xi i | acknowledgments

A star-studded cast of computing industry leaders from diverse

areas and several countries spoke at the conference. They were Steve
Ballmer (CEO Microsoft), David Baltimore (President, CalTech),
Rodney Brooks (Director, MIT AI Lab), Bill Buxton (Chief Scientist,
Alias/Wavefront), Vint Cerf (SVP, Worldcom), Rita Colwell (Direc-
tor, NSF), Michael Dertouzos (Director, MIT CS Lab), Sylvia Earle
(Chairman, Deep Ocean Research, NGS), Shirley Jackson (Presi-
dent, RPI), Dean Kamen (President, DEKA Research), Alan Kay
(VP, Disney Imagineering), Ray Kurzweil (President, Kurzweil Tech-
nologies), Marcia McNutt (President, Monterey Bay Aquarium Re-
search Institute), Martin Schuurmans (CEO Philips Centre for In-
dustrial Technology), and Neil deGrasse Tyson (Director, Hayden
Planetarium NYC). Three speakers (Ballmer, Earle, and Kamen)
were unable to participate in the book. At the conference, Ruzena
Bajcsy (Assistant Director for CISE) stood in for Rita Colwell, who
was co-opted by the President of the United States. I give a special
acknowledgment to Marcia McNutt, who set an extraordinary stan-
dard of responsiveness to the sheepdogging editor throughout the
development of manuscripts.
I was pleased at the strong response of several other authors to
my invitation to join in this venture. They added much to the per-
spectives set forth here. They are John Backus (Draper Atlantic Ven-
ture Partners), John Seely Brown (Xerox PARC), Mark Burgin
(UCLA), José Corrales (University of Oviedo, Spain), Paul Duguid
(Xerox PARC), David Gelernter (Yale), John Gray (London School
of Economics), Richard Strozzi Heckler (President of Rancho
Strozzi Institute), Douglas Hofstadter (Indiana University), and
Bruce Sterling (SF writer from Austin, Texas).
John Gehl, my erstwhile colleague and editor of Ubiquity
(⬍acm.org/ubiquity⬎), helped this book in several ways. He wrote
down everything Bob Metcalfe told him. He also interviewed several
of the authors for Ubiquity, where their interviews now appear. John
has a special flare for helping people speak eloquently from their
hearts in interviews.
My friend and colleague Bill Frucht, an editor for Perseus Books,
helped me in my thinking during the formative stages of this book.
ACM sponsored the Information Technology Profession Initiative
with me as director. The initiative’s steering committee contributed
 acknowledgments | x iii

greatly to my thinking on the profession we find growing up around

us. They also contributed indirectly to the shape of the conference
and this book. They are Paul Abrahams, Fran Allen, David Arnold,
William Aspray, Doris Carver, Joseph DeBlasi, Wayne Dyksen, Bruce
Eistenstein, Fernando Flores, Peter Freeman, Paula Hawthorn,
Charles House, Jeanne Meister, James Morris, Alan Salisbury, Luis
Sota, Dennis Tsichritzis, John White, and William Wulf.
The ACM Education Board, which I chair, has been a constant
source of support and inspiration for me. I thank my colleagues Fred
Aronson, Richard LaBlanc, Robert Aiken, Robert Cartwright, Lillian
(Boots) Cassel, Gordon Davies, John Gorgone, Jenny House, John
Impagliazzo, Marvin Israel, Karl Klee, Eric Roberts, Russell Shack-
elford, Larry Snyder, and Christine Stephenson.
My teachers in the world of business and enterprise have been
ceaselessly supportive: Bob Dunham, Jean Dunham, Fernando Flo-
res, and Richard Heckler. JanIrene Perkins, James Kearns, and Brian
Branagan have also made special contributions.
Bob Metcalfe, the ACM1 conference emcee and my coeditor on
the anthology from ACM97, entreated me to edit this book. He said
I was mature enough to do it by myself.
John White, ACM’s CEO, ceaselessly impresses me with his ability
to mobilize teams to implement his strategic visions. He has been a
constant source of support and encouragement, for which I am
deeply grateful. Patricia Ryan, ACM COO, shared generously her
deep understanding of people and her insistence that we spend
within our budgets. Mark Mandelbaum, ACM director of
publications, and Jono Hardjowirogo, ACM Press Books, gave gen-
erously of their time during the search for a publisher and the sub-
sequent negotiations and contract work. They also helped with the
copyrights. Diane Crawford, editor of the Communications, helped
with a special section promoting this book.
Carole McClendon of Waterside Productions, Inc., was ACM’s
agent. She helped us find an ideal match with McGraw-Hill, our
publisher for this volume. Michelle Williams, editor at McGraw-Hill,
helped us shape the book and a marketing plan.
My wife, Dorothy Denning, ever my friend, companion, confidant,
and adviser, makes my every day worth living and every book fun
to work on.
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 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

s ci e nc e ’s e nd l e s s go ld en age

N o doubt about it. We live today in the golden age of cosmic

discovery. With missions to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and striking
images arriving daily from the Hubble and other telescopes, we en-
joy weekly reminders of our place in the universe. Remarkably, this
golden age applies not just to our understanding of the universe but
to nearly all scientific discovery.
To quantify this golden-age claim in astrophysics, I performed a
simple experiment. I spend some part of each week in the depart-
ment of astrophysics at Princeton University, whose library sub-
scribes to twin copies of the Astrophysical Journal—one circulating
and one not. Along one uninterrupted stretch of the library walls is
every single issue ever published of this journal, which goes back to
1895 (about when the word astrophysics was coined—born in the
marriage of the analysis of laboratory spectra with the analysis of
stellar spectra). One day while browsing the journals I asked myself,
“What year corresponds to the geometric middle of this wall?”
When I did this experiment, the middle landed in 1986, which

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, American
Museum of Natural History, New York City.

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