Robert W Taylor, who was instrumental in creating the internet and the modern personal computer, has died at the age of 85.
Robert W Taylor, who was instrumental in creating the internet and the modern personal computer, has died in California.
His son, Kurt, said Mr Taylor was 85 when he died on Thursday in Woodside.
Mr Taylor funded researchers or led teams of scientists who are responsible for some of the most important technologies of the modern world.
As he had predicted, the limited communications tool morphed into a system that supplies people with fingertip access to everything from encyclopedias to investment advice.
In 1961, Mr Taylor was a project manager for NASA when he directed funding to Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, who helped develop the modern computer mouse
Taylor oversaw pioneering PC's creation
He also oversaw a team that helped create the Alto — a pioneering personal computer — while working at the Xerox Corp's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC).
The technology inspired the Apple Macintosh computer, with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs declaring a GUI "inevitable" after some of his engineers convinced him to visit PARC at the end of 1979.
Mr Taylor's engineering team also helped develop ethernet local networking and a word processing program that became Microsoft Word.
Stanford University Silicon Valley Archives project historian Leslie Berlin told the New York Times
In 2004, he and other PARC researchers were awarded the Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering for development of "the first practical networked personal computers
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