Two realities II, part 3 of 8

Two realities II, part 3 of 8

M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 2001                                [ ]

p.198
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.

   ([ 
   ARPA-IPTO
   information processing technique office (IPTO)
   www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_ipto.htm
   1962-1984 (22 years) 
 ])
p.353
ARPA-style communication
..., the challenge had been to maintain a sense of common purpose among research groups scattered across a continent. 
principal investigators' meeting
graduate-student conferences

p.353
And his solution now, at PARC, was to do the same thing, but more frequently: once a week the computer group would assemble, someone would talk about his work for an hour or so, and then the others would have at him. Taylor considered these meetings so important, in fact, that he made them mandatory, the one thing that CSL members actually HAD to do. Visitors from the other labs were welcome, but for CSL, Tuesdays at 11:00 A.M. were sacrosanct. 

p.353
He even let the speakers set the rules for how each meeting would proceed, much as a card dealer could call the game in Las Vegas; thus their nickname, Dealer Meetings. And when the arguments got heated, which they often did, the minister's son would do his best to convert a “class one” disagreement--one in which the combatants were simply yelling at each other--into a “class two” disgreement, in which each side could explain the other side's position to the other side's satisfaction. You don't have to BELIEVE the other guy, he would tell them. You just have to give a fair account of what he's saying. And it worked. 

pp.353-354
As one CSL member later explained it, Taylor's class one/class two exercise was amazingly effective at clarifying unspoken assumptions and ferreting out facts that one person knew and another didn't. 

p.354
“So by the time you get done”, he said, “you all know the same set of things, and you end up concluding the same thing.”4  
p.481
4. Quoted in Smith and Alexander, Fumbling the Future, 79. 
5. Quoted in Dennis Sasha and Cathy Lazere, Out of Their Mind: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientist (New York: Copernicus, 1995), 39. 

   (Waldrop, M. Mitchell.; The dream machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal / M. Mitchell Waldrop., 1. Licklider, J. C. R., 2. microcomputers--history, 2001,   ) 
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