None of us is free until we are all free.

— Freada Kapor Klein

Can investing in startups that close opportunity gaps for communities of color and low-income groups also be good business? Or are the two goals mutually exclusive?

Venture capitalists and social activists Freada Kapor Klein and Mitchell Kapor explored these questions on stage at CHM, along with Liz Carey, executive VP of finance and operations at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The discussion was moderated by Troy Cosey, head of platform for Kapor Center Investments.

The Equity Gap

When did they realize that the equity gap was a problem? For Freada, who believes we’re all interconnected, equity has always been a concern. Mitch admitted that as an angel investor he initially worried about missing hot deals when Freada convinced him to invest in line with his values, but he agreed to try it.

Liz said, “There are things that you can’t unsee.” Her personal experience as a queer woman in finance meant she was often in meetings where there was no one else like her. It made her wonder who else was being left out of decision making and the opportunities being lost. In fact, according to Troy, a recent McKinsey study showed that companies in the top quartile of racial or ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial outcomes better than their peers.

The Kapors decided to run an experiment to see what would happen if they only invested in companies they thought would do well economically and that also closed gaps for low-income communities or communities of color.

Debunking Conventional “Wisdom”

Mitch says the experiment has demonstrated how conventional wisdom is misguided. That so-called wisdom separates “regular investments” from “impact sideshows.” But, he notes, all companies have an impact on the economy, the environment, and quality of life and many increase the gap between the haves and have-nots. He believes you’re part of the problem if you’re not asking questions like: “What’s the core purpose of the business? If it succeeds, who is going to be better off and who is not?” The engine of value creation for the business must simultaneously create both economic value and social impact so they can’t be separated. The more business the company does, the more positive impact it has.

Liz believes in the “Hippocratic oath” of investing: Do no harm, and when you can add value. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a grantmaking organization with a mission to improve life in Silicon Valley. If they deploy capital to close equity gaps, that makes their work easier.

It’s important to think about the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem, not just founders and funders, but also the limited partners—the funders of the funders, says Troy. Mitch has strong feelings about that.

Liz noted that there are gatekeepers and systems of due diligence for institutional investors that prevent them from undertaking equity investing, which cuts off opportunity. Freada is hopeful that a new bill requiring endowment transparency will help people like university alums learn who manages the money they donate to their alma mater and where it’s being invested.

Accountable Solutions

Assumptions must be challenged in order to enable women and people of color to get their startups funded.

Mitch says one solution is to counteract the “clubby” networks in Silicon Valley by doing away with the requirement for a “warm intro”—meaning that a founder must get introduced to an investor by someone else in the investor’s circle. At Kapor Capital, anyone can apply for funding through a simple form that asks questions about how a business will close equity gaps. They receive several thousand applicants a year and have funded companies who applied through this channel.

Bias appears in other ways too. If someone has a mountain of debt, working for a startup for little or no pay is not an option. Kapor Capital helps employees pay down education loans. Freada is skeptical of pedigrees because they are proxies for privilege. Instead, she is interested in a founder’s “distance traveled.” She wants to know where someone started in life and where have they landed solely due to their own efforts. To help close equity gaps, Liz helps founders understand why they didn’t get funded.

To ensure that they’re accountable for closing equity gaps themselves and helping to move the field, Liz and her team updated their investment policy document. Now 1/3 of the firm is managed by a diverse manager.

Kapor Capital uses a “Founder’s Commitment.” Founders sign a pledge to build diverse teams and inclusive cultures or they don’t get a check. They must ask themselves who their customers are and recruit a team that reflects them. Because they believe that who writes the check affects who gets the check, the firm is also now run by Mitch and Freada’s two younger partners, and their latest fund is currently one of the largest Black-led VC funds. To recruit diverse partners, they recommend that VCs post open positions rather than recruiting from their networks.

Change takes a long time, says Mitch, but hope is a discipline. Look for ways you can make a difference and, in Liz’s words, “keep pushing forward.”

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Techno-Optimism

Expanding on key issues from his new book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, cowritten with AI chatbot GPT-4, Hoffman noted that while AI is often seen as a threat, it can also amplify whatever we create to elevate humanity. Imagine a medical assistant on every smartphone or a tutor for every age on every subject. It may be an existential risk, but AI may also be the only thing that can help solve pandemics or climate change.

Impromptu is Reid Hoffman’s latest book, cowritten with GPT-4.

Hoffman describes himself as a techno-optimist rather than a techno-utopian. He also believes the term “homo techne” should replace “homo sapiens” to reflect how humans have evolved through their technology: fire, the wheel, the printing press, electricity, and now AI. We must go beyond the fear of new technology so that we can shape it, because it in turn shapes us.

Working with chatbot GPT-4 to write a book was “amazing and delightful,” says Hoffman. Focusing on current discourse around AI, he explored how it could help us to become more human.

Hoffman says the book can provide ideas about how to use prompting to get results from GPT-4. He recommends trying it out for something that matters to you. You just might be surprised.

IQ, EQ, and AI

Technologists tend to worry about super-intelligent robots, Hoffman notes, rather than the more real threat of AI used by terrorists or criminals. We must put guardrails around AI to prevent that kind of misuse of its intelligence.

Anyone who has talked with a chatbot knows it can deliver on providing information. Sympathy or helpful advice? Not so much. Inflection AI, cofounded by Hoffman, has created PI, which stands for “Personal AI,” is designed to be a new class of AI—one with emotional intelligence that he hopes can help us solve problems along the way to becoming more of who aspire to be as human beings. AI’s access to information to solve problems has great potential.

What about…?

The audience was most concerned about AI in journalism and information, and most excited about its possibilities for work, the economy, and education. Hoffman shares concerns about journalism and worries that AI can help hackers like the Russians use open-source models to spread dissent and discord during the 2024 election. He believes that AI itself can help to deal with the disruption it will cause for workers. And, AI can help make education and tutoring more widely available, as well as improve other areas of social justice.

AI will change many jobs and certainly displace some people. For example, trucks cause 40,000 deaths per year in the US, and AI can get that number down to 1,000 with autonomous drivers. In other jobs, the hope is that AI can take on more of the “boring” rote work while humans focus on the more interesting and creative elements. Teachers would be freed to spend more time with individual students, for instance. And we’ll need AI to fill gaps when the Boomers retire.

So what will we do if AI relieves us of so much work? Hoffman isn’t worried about the “overabundance utopia.” Looking 10 years into the future, he believes we’ll all have a personal intelligence assistant to help us navigate many aspects of our lives. We will use AI devices for drug discovery and medicine at a speed and quality we’ve never seen before. And, perhaps AI will have helped us make a dent in climate change. Deep Mind saved Google 15% when it analyzed suggested reconfiguring electricity flows for all the company’s data centers. If we apply that kind of analysis to all buildings, city grids, and power utilization, AI might just save humanity.

Want to learn more? Download Impromptu for free.

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Here are some highlights from the three-part event.

The Survey Says . . .

CHM’s Vice President of Innovation Marguerite Gong shared the results of a survey of a representative sample of 1,600 adults nationwide. A series of questions resulted in eight primary insights.

The survey results focused the event discussions in three primary areas: a broad view about technology, news, and a free press in a digital world; national news, local news, and the ways they inform each other; and, how innovators are creating, delivering, and sharing news in novel ways with the help of technology.

A Free Press in a Digital World

Richard Gingras, vice president of news at Google, took the audience back to 1791, when the First Amendment was established. At that time, people shared ideas through the printing press, and it took weeks or even months for debates to reach a national stage. Technological advances like the telegraph, radio, and television allowed voices to carry faster and farther, but publishing information was the privilege of the few.

That changed in the 1990s, when the internet revolutionized communication and enabled anyone to share their voice in the public square. It also changed how people are informed, how they form opinions, and how they perceive the world and each other.

Along with technological advances like generative AI that can potentially serve the information needs of local communities as well as spread misinformation, Gingras notes that journalism must adapt to changing media forms and the different ways that people communicate and understand society, including through social media. The political sphere has adapted the internet’s capabilities to speak to voters and build alliances more quickly and effectively than journalism, resulting in the rise of authoritarians and the demise of democracies.

We’re at a seminal point in the role of our digital societies and the role of the press in them, says Gingras. We should admit that what we’re actually concerned about is not the dangers of machines, but of ourselves.

National and Local News

Chris Shipley, author and curator of Newsgist, moderated a panel that featured Cheryl Phillips, the founder of Big Local News at Stanford University and David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. They discussed how to build trust with local communities and fill information gaps.

For Walmsley, community engagement in a large country like Canada, with a population dispersed over six time zones, poses challenges.

Walmsley uses social media’s free platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, to improve accessibility to the newspaper’s trusted brand. Social media also allows the paper to offer news and information in a way that is more attractive or comfortable to people like young women.

Cheryl Phillips’ Big Local News collects and aggregates local data like school enrollment and police stops to create large datasets. The local data provides a good sense of what’s happening that needs to be addressed by a local government, and the larger dataset can be used to identify patterns that call for policy changes at the federal level.

So, asked moderator Chris Shipley, how do newspapers and journalists regain people’s trust today? Walmsley believes it’s important to share and explain your methodology—talk about how you chose the stories you did, for example, and why you declined others. Journalists must explain the effort that goes into the news. Phillips says its crucial to ask people exactly what information they want to see and give it to them—sometimes it might just be unvarnished facts on which they can take action rather than beautiful, comprehensive graphics of all the data that’s been collected.

Hyper-local News

Dawn Garcia, director of the John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, moderated a panel featuring alumni of the program who spoke about the innovative models and the technology they use to help keep diverse communities engaged and informed.

Venture philanthropist Tracie Powell is the founder and CEO of The Pivot Fund. She invests in community-based, grassroots newsrooms, particularly those led by and for people of color, helping them scale their work to reach more audiences and generate revenue to become more sustainable.

Maritza Félix founded Conecta Arizona during the pandemic to debunk misinformation. What started as a group on WhatsApp grew rapidly into a radio show, then a newsletter, and now a podcast that reaches more than 100,000 people. She hosts Cafecito (coffee) every day on WhatsApp to discuss the news of the day, bringing in experts once a week to answer questions directly.

Candice Fortman is the executive director of Outlier Media, a non-profit newsroom in Detroit that provides information 24/7 through an SMS text-based platform as well as undertaking investigative and accountability reporting. To find out what Detroiters want to know, Outlier Media conducts an annual assessment, asking questions over text message, like, “If you had a reporter working with you for the next 24 hours, what would you have them figure out for you?” They also mine public record information requests, and Fortman notes that complaint data is a very good indicator of where there are accountability and transparency gaps. Outlier Media also fosters community journalism in partnership with an organization called Documenters.

Fortman closed with a plea to the techies in the audience at CHM: SMS technology is always breaking—please fix it! The same might be said of the news—it may be broken, but there are plenty of thoughtful and creative people working to fix it. Let’s join them.

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Image: Dawn Garcia, Maritza Félix, Candice Fortman, and Tracie Powell.

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Ethernet is everywhere, on everything, doing every task.

— Gordon Bell, Former VP of R&D at DEC

Ethernet transformed how we connect to each other and to the world. On May 22, 2023, CHM celebrated Ethernet’s 50th anniversary with co-inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe, a 2008 CHM Fellow and this year’s winner of ACM Turing Award, along with other networking luminaries.

Beginnings

Rich Karlgaard, Yogen Dalal, and Bob Metcalfe on stage at CHM Live.

Forbes’ Rich Karlgaard led the first panel discussion with Bob Metcalfe and Yogen Dalal, a member of the Ethernet development team. In the early 1970s, at Xerox’s innovative Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Bob was tasked with designing the network for the first personal computer.

When grad student Dave Boggs helped Bob, who had injured himself cutting coaxial cable, the two began to work together and quickly earned the nickname “the Boggsy Twins.” A breakthrough moment came when concerns about violating potential restraint of trade laws by connecting products from DEC, Intel, and Xerox led to making Ethernet an open standard. That strategy allowed for its rapid proliferation.

When Yogen Dalal first heard about Ethernet, his reaction was, “Wow!” a feeling shared by everyone who came across it. He would explain how the creative yet simple technology worked using a cocktail party analogy.

After a video clip of the late Dave Boggs describing how Ethernet evolved out of the need to connect office workers’ computers together, Bob explained how the monopolies of AT&T and IBM had to be broken to build the internet. Standardization was key, too, in making networking possible. Bob saw the potential for cooperation between DEC, Intel, and Xerox and how to serve the market with Ethernet-compatible products and founded 3Com. Selling Ethernet for IBM PC’s, Bob explains, led to the articulation of “Metcalfe’s Law.”

Use Cases

Rich Karlgaard, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Judy Estrin on stage at CHM Live.

The second panel focused on how networking pioneers capitalized on Ethernet technology, creating a global industry. Rich Karlgaard moderated the discussion with serial entrepreneurs Andy Bechtolsheim, who has been founding and building networking companies for over 45 years, and Judy Estrin, who founded eight networking companies.

From a technology perspective, Judy believes that Ethernet’s success and endurance was due to the simplicity of its design, its flexibility, and the layering that allowed entrepreneurs to build different technologies underneath the packet format. But, there were also other factors that contributed to its success.

Former VP of R&D at DEC Gordon Bell, in a video clip, describes the first meeting with DEC, INTEL, and Xerox at PARC in 1978 to begin creating the Ethernet standard that was ultimately completed in 1980. These standards helped enable the creation of billion-dollar businesses around Ethernet infrastructure. Judy’s Bridge Communications focused on switching, routing, and connecting legacy systems, while Andy focused on building workstations.

In another video clip, John Chambers, former chairman and CEO of Cisco, shared how he learned to listen to customers like Ford and Boeing who alerted him to fast Ethernet at a time when everyone was betting on AT&T. He got it and Cisco thrived. Similarly, Judy Estrin helped FedEx transition from mainframe to network computing as a board director. But, she was unable to convince Steve Jobs to include Ethernet as an option alongside AppleTalk. Turned off by the bulky component, he said, “Apples only need to talk to Apples.”

Connectivity

Bob Metcalfe in CHM’s Revolution exhibit with Ethernet artifacts.

In the third segment of the evening, Bob Metcalfe described how connectivity is an extremely powerful tool, and ones that humans have trouble handling. That results in pathologies, he said, like hacking, pornography, advertising, spam, and fake news. He then gamely answered audience questions on everything from AI to ALOHAnet and the future.

That future includes an Ethernet standard for 800 gigabits per second on optical fiber and 1.6 terabits per second, both with multiple lanes. Fifty years ago, the initial Ethernet was 2.94 megabits per second.

Main image: Bob Metcalfe on big screen with Rich Karlgaard, Yogen Dalal, and Bob on stage at the Ethernet@50 CHM Live event.

CHM would like to thank Arista Networks and the Ethernet Alliance for their generous support of Ethernet@50.

WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION

Additional Resources

• The Verge’s special issue on Ethernet, World Wired
• The Vergecast: The fight over AM radio, the future of ethernet, and the legacy of Zelda
• CHM blog Happy 40th Birthday Ethernet

From 1988 to 1994, venture capitalist and historian James L. Pelkey traveled around the world conducting interviews for his hypertext book, A History of Computer Communications: 1968-1988. The transcripts from these interviews contain a wealth of knowledge from early computer communication pioneers. Explore:

• Pelkey’s oral history collection
• Pelkey’s online book hosted by CHM

The post Ethernet Turns 50! appeared first on CHM.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

— Alan Kay

An Alto computer in CHM’s collection.

In 1973, the innovators at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had a time machine. The Alto computer transported computing 15 years into the future with its groundbreaking features and functions. It influenced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a generation of researchers. A half century later, how we live with computing is still shaped by the Alto.

On the 50th anniversary of the Alto, many of its creators and some of today’s leading inventors gathered at CHM to share the Alto’s legacy and discuss what we can expect for the future of computing research—centered today on artificial intelligence (AI).

Alto Team Panel

CHM Trustee John Shoch, who worked at PARC as a graduate student, moderated a discussion with two of Alto’s designers, Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi. Alan Kay participated via video. 

John Shoch, Butler Lampson, and Charles Simonyi

Laying the Groundwork

In the late 1960s, when mainframe computing was evolving, interactive computing was being done with time-sharing because it was economical. But, Lampson said, that wasn’t how anyone wanted to do it. Everyone wanted an efficient, working personal computer like the Alto.

Corporate behemoth Xerox decided to get into the computer business, and in 1970, Bob Taylor, an ARPA founder (Advanced Research Projects Agency), was hired to set up PARC, with a mandate to create the office of the future. Alan Kay was one of his first hires, and he admired how Taylor created a culture to facilitate collaboration among “lone wolves.”

Lampson explained that the prevailing way of doing computing research at the time was on a DEC PDP-10. But DEC was a competitor of SDS, which Xerox had just bought, so they didn’t want to ask for the machines for the lab. Instead, they decided to build one. The result was the MAX computer, a precursor of Alto. Simonyi described working with Chuck Thacker on the machine.

Ideals and Ideas

Lampson believes that advances in computing, including today’s deep learning, are limited only by hardware, specifically memory. Perhaps equally important are far-seeing visions. Kay explained how PARC researchers homed in on ideas from the larger ARPA community: the destiny of computers was to become personal intellectual amplifiers spread over the earth and pervasively networked to everyone. The Alto was their response to that vision.

The Alto was a perfect machine, says Simonyi, “So generous and at the same time so simple.” The keyboard read bits, the mouse gave bits rather than coordinates, the output interfaced with a 32×70 display with bits. But there was only a megabit of memory, under 128K. The panelists remembered that your text would disappear from the bottom up if the machine needed to pull memory to execute on formatting or printing commands. Alto software had to be developed as completely separate applications, only connected through the file system. There were several efforts to get around this, but all failed except Smalltalk.

In conclusion, Kay noted that when innovative research produces powerful tools, it’s important that training and education are an integral part of the system to ensure the tools are “used for good.” He believes that today’s computing power should be directed by high ideals like those pursued at PARC.

AI Research Panel

The second panel focused on artificial intelligence, arguably the most revolutionary sector in today’s computing landscape. CHM Trustee Diane Souvaine led the discussion with two computer scientists from pioneering research labs: Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist of Open AI, and Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz.

Both Sutskever and Horvitz aim to foster creative, collaborative labs focused on big ideas. Sutskever notes that all of computing has just one goal right now: To build artificial intelligence that actually loves humanity. Horvitz thinks computing systems should be reasoning about how to complement humans in a deep way, to understand gaps in thinking, synthesize information, and perform other functions that can lead to breakthroughs we can’t even imagine.

The panelists were frank that AI in various forms and expanding beyond research programs will be extremely disruptive to humanity. It will affect jobs and the economy, education, and how we spend our time. It will also, Horvitz notes, impact our sense of our uniqueness and identity as human beings. With guidance and ongoing deliberation across civil society and government, he believes things can go well. Sutskever also hopes for positive outcomes but cautions that AI is going to be incredibly powerful, and with such power comes significant risks.

Sutskever says that many layers of guardrails can be placed by those developing AI technology, for example in refusing unacceptable requests. But we also need wise, well-chosen societal rules and collective choices that will lead to a better environment and outcome for everyone.

Without a doubt, we will see creative and unexpected solutions as people use AI, and also new problems caused by AI that we haven’t seen before. These things, says Horvitz, will happen at the same time. Adds Sutskever, “It will be not boring.”

Main image: John Shoch, Butler Lampson, and Charles Simonyi.

CHM would like to thank Arista Networks for their generous support of “The Legendary Alto and Research at the Edge.”

Watch the Full Conversation

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

David C. Brock, “50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World,” https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto

The Alto in CHM’s flagship exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/347

A selection of video recordings featuring an Alto computer restored by CHM, https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbSX7IyztvLjML_lgB1C_Bb

A 1986 lecture by Alan Kay, “The Dynabook—Past, Present, and Future,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMDphyKrAE8&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr&index=8

A 1986 lecture by Butler Lampson, “Personal Distributed Computing – The Alto and Ethernet Software,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h33A-KWJKDQ&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr&index=9

A 1986 lecture by Chuck Thacker, “Personal Distributed Computing – The Alto and Ethernet Hardware,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9n2J24Jg2Y&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr&index=10

Coming Soon!

Access to Xerox PARC’s file system archive is coming soon! Sign up to receive notification.

The post From Alto to AI appeared first on CHM.

On March 8, 2023, CHM Live explored how emojis can be more inclusive and who makes decisions about how new emojis are added. Journalist, film producer, and emoji activist Jennifer 8. Lee, artist Yiying Lu, and one of Time magazine’s “most influential teens,” Rayouf Alhumedhi, joined moderator and professor Sara Dean for a lively discussion.

Rayouf Alhumedhi (left) and Yiying Lu (right) on stage at CHM Live.

Making Emojis

🥟 🧕 🥡 🥢 🥠

Before Unicode standardized how languages (and emojis) work on smart devices, things were “a mess,” according to a clip from Jennifer 8. Lee’s documentary film, The Emoji Story. Emojis looked different on different phones. You might send a friend a heart emoji and they saw something entirely different. But, unlike established languages that evolve organically, Unicode is continuously evaluating newly invented emojis to determine whether to include them in this new visual language. Their emoji subcommittee gets hundreds of proposals but only incorporates about 60 new emojis every year.

Yiying Lu started designing emojis when she was invited to a party and couldn’t text back her favorite food—a dumpling. She went on to design emojis for not only a dumpling but also a fortune cookie, takeout box, and boba tea. Designing a chopstick emoji made her realize the importance of multigenerational and multicultural points of view.

As a Gen Z teenager, Rayouf Alhumedhi designed an emoji featuring the hijab, the headscarf worn by millions of Muslim women and girls like her. Both Yiying and Rayouf were surprised they needed to submit hard data to the subcommittee to prove the extensive popularity of the hijab and boba tea—something they felt was obvious in their cultures.

The woman in a headscarf emoji designed by Rayouf Alhumedhi.

Including Emoji

When Jenny 8. Lee discovered that decisions about what new emojis to include were made by a group of mostly older, white, male engineers in a conference room in Silicon Valley, she was inspired to start Emojination, a grassroots organization to propose more inclusive emojis. They’ve been responsible for over a hundred new emojis, and Jenny has since served as vice-chair on the subcommittee.

Skin tone options for emojis created by Katrina Parrott.

After Katrina Parrott’s daughter couldn’t find an emoji that looked like her, Katrina developed five different skin tones for emojis. In a clip from The Emoji Story, she notes that it doesn’t feel good to have to send an emoji that doesn’t look like you, particularly for a young person. Jenny 8. Lee discussed the implications of emojis as a new visual language.

In attempting to help more people see themselves in emojis, a lot of work is being done with gender. According to Jenny, as recently as 2015, there were many professions and roles for male emojis and only four for female: dancer, princess, Playboy bunny, and bride. Now, there are gender-neutral versions of emojis for all kinds of roles—even a gender-neutral alternative for Santa Claus.

Communication +

What can emojis add to the way we communicate? Vendors of boba tea and dumplings have told Yiying that her food emojis have helped their small businesses by giving visibility to their products. Rayouf notes the practicality of emojis as well as how they enable self-expression.

When Jenny talked to a linguist, she realized that images like emojis have trouble expressing words like “you” or “I.” She was thrilled when someone submitted a proposal of a pointing finger to represent “you” to the emoji subcommittee. Jenny believes that’s the power of an open process that allows anyone to participate. She recalled how she was profoundly affected by working to make it possible to represent an interracial couple with emojis. They could now use this ever-evolving new language to express their love.

Watch the Full Conversation

CHM’s new wall display features emojis designed by Yiying Lu! Learn more.

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Apple’s Lisa computer debuted in 1983 with an ad starring a young Kevin Costner, but while his career took off, the Lisa did not.

How could a machine that transformed the way people interact with computers also be a commercial flop? CHM gathered key insiders to celebrate the Lisa’s innovations, explore its ongoing impact, and learn lessons from its failure. It was a memorable evening of memories, stories, and swag.

Bruce Daniels shows off his Lisa team T-shirt.

Moderator Katie Hafner, a New York Times contributor and author, kicked off a panel discussion with members of the original Lisa team.

Imagining Lisa

John Couch, general manager of the Lisa division, and Steve Jobs were both in their twenties when, as Couch explained via video, they were trying to figure out how to “help their dads use a computer.” That meant trying to create a new market with a revolutionary new interface that would use icons instead of text-based commands and make computers accessible to anyone. He believes the investment paid off because the Lisa became the foundation of Apple’s future.

Bruce Daniels, Lisa’s software manager, remembered the Apple team’s famous trip to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Riding back in Steve Jobs’ car, the two talked about how to turn PARC’s ideas and demos into a product.

Daniels recruited DEC engineer Wayne Rosing, who like everyone (but one) who was interviewed was excited to join the team. Rosing contests that it was the mouse and the graphical interface that changed everything by providing a new, more intuitive alternative to text-based commands. He helped to make the decision to have a one-button, rather than two- or three-button, mouse so that users were spared from making decisions.

Daniels and Rosing agreed that the Lisa’s high price eclipsed the creativity put into it. But they are proud that the machine’s innovations were given life in the Mac.

Rosing noted that the graphics system for the Mac, written by Bill Atkinson, was the same one that was in the Lisa. In fact, about thirty percent of the Mac’s code came from the Lisa.

Creating Lisa

Icons & Fonts

Annette Wagner, who designed the Lisa icons and fonts, was hired by Apple in 1981 as a graphic designer and typographer and “didn’t have a clue” what she was getting into. She and her colleague, Elizabeth Hall, were told they needed to create typefaces that printed out the same as they looked on the screen, introducing them to the term “WYSIWYG.” Then, the designers learned that the screen had rectangular pixels. There was lots of experimentation, Wagner said, and it was “quite an adventure.”

When the laser writer printer appeared, Wagner had to deal with a new world of outline typefaces. Told to contact John Warnock at a new company called Adobe, Wagner’s extensive feedback inspired a major breakthrough—a concept called font hinting. Wagner reminds us that our assumption that what we see on the screen will print out clearly and faithfully is a debt we owe the Lisa.

GUI & Graphics

Developer Bill Atkinson, who worked on the Lisa user interface and created the QuickDraw graphics library, said via video (he missed the event to go on his honeymoon) that it took him only two weeks after he spoke with Steve Jobs to quit his PhD program and join Apple. He was inspired by Jobs’ vision that they would change the world for the better, and he appreciated the care and artistry put into the work. He believes Lisa’s lasting contribution was to make computers available as a tool for anyone to express their creativity—it wasn’t just a machine for nerds.

Evangelizing & Marketing

Katie Hafner speaks with CHM President and CEO Dan’l Lewin.

Dan’l Lewin, CHM president and CEO, was the market development manager for the Lisa. While working for Sony in 1977, he met Steve Jobs, who was in the office next door. Lewin organized a sneak preview program with the product management team to introduce the Lisa to leaders in business and academia. With a full-day agenda, Fortune 500 CEOs had to be present with up to six officers, and they sat in a specially constructed room ($250,000 to build!) with separate bays to view the demo.

The CHM Live audience enjoyed their own demo video as well as a trailer of media partner The Verge’s upcoming documentary. Chris Espinosa, Apple employee #8, provided CHM with the Lisa’s floppies and obtained permission from Apple to share the source code (access the code here). CHM software curator Al Kossow was able to restore the code and run it on a Lisa computer from CHM’s collection.

Celebrating Lisa

Journalist and Wired Editor-at-Large Steven Levy joined Katie Hafner to discuss the impact of the Lisa and why it was a commercial failure. Price was a huge impediment. At $10,000, the Lisa was competing with the much less expensive IBM PC, which was featured on the cover of Business Week in 1983.

But, says Levy, the Lisa was always considered an experimental machine, the computer of the future, while the workhorse Apple II was supposed to compete with IBM. Experimental technology is always super-expensive the first time around.

The concept of “going straight into cyberspace with your hand” was an unconventional way of doing computing at the time, notes Levy. The Lisa was always going to be a hard sell in the corporate world, where IT managers, not users, made the buying decisions.

While it’s popular to note that there wouldn’t be a Mac without the Lisa, Levy wondered if the Lisa might have survived without the Mac. What if the Lisa didn’t have to compete for resources at Apple? What if Steve Jobs wasn’t talking up the Mac even before the Lisa was released? Maybe without the Mac, Apple would have figured out how to produce a more affordable version of the Lisa that was open to outside developers.

CHM’s VP of Innovation and Programming Marguerite Gong Hancock hands off Lisa’s birthday cake to Annette Wagner.

We’ll never know what might have been. But what we do know is that the Lisa computer changed the world of computing. And for that, we can celebrate, which CHM did—with a special birthday wish from Lisa Brennan-Jobs, a birthday cake, and a heartfelt rendition of “Happy birthday to you!”

Main image: Members of the Lisa team who were in the audience or speaking at the event on stage at CHM.

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The post Happy 40th Birthday Lisa! appeared first on CHM.

NOVA explores these questions in their new documentary, Computers v. Crime, an investigation into the flaws of controversial criminal justice technology. On November 1, 2022, CHM hosted two participants in the film, UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid and neuroscientist Vivienne Ming, to deconstruct the biased algorithms behind the tech and discuss their impact with KQED’s Rachael Myrow.

Humans / Algorithms

An excerpt from the film featured Hany Farid’s research into whether algorithms are doing better than humans at eliminating bias.

The researchers paid non-experts to evaluate defendants by reading a short paragraph that included age, gender, and prior conviction record. There was no information about race. People were then asked, “Do you think this person will commit another crime within the next two years?” The results showed that the humans were as accurate as the commercial software used in courts today . . . and just as biased. Because people of color in America are more likely to be arrested, charged, and convicted of crimes, it turned out that prior conviction data is a proxy for race.

Given the historical inequities in the criminal justice system and how deeply ingrained racism is in American society, is it even possible to create software that’s not racist? Hany Farid believes it’s naïve to think we can. Worse, people tend to assume that technology is infallible despite mounting evidence that it’s spectacularly biased. He explains how that bias has been baked in.

Despite their ubiquity and the critical decisions they’re being allowed to make, algorithms are not particularly explainable, notes Farid. They are very complex, massive systems with billions of parameters, and even those who create them don’t know exactly how they’re operating.

There’s also no one providing quality control, and regulation is not only years behind but also subject to highly-partisan, heavily lobbied lawmakers who don’t understand technology.

Vivienne Ming shared a story about how predictions can turn out to be nothing like you may have, well, predicted.

Critical Thinking / Pattern Recognition

In the second film excerpt, Amazon’s failed attempt to correct gender bias in hiring actually resulted in even more biased results, despite the best intentions. Why? The algorithm was very good at recognizing patterns in historical data that correlated promotion with men even when all gender markers were supposedly removed.

Ming says it’s impossible to scrub the history out of data and rebalance it—it’s just too complicated. She notes that the Amazon algorithm developers didn’t seem to ask themselves if they fully understood the problem they thought they were solving. Too much data, complex systems, and computer science programs that lack diversity and don’t teach critical thinking skills may be part of the problem.

The third film excerpt highlighted how data related to an historically over-policed Oakland neighborhood was fed into a platform that then predicted crime will occur in that area, regardless of other available data showing that elicit drug use is a city-wide problem.

So, now that research has demonstrated the problems with these systems, why are they still being used?

Both Farid and Ming believe that political issues come into play and that both policy makers and consumer must make better choices. Market-driven AI isn’t going to improve until we all get smarter about what we want.

Watch the full Conversation

NOVA’s Computers v. Crime is available for streaming online and via the PBS Video App. NOVA is a production of GBH. Computers v. Crime is a NOVA Production by BlueSpark Collaborative, LLC for GBH.

This event is made possible by the generous support of the Kapor Center.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by Brilliant Worldwide, Inc., Consumer Cellular, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS viewers. Additional funding for Computers v. Crime is provided by the George D. Smith Fund, and the NOVA Science Trust with support from Margaret and Will Hearst, and Howard and Eleanor Morgan.

The post Computers versus Crime appeared first on CHM.