Bob Taylor didn't have a computer science degree, just a master's in psychology. At ARPA, he funded ARPANET and its first nodes. Later at PARC, he built a lab culture around bean-bag chairs and informal spaces that let brilliant people create together.
So Bob Taylor started out at ARPA and was the person who managed to get the funding for ARPANET kind of set and worked at the University of Utah and a couple other places very briefly where they were sort of the earliest nodes on the ARPANET that became the internet. The thing that's super interesting about Taylor was that he was not a tech person at all. He was a psychology, I think, degree, I think a master's degree, certainly not a PhD, who ran this lab full of— I mean, just hands down incredible genius technologists who he kind of plucked from all over the country and sort of started this notion of like whenever you think of beanbag chairs or like the slide that's here at your office and you think about, well, where'd this idea that people needed to kind of have some space to relax a little bit and interact with each other in different ways. I mean, that was pioneered at Taylor's lab. He just had this incredible way of bringing out a sense of discernment of who to listen to in his labs. And so he was this wonderful man to work for, if he liked you, and a nightmare to have work for you, because all he cared about was protecting his people, his lab.
