TN. (Mar. 1991), pp. 211-232; reprinted in Automated pattern analysis in petroleum exploration, I. Palaz and S.K. Sengupta (eds.), Springer-Verlag (1992), pp. 223-248.
< "TinyTalk, a subset of Smalltalk-76 for 64KB microcomputers" (with Kim McCall), Proc. of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium (Sep. 1980), pp. 197-198.
= PARC’s Notetaker was possibly the first 8086-based, and the first portable, computer.
< "The LISP70 pattern matching system" (with Horace Enea and David C. Smith), Third Int'l Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (Aug. 1973), pp. 671–676.
= An elegant language suitable for the programming of translators and rule-based systems.
< "A conceptual dependency parser for natural language" (with Roger Schank), Proc. of the 1969 conference on computational linguistics (Sep. 1969), pp. 1-3.
< "A conceptual parser for natural language" (with Roger Schank), First IJCAI (May 1969), pp. 569–578.
< "Experiments with a search algorithm for the data base of a human belief structure" (with Ken Colby and Horace Enea), First IJCAI (May 1969), pp. 649–654.
= An early paper on knowledge representation.
< "Analysis for 'pure–aggregation' strata" (with Lincoln Moses et al), Chapter 6 of The National Halothane Study, Bunker JP, Forrest WH, Mosteller F, Vandam LD., eds., US Government Printing Office (1969), pp. 328–350.
= A new statistical method for analyzing rare outcomes.
< "A language design for concurrent processes" (with Horace Enea), Proc. of the AFIPS SJCC 32 (1968), pp. 403–408.
= Compel was the first data flow language. This paper introduced the single assignment concept, later adopted in other languages: see “A parallel programming model with sequential semantics” (thesis) by John Thornley, California Institute of Technology (May 1966), pp.13-14 (pp. 30-31 of the postscript file).
< "A directed graph representation for computer simulation of belief systems" (with Horace Enea and Ken Colby), Mathematical Biosciences 2 (Feb. 1968), pp. 19–40.
= An early proposal for a semantic network representation of knowledge, and a graph-processing language, GRAPPLE.
< "Nonrecursive adaptive integration" (with Bill McKeeman), Communications of the ACM (CACM) 6 (June 1963), Algorithm 182.
= Became a standard numerical technique.
< "Programming by example: novice programming comes of age" (with David C. Smith and Allen Cypher), CACM 43:3 (Mar. 2000).
< "Networked Computing in the 1990’s", Scientific American (Sep. 1991), pp. 86-93.
= An invited speculation on trends in networked computing.
< "Object-Oriented Languages: Programming Experiences", Byte 11:8 (Aug. 1986), pp. 195-206.
= Lessons on methodology gleaned from interviews with neophytes.
< "Object Pascal Report", Structured Language World 9, 3 (1985), pp. 10-15.
= A formal specification of Apple's object-oriented extension to the Pascal language.
= Cited on p. 15 of “Recollections about the development of Pascal” by Niklaus Wirth in The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (1993).
< "Programming Languages", Scientific American 251 (Sep. 1984), pp. 70–78.
= An introductory article illustrating the diversity of programming languages.
< "Personal computers are coming to campus", Proceedings of the ACM 12th annual computer science conference SIGCSE symposium (Jan. 1984), pp. 49-50.
= Apple’s view.
< “Enlisting user help in software design” in SIGCHI Bulletin 14:3 (Jan. 1983). Originally presented at ACM 82 during a panel, "People-Oriented Systems, Revisited” (Lorraine Borman, moderator). Excerpts appear on slides 40-41 of A CHI Retrospective 1962-1982.
< "The Smalltalk Environment", Byte 6 (Aug. 1981), pp. 90–147.
= A frequently cited article about browsing and the modeless user interface.
< "Personal
computing: problems of the 80's" (with Portia Isaacson, Robert
Gammill, Richard Heiser, Adam Osborne, and Jim Warren) in Proc. of the
Oregon Report on Computing in the 1980s (Mar.
1978); Computer 11
(Sep. 1978), pp. 86–96; ACM SIGPC Notes, 1:3 (Sep. 1978),
pp. 46-55.
= A surprisingly prescient report.
< Papers in the proceedings of the first two West Coast Computer Faires (1977–78).
< Several articles in People's Computers (1977–78).
< The Smalltalk Browser is described in:
o “A Metaphor for User-Interface Design” by Adele Goldberg and David Robson in Proceedings of the Twelfth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 6, 1 (1979), pp. 148 thru 157.
o Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment by Adele Goldberg, Addison-Wesley, 1983.
o The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan Kay, p. 36, also published as a chapter in History of Programming Languages, Volume 2, edited by Thomas J. Bergin and Richard G. Gibson, Addison-Wesley Professional (1992).
< Descendants of the Smalltalk Browser include:
o class browsers in many IDE’s
o browser controls and the File Viewer in NeXTStep
o “as Columns” view in the Mac OS X Finder
< "Microcomputer user interface toolkits: the commercial state-of-the-art" (panel with Bill Buxton, David Reed, and Scott MacGregor), Proc. of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (Apr. 1985), p. 225.
= Presented MacApp, Apple’s second object-oriented framework.
< Lisa ToolKit source code (1984) [PDF]
< "PUB––the document compiler" (manual), Stanford A. I. Project Operating Note 70 (Sep. 1972).
= A dialect of Algol–60 to format documents for electronic publishing, it featured automatic numbering, headings, multiple columns, figures, footnotes, front and back matter generation, and cross–references. The program was popular at universities in the 1970's.
< Mentions of pangram generation software developed in 1984 to solve a puzzle devised by Lee Sallows:
o “Computer Recreations” by A. K. Dewdney, Scientific American 252, 1 (1985) pp. 10-13.
o Self-enumerating pangrams by Eric Wassenaar (1999).
o Self-ref Letters and SRL Solution (2005).
o Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books (1996), p. 392.
< Six recollections by Andy Hertzfeld in Folklore reprinted in Revolution in The Valley by Andy Hertzfeld, O’Reilly (2004).
= My involvement in the development of the Apple Macintosh.
< “Past, Present and Future of Smalltalk” by Peter Deutsch in ECOOP'89: Proceedings of the 1989 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (British Computer Society Workshop Series) edited by Stephen Cook, Cambridge University Press (1989).
= Discusses the Smalltalk Browser that I developed in 1976.
< Other mentions in works about Silicon Valley history, innovation and design, e.g.:
= Books:
Õ Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
Õ The second coming of Steve Jobs
Õ Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration
Õ About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design
Õ Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation
Õ Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer
Õ History of Programming Languages, Volume 2
Õ What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
= Articles:
Õ The Early History Of Smalltalk
Õ Inside the PARC: the 'information architects’
Õ Inventing the Lisa (and Macintosh) Interface.
< Tesler's Law of Conservation of Complexity (ca. 1984). Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it--the user, the application developer, or the platform developer? For details, see Dan Saffer's interview.
< Tesler's Theorem (ca. 1970). As commonly quoted: Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn't been done yet or Artificial Intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet. What I actually said was: Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet. The theorem is cited in this SlashDot discussion and in these books:
o Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books (1979, updated 1999), p. 601
o Foundations of Computer Technology by Alexander John Anderson, CRC Press (1994), p. 395
o Real-Time Systems Engineering and Applications edited by Michael Schiebe and Saskia Pferrer, Springer (1992), p. 398
<
The word modeless
to mean a user interface in which the user is never “stuck” in a mode (ca.
1970). Others, including Alan Kay, began to use the term with the same meaning
at around the same time. An early example was the Gypsy text editor
(1974) that I developed with Tim Mott at PARC. See also About Face 3: The Essentials of
Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann and David Cronin, Wiley
(2007), p. 425.
< The term friendly user interface (ca. 1974). The first known usage in a publication was "The Office of the Future", Business Week (30 June 1975), p. 48. An earlier unpublished usage is cited in a quote by Robin Kinkead in Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder, Morgan Kaufmann (2003), p. 47.
< The word browser (1976) to mean a point-and-click information navigation window. The first known window to bear that name was the multi-paned Smalltalk Browser (1976) that I developed to navigate through a source code hierarchy.
< Association for Computing Machinery
Updated 28 October 2007
