I’m here today with John Backus and I should
probably put the day’s date [September 5,
2006] on here for the calendar, for the purpose
of filming. But there’s probably more
computational power in this Sony camera than
there was in the first computer upon which
you worked.
Oh, I’m sure.
You are a person whose career has spanned
the ages of contemporary computing, from the
earliest days of some of the first machines
that really made an impact upon the commercial
world, to where we are today. Of those years,
what do you think surprised you the most,
of
the changes you’ve seen?
Well, I think just the speed of change. I
mean it’s just appalling.
Appalling.
Yes, because I mean all these refrigerator-sized
machines that I first worked with soon
became smaller and smaller and smaller until--
In fact, as I read some of the interviews,
you’re a fan of the Palm Pilot and I think
you
had a TiVo at one time.
I still do.
Still have a TiVo, which probably did have
more computational power than the first machines
upon which you worked.
Yes.
What I heard you say is just the first derivative
of change, that things are changing so
rapidly. How wired of a guy are you? I mean
you have your e-mail address. How connected
are
you these days?
Not a lot. I’m like any guy that has a personal
computer, fumbling around trying to find my
way in this mess that’s out there.
What was your first personal computer?
It was an IBM PC.
I imagine you got a good discount on that.
This big, you know, this high. You could hardly
lift it.
Wow. Amazing. In fact, let’s go back to
some of the machines over which you’ve worked
over
the years because the first one was the SSEC.
If I get that right that’s the Selective--
Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator.
Yes. What was the story behind the existence
of that very computer? Why did it come to
be?
Oh, that was because IBM cooperated in designing
the Mark I at Harvard, and Harvard gave
them no credit. So Watson was really mad about
that.
That was Watson, Sr.?
Yes. So he decided to build this strange monstrosity
called the SSEC. And he did.
Now was that the defense calculator?
No, no.
Was that a different name for it?
The defense calculator was the 701, which
followed.
Oh, okay, which was the successor to that.
Yes.
Where was the SSEC actually built?
It was built right there on 57th Street--
Well, the entrance was on 57th Street, yes,
but
it was near Madison.
I don’t think there’s a lot of manufacturing
in downtown Manhattan these days of computers.
No.
That’s really what attracted--
It was unique.
It was unique, one of a kind.
Yes.
You were describing earlier what that beast
looked like. It was many rooms full.
Well, yes. It filled a room that was about,
let’s see, 50 feet wide by 100 feet deep.
It
had a window opening on the street so that
people could look in, and big black columns
holding up the middle of the room. It had
a huge console with hundreds of toggle switches
and stuff like that. Then behind
glass cases around the walls were tape units
and relays, some of which would fall out as
it
was operating because they were heavily used.
It was a fun machine. It would make an error
about every three
minutes and you had to stop and figure out
how to restart the thing.
Right. That was certainly the age of machine
building, because there was the Mark I around
the time.
Yes.
That was Aiken, if I’m not mistaken.
Yes.
And Eckert and Mauchly. That was around that
time or a little bit earlier in their work?
That was about the same time.
Did you have any contact with those guys at
all?
No.
Just a quick side story. I think it was Mauchly’s
grandson [who] went to the Air Force
Academy, and I taught him COBOL, of all things.
Mauchly came up once to visit us. It was
interesting seeing him. I recall [in] one
interview that you were walking by the IBM
offices and saw this display, and that’s
what attracted you inside then.
Yes.
What were you doing at that time? You were
out of the Army?
I had just graduated. I had just gotten my
Masters Degree from Columbia. But I hadn’t
even
begun to look for a job, but I just found
this place and I walked in and it looked so
interesting. I ask if they would give me a
job.
And they said?
And they said, “Yes, come up and see the
boss.” I said, “No, no, no. I’ve got
holes in my
sleeves. I have to look respectable.” But
they got me up there anyway and I got an
interview by [Robert R.] “Rex” Seeber
who gave me a little puzzle that I solved,
and he
hired me.
Wow, on the spot?
On the spot.
My goodness. So at Columbia, you were getting
your Masters in Mathematics. Is that correct?
Yes.
Actually, to go back in time a little bit,
before that, before Columbia, you were in
the
Army then.
Let’s see, yes. Yes.
So that was really the time of the Korean
War or World War II?
That was World War II. That was 1945.
Oh, my goodness. So let’s start there then.
Where were you stationed in World War II?
Well my first station was in Camp Stewart
Georgia.
Oh, my - hot place.
It’s a very bleak, hot place. But I only
stayed there for a few months, and then I
was
selected for army specialized training. Then
I went to some little place in Alabama to
get
classified. Then I went to the University
of Pittsburgh, which I enjoyed enormously
because
I was supposed to be learning all this stuff
that I had already studied. So I spent a lot
of time there. There’s a place called the
“Pittsburgh Playhouse,” which was really
a bar. A
very friendly place. After that, yes, I was
there. Then the Battle of the Bulge occurred
and they were drafting everybody. So everybody
in Pittsburgh was going to be sent overseas
right away. But I had just taken a test, some
kind of a test that qualified me for being
sent to Haverford College. So I went there
and had a very nice time at Haverford College.
Where’s that located?
It’s just outside of Philadelphia in Haverford,
PA. I was there for a while, and, let’s
see. Then my next step. I was destined to
go to medical school, but in the meantime,
I was
sent to Atlantic City to work in the hospital.
So I stayed in Atlantic City working in this
hospital 12 hours a day for a while, living
in the Traymore Hotel on the Boardwalk. While
I
was there, I was working on the neurosurgery
ward and they noticed that I had this huge
bump on my head here, which was a bone tumor
that had been growing slowly, fortunately
outward, for a long time. They said, “Well,
let’s take that out.” So I became a patient.
They operated, took it out and I was a patient
on this ward. So I had no duties whatsoever.
I could just spend my time wandering around
Atlantic City at night, which I did, and
sleeping in the hospital. That went on for
a while. Then finally I got sent to New York,
and started going to medical school at - what
was the name of it - Flower and Fifth Avenue
Hospital. I discovered very quickly that I
didn’t like medical school, because all
you had
to do was memorize stuff. While I was in Atlantic
City, they had done this operation,
removed this bone tumor and put in a plate,
which they had constructed by sort of cutting
out triangles, because there’s a lot of
curvature in the skull there. It was kind
of a
squishy plate, which made me feel very insecure.
So when I was in medical school, I opted
to go to a hospital on Staten Island where
their business was putting in plates for
veterans. I went there and they took out the
old one. I walked around for a while with
nothing, just skin.
Oh, my. That’s exposed.
Yes, it really felt weird. Then they took
a cast and they let me make the plate, actually,
because you just had to put it in a hydraulic
press and trim it up a bit, which I did. They
installed it. During that time, I got this
wonderful little apartment on East 71st Street
in New York. It cost $18 a month.
Oh my. That must have been an exciting time
to be in New York City, in Manhattan.
Yes, it was. It was a Hungarian neighborhood.
I’m sorry, I mean Czech, because there was
a
Czech restaurant just down the street from
where I lived. It was very nice. No, I lived
there for quite a while until finally, I got
married. But I had some friends from the army
who lived nearby. One guy was a composer who
lived with his wife on the floor below in
the
same ratty apartment building, and another
friend who was a singer lived across the street.
So we had a nice little--
So in walking by the IBM building, you saw
this machine and then got whisked upstairs.
Yes.
Remarkable. Did you have any interest in computing
prior to that time?
No. I mean… No.
There wasn’t a lot of it around.
What was computing? What’s that?
Fascinating. If I may ask, let me pick up
on something you said.
I just like machinery.
Yes, because you’re kind of a gadget kind
of guy. How did you meet your wife, if I may
ask?
Well, I was married twice. My first wife;
how did I meet her? Oh, I met her at-- She
was
living with three other girls in an apartment
in New York and this guy I had known at the
University of Virginia took me to this place.
That’s how I met her. My second wife I was
introduced to by my first wife at about the
time we were about to split.
Fascinating.
Because Barbara is an English teacher at Berkeley,
and Barbara had taken her course in
poetry.
Small world. So back to the SSEC. What did
they hire you to do?
Programming, what else?
Down at the machine level. What did “programming”
mean for a machine like that? To a
contemporary programmer, that would be so
foreign.
Yes, oh, I mean it was weird because you had
the whole machine to yourself for months.
Wow. I imagine the room got a little warm
too.
No, no. It was air-conditioned. The first
problem I was assigned to was this one, that
one
of the machine’s co-inventors was working
on. It was a problem to calculate the position
of
the moon, which is a very difficult thing
to do. It’s a Fourier series of about 1,000
terms
or something. I worked on that.
This was long before the U.S. had committed
itself to any space program really, actually
any lunar program at all.
No, such ideas were just totally-- No, I mean
you’re making a big transfer in time there
to
think in those terms.
Interesting. So your background as a mathematician
served you well, then, to do that kind
of thing.
Well, to say my background as a mathematician--
I was never a mathematician, really.
Really.
I mean, no. I like some of the more abstract
stuff, but I was never a scholar. I never
liked to study or learn anything.
You mentioned one of the designers of the
SSEC. Who was that person?
Oh, Rex Seeber.
So then from your experience with the SSEC,
you then went on to produce Speedcoding, the
Speedcoder.
Yes.
What were sort of the things that influenced
you to create that in the first place?
Well, programming in machine code was a pretty
lousy business to engage in, trying to
figure out how to do stuff. I mean, all that
was available was a sort of a very crude
assembly program. So I figured, well, let’s
make it a little easier. I mean it was a rotten
design, if I may say so, but it was better
than coding in machine language.
Sure. So this was really around the time where
we saw the explosion of languages like that.
It wasn’t really the first language above
machine language.
No, no.
Who were some of the contemporaries around
that time?
Oh, God. I don’t think I’m going to be
able to answer that question.
No worries. Because Grace Murray Hopper and
the COBOL work, that was roughly around the
same period as the early Fortran work, wasn’t
it?
Let me see. Yes, I had a lot of—[pause]
I forget when Grace’s work actually was
and the COBOL work.
Gardner Hendrie (cameraman): Yes, I think
that may have been--
It’s a little bit later.
Gardner Hendrie (cameraman): It’s a little
bit later, yes.
I still have my nanosecond from Grace. She
had this thing where whenever she’d lecture,
she’d always give people in her audience
a nanosecond, which was a piece of telephone
wire
cut to 11 ¼ inches, which was the distance
that light would travel in a nanosecond. She
offered that as a visual metaphor to say this
gives you an idea of why machines are
shrinking. So if I think about the SSEC covering
100 feet, delays of the speed of light
intruded upon things here as well. From the
experience of the Speedcoding work, that’s
kind
of what led you to write the memo to your
boss saying, “Hey, I have this idea for
a high-
order language.”
Yes, because we were moving to the 704, which
had built in floating point, built in
index registers, which was all that Speedcoding
was supposed to supply. So what the hell?
And the 704 being the first machine with core
memory as well too.
Yes.
Tell me a little bit about the 704 and its
sort of size and shape and such.
Well, it was a box about this big, about that
thick and about that high. It was a
big--
It was a big machine.
Yes.
As we were talking earlier, the management
of IBM was of mixed feelings with regards
to
the utility of the 704 because you had Tom
Watson, Sr….
Yes, he was very skeptical of it. But Jr.
was not. He was sort of for going in this
direction.
Wasn’t this around the time that Tom Watson,
Sr. said something to the effect that the
worldwide market for computers is like one
or two computers, or something like that?
Yes.
He was saying that in reaction to the 704?
Yes.
Interesting.
Well, first before the 704 was the 701, which
had no index registers. It was a very
primitive machine.
Were you involved with the machine designers
at all, or was this sort of just handed to
you?
No, I was part of the-- In fact, I sort of
credit myself with getting index registers
and stuff and floating point built into the
704, because the designers were just totally
preoccupied in getting a drum unit designed.
You know, one of these crazy magnetic drums.
Which would have had how much storage capacity?
Oh, about maybe 1,000 words, or maybe as many
10,000, but no more.
Probably less memory than your watch has.
Yes, right. Things were bigger in those days.
So the market for the 701 and the 704, where
was IBM trying to head with that?
The 701, there were 18 701s, and the 704,
there were quite a few more. I couldn’t
tell
you how many.
So you actually influenced the design of those
machines then, the introduction of--
Yes, I was on the design team for the 704.
Was the notion of bringing index registers
and floating point in viewed as radical by
the design team?
Actually, I kept sort of suggesting that they
do this, and they kept talking about
this damn drum. In the design meetings, I
kept bringing this up and bringing it up.
They
kept talking about the drum. Finally, I decided,
well, there’s only one way to get their
attention. So I spent an hour just deriving
some cockamamie scheme for designing it. Gene
Amdahl… It would have taken about a ton
of hardware to implement what I had described
and
Amdahl said, “Oh, you don’t need to do
that.” It’s just easy to do it [with]
just this. It
doesn’t take hardly any more hardware.”
Wow.
He then designed it.
Remarkable. So the interaction between you
two led to some important innovations in
that machine then. Did you do much further
work with Gene?
Not a lot, no. I mean, I was on some… IBM
was trying to design something for the
Defense Department, some big, huge – the
NORC -- and we kind of interacted.
Right.
There were a lot of committees in Poughkeepsie,
and stuff.
So what kind of programming tools, as we would
call them today, even existed for the
704 in its earliest days before Fortran?
Well, there was an assembly program.
Right, and that’s about it.
That was about it, yes.
Wow. So from that experience, it led you to
write a memo to, I think it was your boss
Cuthbert…
Hurd.
Hurd, that said, “Hey, I have this idea
here.”
Yes, I mean, you’ve got to make it easier
to program this thing. I kind of laid out
the fact that half the cost of running this
thing was programming it. I mean, in counting
the machine costs and everything.
Right. In fact, you use a phrase in one of
your interviews that said, “The assumptions
under which we created Fortran really aren’t
valid anymore.” What were the assumptions
that Fortran was created with? I think you
just said it, to some degree. It was reduce
the
cost of programming.
Right. Yes, because it was just so slow.
The process of producing programs.
Yes. Machines were very expensive too. The
rental for a 704 was in the millions [of
dollars] for a year’s rental for one of
those things.
Right. I recall reading a figure; it was like
$400 an hour of computing time or
something like that.
Yes, that’s about right.
Who would think of charging per hour these
days? I don’t know how you’d compute that.
But then the salary of a programmer would
be a lot less than $400 per hour I would guess.
Right, yes.
So as you began the work into what became
Fortran, what were the other things swirling
about in the community that led you to that
particular structure? Who were some of your
contemporaries that were doing similar things?
I don’t even know some of the names around
that time.
Well, Grace Hopper was talking about compilers
and stuff like that.
Right. She really talked up what became COBOL.
Yes, but her ideas were just so cockamamie
stuff. Her scheme for this - I forget the
name of her proposed compiler - but it was
part machine code, part this, part that.
Just out there.
Completely unworkable thing.
Right. She was working for Remington at that
time?
Yes.
And IBM and Remington… Well, this was the
era where there were a lot more computer
companies than there are today.
Yes, right.
It was the age of the big iron where they
were competing with one another. Had Gene
Amdahl gone off at that time, or he was still
with IBM, wasn’t he?
I think he was still.
Okay. Interesting, but that was certainly
a ferment of activities and ideas that
spawned a lot of other companies later on.
Right.
Now, the first formulation you had of what
became Fortran, that essentially came from
your ideas. But then very quickly you began
to assemble a team around you of about, I
think
it totaled 13 or so in all.
Yes, but basically, the core of that was more
like eight.
Right, because you had Irv Ziller, as I remember,
was one of the first ones that joined
you. Tell me a little bit about Irv and how
you latched onto him and vice versa.
Well, I was originally in what was called
a Pure Science Department which Rex Seeber
ran.
This is really before IBM had started the
lab, is that correct, or just around the same
time?
No, Watson Labs was in existence.
Okay.
So yes, Hurd was running the Applied Science
Department, and Irv was one of the first
people in the Applied Science Department.
When I started working on this project, I
got
moved to the Applied Science Department because
Seeber really didn’t want anything to do
with this stuff. When I pitched this to Hurd,
it was easy to persuade him to let me get
Irv
to work with me. It just sort of went like
that - one by one.
That would have been in 1954ish- 1955?
Yes.
So you two toiled for a while and then slowly
the team grew over time.
Yes, we were allowed to hire people.
As I recall, the management touch around you
was pretty light, that perhaps--
Very light.
I’ll put it this way, you probably succeeded
because you were left alone.
Yes. We were off in a building on 56th Street
on the fifth floor of a little small
building.
Tell me about some of those years, because
I guess it’s sort of like a temporary
software that you kind of set a date saying,
“Well finish by then.” It kind of stretched
out, didn’t it?
Yes, it kept being extended by six months
every time somebody asked. But we had a
great deal of fun. It was a very nice group
of people. My main job was to break up chess
games at lunchtime because they would go on
and on.
In fact, I read that you guys used to play
a lot of blind chess. Maybe I mistook it in
one of the interviews, but tell me about that.
Yes. Well, I don’t know who… Harlan Herrick
was the chess freak and he got people
involved in that. There was some of this blind
chess going on. But it was mainly just
regular chess.
Right. You’ve repeatedly used the words
that that was a really fun time.
Yes, it was.
What made it so fun?
Well, just because we all got along very well
and we had these challenging problems to
deal with that we kept talking about and discussing
and we-- I don’t know. It was a
challenge.
Sure
The excitement of doing something that everybody
said we couldn’t do.
Right. You were in your - what - late 20s?
I imagine all of you were about the same age
or thereabouts.
Yes.
I recall in one of the interviews, you guys
sort of made up things as you went along,
as you discovered the problems and would tackle
them.
Oh, absolutely. The problem kept sort of sub-dividing
like an amoeba. The whole thing
just got divided up into these phases.
Sure, the phases of compilation, in effect?
Yes. Each phase was worked on by one or two
or three people, and they kind of
conversed with each other to get the interfaces
right.
And your role was sort of overall architecture
for it, it sounds like.
Yes, my role was just to sit around and watch.
[Laughs] So what were those major phases?
How did it break itself out?
Well, the first one was doing the arithmetic
stuff.
Sure.
That took in all the data from the [source]
code that was written, and it produced the
arithmetic code and stored a whole lot of
data for the next phase. The next phase was
dealing with indexing and that they really
couldn’t deal with because of only having
three
index registers.
Oh, my.
So we decided that -- or I decided that -- they
should do it for a machine with an
unlimited number of index registers. And they
did that. The third phase was just, sort of,
just put together all this stuff that had
accumulated. The fourth phase then did this
sort
of - what’s the name of that - Monte Carlo
calculation to determine how to assign index
registers.
My goodness. You were doing all of this in
machine language or assembly language?
Yes.
Wow, I can’t imagine doing that. It’s
hard enough in a high-order programming language.
Yes. No, I mean these guys were really good.
So when this first got unleashed to the world
-- because IBM basically shipped this
with every 704 then didn’t they?
Yes.
Of course, it was bug-free in the first release.
Of course. No. Apparently, we shipped one
box of binary cards, which is the only one
we were able to produce because it just ruined
the card punch to produce these things. So
we produced one box of binary cards and shipped
it off to Westinghouse, somehow or another.
And it arrived. Just this box of binary cards.
They figured that this must be the deck for
Fortran. They actually ran it, loaded it and
then executed this program and finally had
a
compiler, which they then had a little test
Fortran program which they compiled, and it
ran.
What did it do? Do you remember?
Oh, it was some jerky little nothing.
Right, but it was the first instance of an
executable outside of your own group.
Yes.
Wow.
Of course, that was the only time it worked
for them for a long time thereafter.
Did you spend a lot of time with them personally
then, trying to get things working?
We then sent this thing to a whole bunch of
people and they all struggled with it and
kept sending us all these error problem--
Bug reports, yes.
…error reports, and we kept correcting the
errors. Slowly, I guess it took six months
to sort of get it so it would run pretty reliably.
Gee, that sounds how Microsoft delivers software
these days. We probably don’t want to
keep that one on the tape. What were some
of the early problems that people were trying
to
apply this to?
Oh, they were mostly aerospace stuff. That
was for the big customers of the day.
Sure. Like Boeing and--
Boeing, North American and - I don’t know
- the company that Roy Nutt worked for- GB:
That name is familiar. Don’t remember. Roy
was a person on your team, wasn’t he? JB:
Yes.
But what work did he do in the phases?
He did the assembly program. It was a very
special, fast assembly program that
assembled all this stuff. But he did a lot
of stuff. He came down from - my memory is
so
terrible.
I might even have that in one of these things.
[Looking at documents.]
Yes.
Steve Lore [Steve Lohr, a senior writer and
technology reporter for the New York
Times], who I met once, did a really interesting
history of this work in one of his books –
The Turning Point.
Walter Ramshaw was his boss. It was an aerospace
company, but it was in the east.
East Coast. I’m not sure.
Gardner Hendrie (cameraman): Was it Grumman?
No.
Yes, I don’t see the name here. You had
one woman on your team. Lois?
Yes, Lois Haibt.
Yes. What role did she have in the midst of
all of this?
Lois - let’s see, what section did she work
on? I think she worked on section three.
No, section four.
We were talking about some of the other people
involved, and the places where Fortran
was making some inroads. It was primarily
in the aerospace world, were dealing with
lots of
those kind of problems.
Yeah, and we also did a lot of work with Los
Alamos—
Yes. That would have been of course post Manhattan
Project kind of work, but there was
a lot of nuclear testing going on and—
Let’s see. When was the Manhattan Project?
The Manhattan Project was what, late-- The
bomb exploded in ’45, yeah.
Gardner Hendrie (cameraman): The bomb exploded
in ’45. The first hydrogen bomb was, I’m
thinking ’52.
That sounds right to me. But then we were
doing a lot of nuclear testing because we
didn’t really know the impact of-- We were
shrinking them and Los Alamos was doing quite
a
bit of work there. In fact, to jump ahead,
I do work with people in the supercomputing
domain, and Fortran still rules in that space—
Yeah, I’ve heard that.
Most of the super computing work is still
all done in Fortran.
That’s astonishing.
It is astonishing. But a lot of the weather
forecasting programs…
Well, they have all of those dusty decks to
deal with.
I don’t think they use punch cards anymore.
I know, but the equivalent thereof.
The equivalent of. But it’s amazing how
much that software still lives, because they
are probably using those algorithms which
existed decades ago. In some of the nuclear
simulations and weather simulations and stuff
-- that stuff is still pretty much all
Fortran these days.
Uh huh. Wow. Astonishing.
That was Fortran 1. What led to Fortran 2?
Well, it was— [pause] You couldn’t-- There
weren’t any subroutines in Fortran 1. You
just-- It was one big mess. So Fortran 2 added
the ability to have subroutines and—
And the notion of subroutines coming from
Maurice Wilkes I think—
Yeah.
--first proposed that notion. Did you have
much interaction with his team at all?
No, but we read about it.
So subroutines were the big thing in Fortran
2. JB: Yes.
What did that enable you to do? Was it hard
to introduce the notions into the compiler?
No. It was-- It didn’t take much doing.
I think Irv Ziller did most of the programming
that made that change from 1 to 2. Irv Ziller
and Libby Mitchell. She’s absolutely
disappeared from this earth. I’ve tried
to locate her but I have not succeeded.
I’d read she was kind of the program lead
for Fortran 2.
Huh?
She was kind of the program lead, the project
manager—
No. Irv was. GB: Irv was. JB: Yeah.
What was Libby’s role in Fortran 2?
She did a lot- just a lot of programming.
She was a very good programmer and she did
it accurately and quick.
What begat Fortran 3? What were its novel
things? I’ve read of Fortran 1, 2 and 4
but 3
seems to have disappeared.
Well, 3 was mainly again Irv’s thing, where
you could sort of combine symbolic
programming and Fortran programming.
Fortran 4 is the one that really seemed to
gain traction with the commercial world.
Yeah.
You were still deeply involved in that work
at that time, weren’t you? JB: I don’t
think so. I think that was mainly something
that Bill Heising did. GB: By that time you
were still at the Watson Labs. Is that correct?
I was never at the Watson Labs. GB: You were
just in New York City? JB: Yeah.
Interesting, because I thought I’d read
somewhere you were at the Watson Labs. You
stayed in Manhattan this whole time then?
Yes. Yeah.
Interesting. It wasn’t until later that
you went out to the West Coast.
No. Wait. Let me get this straight now. When
you said Watson Labs I keep thinking of
some little place on 110th Street but—
I meant upstate New York a little bit.
Yeah. You meant out in Yorktown. Yeah. Let’s
see. When did I move there?
I couldn’t find a date for that one because
you were in New York City for the most of
the ‘50s and then you ended up at the San
Jose Labs I think in ’63 so—
Right. I wasn’t at the Yorktown Lab for
very long, but I can’t remember when I moved.
No worries. With Irv and others taking more
up on Fortran 4, where did you find your
work leading? Where was it leading you?
Well, it’s leading me nowhere basically
because I had an obsession with the four-color
problem. It was 
just some crazy ego thing that I was totally
ill equipped to deal with, but
I had some idea that I was going to generalize
it and thereby make it easier to solve, or
something like that. It was simply that the
idea was to prove that any map on a plane
could
be colored with four colors without having
neighboring countries of the same color. I
messed with that for ages and ages and ages
and never got-- I had all these nutty little
theorems that I proved, but never really did
it.
Although identifying yourself not as a mathematician,
you were dealing with some pretty
deep mathematical issues.
Well, I was dealing with a difficult mathematical
problem but I would never say that I
was dealing with deep mathematical issues.
And IBM gave you the freedom to pursue these
things.
Yes, they just left me to stew in my own juices.
Did you have other colleagues you were working
with around that time or pretty much a
loner in that?
I was pretty much a loner doing that, huddled
in my office in Yorktown and later out-
when I moved to the West Coast.
Let me go back to the Fortran days for one
more moment on that. As you look back on
what you guys did there, what do you think
you got the most right, and what do you regret
having done, the most wrong, if you will?
Well, I think history has shown that we divided
up the problem pretty much right
because a lot of people have kind of followed
that same pattern in general.
You really just stumbled into that, didn’t
you? The way the compiler and such was
divided up? Or was it just sort of the natural
decomposition that fell out?
Well, it just-- We started to do it as one
unit and then we saw that, uh oh, that
isn’t going to work, so we had to subdivide
the problem into two things, and then that
kind
of went on like that. It was a pretty natural
process.
In all, you ended up with-- What was the final
form of the compiler?
It had six sections—
Six sections.
Yeah.
It manifested itself as 250,000 cards, or
some huge number like that? JB: No! The
original compiler was, if I remember, about
30,000 instructions. GB: Wow. So efficiency
and
smallness were virtues at that time.
Well, people were writing these things [instructions]
one by one. You didn’t have
these programs that could slosh out thousands
of instructions from one little piece of
writing.
Remarkable. Does the museum have a copy of
that first compiler now? I think you were
saying that they do, they don’t?
Gardner Hendrie (cameraman): I believe they
do have a copy.
How exciting.
Yeah. I think I’ve heard that they do have
one of the early compilers, yeah.
That’s remarkable. After the Fortran work,
did you have much contact with the Fortran
communities that eventually standardized Fortran
internationally?
Well, my main contact was coming to some--
What was it called? The-- Some committee
that dealt with that stuff.
ISO or—
No.
ANSI? I forget. There were so many standards
groups around that time.
No, but this wasn’t a standards group. This
was just the committee within- all the
aerospace people and stuff that dealt with
Fortran.
They wanted to get some common standards.
Yeah, so that they’d have a uniform thing
and they used to- that committee used to
hold meetings in Los Angeles and various places
which would mainly be getting together
and-- Who was it? I guess it was usually Roy
who would come-- No. It was a guy at North
American, not Frank Wagner but another guy,
a little guy with a moustache. Anyway—
We’ll do pattern matching with pictures
here.
Yeah. He used to show up with big bags of
liquor and we would have our meeting, which
was mainly drinking—
From this the standard of Fortran was born.
Hmm. It tells me something about the
standards process. I was involved in the standards
process with Ada and other things and we
didn’t have any such meetings.
Oh.
They were much less fun.
Yeah. Well, that went on for quite a while.
Then it got the bigger bosses in the
process, they got annoyed with us and sort
of got it much more sober and productive,
but I
didn’t participate in that.
How did you get drawn into the ALGOL process
then? ALGOL was my second programming
language. I learned Fortran 4, and I went
to the Air Force Academy where we had a Burroughs
machine and we were taught ALGOL 60 as our
primary language. I loved ALGOL. That was
a
great language. I enjoyed it. It sounds like
you have other opinions of it—
I’m glad you liked it—
How did you get drawn into that process?
Well, I don’t know that I was very much
drawn into it.
Your BNF work came from that of course—
Yeah.
--when you were specifying the structure of
the ALGOL.
Yeah, but I-- It was a big committee deal,
Sure.
--and I don’t think I contributed very much
to it.
How did you and Peter get together, Peter
Naur, to specify the syntax?
Well, I had come to one of these meetings
with this BNF description. It was a little
paper and I handed it- I hand carried it because
it was so late in the game, so I had these
copies that I dragged to the meeting and passed
out to people and nobody paid any attention
to it.
Really.
No. Except Peter Naur. When he came to write
up the thing, he used this descriptive
method, and improved it in the process.
In retrospect, I can’t imagine specifying
a language without using BNF. So what were
they doing before that time frame? It must
have been—
They were just writing English.
And giving examples, and stuff like that.
I had read you were influenced by some of
the
work of Noam Chomsky, that led you to that.
Yeah, well, that’s a funny story. That’s
what I said and what I believed, and yet…
Who
was it? Somebody sort of proved that I was
wrong about it, that I hadn’t got it from
Noam
Chomsky, because the dates were all wrong
somehow. But-- God, who was that?
No worries. What became the de facto way,
really, to describe the syntax of languages
was something that I heard you say just came
in late in the game in ALGOL. Now we look
back
on it and I would have sworn I thought it
was a fundamental piece of the creation of
ALGOL
but—
No. They were inventing that language long
before and the description was pretty much
of a mess.
But the BNF work, it’s been so influential
in other languages. I know ADA picked up on
it. Didn’t Wirth use it to describe PASCAL
as well?
I think so, yeah.
And pretty much every language. Did you have
any interaction with Niklaus Wirth at all
in the PASCAL work?
Not in designing PASCAL, no. But we would
meet in these meetings quite often.
In your design of Fortran, are there things
that -- “regret” is the wrong word, but
it’s “I wish we had done this thing a
different way because we now created generations
of
programmers who are doing these terrible things”.
Is there any such thing in Fortran like
that?
Not that I’m aware of, because I never used
it very much so I—
Really! Interesting. So as a programmer, what
did you program in most of the time?
I never wrote many programs. I was not good
at doing that. What kind of programs was I
going to write anyway?
From the four color problem -- that was around
the time of the work with ALGOL, if I’m
not mistaken -- then what did it lead you
to next? Was this around the time you went
to the
[IBM] San Jose Labs, Santa Teresa Labs?
Yeah.
What led you to be moved out that way? I love
the west coast; it’s not a bad place to
be.
Well, I got an invitation from Berkeley to
be a visiting professor there. I went out
and I spent a year at Berkeley.
Still with IBM though.
Still with IBM. Never gave a lecture, just
sat around in the engineering building. At
the end of the year they were so pleased with
my performance they invited me to be a
visiting professor for another year. Again,
never gave a lecture, and so that’s how
I kind
of got moved out to the West Coast.
The labs were really just forming around that
time in Santa Teresa, weren’t they?
Yeah, so I didn’t show up in San Jose for
quite a long time. I was just hanging out
in
San Francisco, and finally they said, “Well,
how about showing up?” So I started going
down
there, and after that I got working on this
stuff about—
The functional programming work?
Yeah.
The Santa Teresa Labs are interesting; they’re
still kind of in the middle of nowhere.
Back then they must have really been in the
middle of nowhere, because San Jose hadn’t
quite expanded its borders that much. And
you were there when there was still a lot
of
orchards around in the area.
Yeah. When I first went down there, there
was just this little-- There was the plant
and then there was this little building—
What were they doing at the plant? What did
they manufacture at that time?
Oh, I think printers or something. I’m not
sure.
That sounds about right. I think these days
there’s a lot of database work that goes
on
in that space.
Yes.
You probably had the feeling of “I wish
I had bought lots of real estate when I first
moved into that area”, because you saw some
amazing transformations in the valley over
the
years.
Oh, yeah.
This would have been in the early 1960s you
ended up in San Jose?
Let’s see—
I think I have the date. Sixty three was around
the time you moved there—
Uh huh.
--and that was way before Silicon Valley came
to be Silicon Valley.
Right.
It was really around that time frame that
you started your first forays into the
functional programming work.
Yeah.
Tell me a little bit about the work environment
in that space. You showed up
occasionally at the labs it sounds like.
Yeah. I mainly stayed home. I worked with
Ted Codd briefly, and—
This is before Ted Codd of the database world.
Yeah.
This was long before he’d really begun to
formulate his relational database work.
Yes.
What work were you doing with him?
Just trying to work on this functional programming
stuff. I was just groping around
really, trying to—
What led you to the functional programming
domain in the first place?
That’s hard to say because-- 
I was just trying to think of some sort of
really higher
level programming that wasn’t as difficult
as Fortran. The problem was that the idea
of
functional programming, the “combining forms”
and stuff like that, came pretty easily. But
trying to make it into a real full system
where you could deal with all the other issues
that you couldn’t express in that language
got very confusing and messy.
Indeed, as I look over your career, you probably
spent more time on functional
programming than you did on the Fortran work
certainly.
I think so, yeah.
Were there others around you that influenced
the early functional programming work, or
was this sort of a foray on your own?
I think it was mostly a foray on my own.
And IBM created an environment that they let
you go off and do these wild things. JB:
Yeah. I guess-- By that time I was a Fellow
so I could do whatever the hell I wanted.
GB:
You were one of the first Fellows. Were you
in fact in the first batch of Fellows? JB:
Yes.
Who were some of your peers who were the other
Fellows or—
I didn’t know them, because they were all
into printers and hardware and stuff, so I
didn’t know any of them.
As I recall, the Fellow program was started
by Watson Jr--
Yes.
--as a means of recognizing some of IBM’s
top technical talent, and let them alone so
they can create new great things for us as
well.
Yeah. The idea was that you could do what
you wanted for a year and--
It turned out to be longer than a year though.
Yes, and then I kept sort of doing what I
wanted and they kept saying “Oh, yes, go
ahead, do it.”
Very nice.
Yes. Then they finally decided that they’d
better quit this one year at a time thing.
Then turn it into: this is sort of what you
do the rest of your career?
Yeah, sort of. That is the understanding,
isn’t it?
That’s the understanding. As I said to you,
Nick Donofrio basically described that I
have two jobs: One is to invent the future,
and the other is to destroy bureaucracy. Of
which there is a little bit of that around
the organization. But it sounds like you were
pretty much unencumbered by bureaucracy.
Yes, I was very unencumbered by bureaucracy.
That must have been nice.
Yeah.
Were you having as much fun then as you expressed
you had in the time you were working
on the SSEC? Or was it a different kind of
fun?
Well, the most fun time was working on Fortran.
We really had a ball working on that
because it was just… We had this nice place
to work, and we all got along very well with
each other. At one point we were in this hotel
across from Saks Fifth Avenue, and everybody
spent half their time looking in to the dressing
rooms across the street.
There’s a distraction.
Yeah, it was a distraction.
Do you have much contact at all with any of
your colleagues from that time frame? They
must have scattered to the winds.
Yeah. No, I have contact with Irv Ziller.
Where is Irv these days?
He’s in New York, the same old place he’s
lived his whole life, across the Hudson,
just in Yonkers or someplace. Not Yonkers,
it’s Riverside, yeah.
He stayed with IBM for a long time then.
Yes, he did.
IBM tended to hold on to people a long time.
He became very closely associated with the
vice president, some-- I forget the name of
the vice president but he was sort of an executive
without portfolio. He was a very smart
guy.
Lois and Roy and Pete and Bob and Dave, any
of those other folks? JB: Well, a lot of
them are dead. Peter is dead, Harlan is dead,
Roy is dead. GB: Lois?
Lois is still alive. GB: Time marches on.
JB: Yeah.
Let’s move back to San Jose. Do you think
you were a Fellow? That would have been ’63,
around the same time. Was that at the same
time you were moved over to the West Coast?
Yeah.
So you began the functional programming work.
Tell me about some of its earliest
formulations. What were the problems you were
trying to solve [those] that Fortran didn’t
quite solve?
Well, it was just trying to be at a higher
level so that you didn’t have to get into
all those gory details and stuff. Basically,
the idea was to try to describe the
transformation that you wanted to take place,
rather than how to do it. It evolved very
slowly and peculiarly. I had no idea about
combining forms when I started, and just finally
hit on that idea and developed it.
It really fermented in a time frame where
there was an explosion of other languages.
There was PASCAL, there were the successors
to ALGOL, there was what became Ada. What
did
you think of the whole Ada? You were around
that time frame.
Well, I thought it was a pile of stuff—
Tell us what you really feel, John. [Laughs]
Don’t hold back here.
Well, it was just so incredibly bureaucratized
and complicated and impossible to
learn.
Your functional programming work was so different.
Huh?
Your functional programming work was going
down such a different path, of pushing
simplicity and power of expressiveness and
the like.
But it was ultimately unsuccessful because
it couldn’t take in all the peripheral
stuff that you had.
Your functional programming work was unsuccessful.
Yes.
Let’s dwell upon that for a moment, because
there were some other papers that I saw
after your Turing Award lecture [“Can Programming
Be Liberated From the von Neummann
Style”, 1977] which was also a turning point.
Because I’d describe it as a wake-up call
to
the language developers and programmers, saying
there’s a different way of looking at the
world here. The world was going down a very
different path. Let me pursue that point of
why
you think it didn’t succeed.
Well, because the fundamental paradigm did
not include a way of dealing with real
time. It was a way of saying how to transform
this thing into that thing, but there was
no
element of time involved, and that was where
it got hung up.
That’s a problem you wrestled with for literally
years.
Yeah, and unsuccessfully.
After the Turing Award work --that was 1977
when you were given the Turing Award -- and
that paper was incredibly influential. I know
there was some other work in functional
language at Berkeley, and others that really
picked up on it well, that tried to make that
more concrete.
Right.
How long then did you continue on with that
-- really until your retirement in ’91?
Were there other problems?
Yeah.
That was also around the time of lots of other
languages. We saw the beginnings of C,
and what became C++, and Smalltalk was around
that time. What did you think of those
languages?
I never learned them, so I don’t have too
much of an opinion.
If I were to ask you what your favorite language
is, it would probably be? If there is
such a thing.
Yeah, I don’t really have one.
What do you think of the contemporary languages
such as Perl and Python and Ruby? Have
you tracked any of those things that are going
on?
No. I’m a terribly unscholarly person, and
lazy.
Really!
Yeah.
Interesting. I would never have characterized
you as such.
Yeah, it’s true.
So Fortran was a way to help deal with that
laziness in a way. You could do things
better—
Yeah. That was my motivating force in most
of what I did, was how to avoid work.
That’s not a bad thing necessarily. You
said one time that the assumptions under which
Fortran were made simply don’t exist anymore,
those assumptions being we needed to build
really efficient programs. What do you think
are reasonable assumptions for a language
designer today for them to have to worry about?
Well, I guess the question of it still seems
that programming is a pretty low-level
enterprise, and that somebody ought to be
thinking about how to make it higher; really
higher level than it is.
But functional programming wasn’t a fruitful
path, you think.
Well, it was and it wasn’t. It’s just
that that whole paradigm didn’t include
these
other [things]. Somebody needs to find a way
to include those other things in a clean way.
Do you think it’s still possible?
I guess. I don’t know. It’s a difficult
problem. GB: It is, and it’s one that consumed
you for a long time. JB: Yes.
You continued on that path for the longest
time at the San Jose Labs. Correct?
Yeah.
Until your retirement from IBM in 1991 or
thereabouts.
Uh huh.
Why did you leave IBM in 1991?
I don’t know. It was my official retirement
age so I just—
So it was time to move on.
Yeah.
You would have been 60 something—
-Five, yeah.
Sixty five.
Yeah.
I didn’t realize IBM had such an age. I
don’t worry about those things. That’s
long in
the future for me I guess.
Good.
From there you went on to Berkeley for a while
and stayed there? Or had you taught for
a while?
No. That was earlier.
What did you do after retirement from IBM?
What did I mainly do? I didn’t do much of
anything, actually.
You were living in San Francisco at the time,
which is a nice place to be living.
Yeah. I did a lot of work helping my wife
get her computer stuff.
You were tech support for the household.
Right.
That was a time frame when there was such
an explosion in activity in the Silicon
Valley and the whole area. Do you have any
impressions of that timeframe?
No, because I wasn’t involved, and I had
sort of gotten out of technical stuff. I was
interested more in music and reading, and
stuff like that.
That’s right, you’re quite a classical
music fan, and an abstract art fan.
Well, I don’t know much about abstract art
actually.
Tell me about your love of music. Did you
always have that love of music?
Yeah. And I always tried to sort of get into
contemporary popular music, but I never
managed to like any of it because it always
seemed so trite.
Do you play an instrument yourself?
No, I don’t unfortunately. I always struggled
when I was younger to play the piano,
but I was always clumsy at it, so I never….
Who are some of your favorite classical musicians?
Are we talking classic, classic like
Bach and Beethoven and the like?
Yeah, and Mozart is one of my favorites but
I also like this- a guy named Goretski.
He’s a modern Polish composer. He does a
lot of nice stuff.
Interesting. And you have a love for art,
and a love for reading as well, I think you
said.
Yeah, I like to read.
What do you like to read mostly?
History, biography.
What are you currently reading?
I’m reading this thing by David McCullough,
a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
If someone were to read a biography of John
JB, it’d be a pretty thick book I imagine.
What would you hope it would say?
Well, that I helped. That I contributed to
the development of computing. And I’m
essentially nonviolent.
You’re a peaceful, gentle guy. As you look
back over your career, what are you most
proud of? Is it the Fortran work? Is it the
functional programming work? Is it something
entirely different?
I guess the functional programming stuff.
Yeah.
What would be your advice to somebody that
would want to take up the banner of
functional programming? Where would you suggest
they begin, and what hard problems would
you like them to pursue?
Well, trying to functionalize all the input/output
stuff.
Helping it talk to the real world.
Yes.
Do you think there’s a class of problems
for which functional programming is better
suited to solving than contemporary languages?
Well, any problem that just wants to transform
some piece of data into another piece,
I’d say functional programming is better
suited to that.
In fact, we were talking earlier that Google
even has a functional programming
language, a thing called Goopy if I’m not
mistaken.
Right.
It’s exciting to see them picking up on
it. So see, your work has gotten traction.
It
truly has.
[Let’s go] way back before Fortran. Where
were you born?
I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, a pretty
lousy place.
How was it lousy?
Well, it's the home of the DuPont family,
so it's a whole bunch of rich sons of bitches
acting up. Acting rich. Not a very good place.
And that would have been... Give me the year,
I can't calculate it in my head.
I was born in 1924.
1924. Your parents -- a little bit about their
history. What does your dad do?
My father was originally a chemist, but then
during the first World War, he was a
munitions officer. When he came back to the
DuPont company -- he was told they were going
to hold his job -- and they hadn't. So he
became a stockbroker, and got really rich.
That's
the story of my father. He was born in Virginia,
[to] a very poor family, and only went to
two years of college, or something like that.
He was a smart guy. Not a very nice guy, but
he was smart. My mother died when I was eight
and a half. And, of course, until the late
'80s, early '90s, I hadn't remembered anything
about her until I took some LSD and
remembered a lot of stuff that I would just
as soon have forgotten, where she was sexually
abusing me. But it was amazing. Until I took
LSD it was as if she hadn't existed; I had
really just wiped her out of my memory. I
couldn't remember anything about her, except
one
incident in which she plugged in a light thing
and it short circuited.
The things one remembers. Wow.
That's the only thing I remembered about her.
Did you have siblings? Any brothers or sisters?
Yeah. I have an older sister who's now dead,
and I have a younger brother who lives in
eastern Maryland. Very nice place.
So you were the middle child?
Yes.
Were you a precocious child? Were you energetic,
a sports kind of child?
No. I was a withdrawn, I think, rather sadistic
child.
Sadistic in what way?
Well, I used to get kids in this little shed
in the back of our house, and sort of mess
around with them in some nasty way, humiliating
way.
You went to school in Delaware?
Yeah. I went to a school called Tower Hill
School in Wilmington, and then in the eighth
grade I went to the Hill School in Pottstown,
Pennsylvania.
Did your dad remarry at all?
Yes. He remarried to a really horrible woman,
my stepmother, who was really neurotic as
hell. For a while she was an alcoholic, and
would sort of hang out the window yelling
at
trades people, and stuff like that. Then she
quit that, but she was always a bitch.
So you grew up in that area, and then after
high school you left the region?
Well, after I went away to Hill School, I
practically never came back to Wilmington.
So your family stayed there, but you then
went away.
Yes. After I got out of prep school, I moved
to New York. Got this wonderful 18 dollar
a month apartment.
Oh my goodness. Wow. Too bad you can't do
that these days. Eighteen dollars a month?
Eighteen dollars.
That might buy you a second these days, in
New York City. So what led you to New York?
Remind me of that story.
I don't know. It seemed like a good place
to get away from my family.
Definitely not a bad place to be. In fact,
as you think about being in grade school and
high school and stuff, what did you imagine
you wanted to be when you grew up? Or were
you
thinking of those kind of things?
I didn't think about that at all. After I
got to New York, my big ambition was to build
a really good hi-fi set, which was not around
in those days. I got this huge chassis, that
had these gigantic transformers and stuff.
Didn't work very well, I must say, because
I
wasn't an electrical engineer. But I tried.
Part of the history of you just trying things
and not knowing that you were going to
fail. And just do it.
Right.
Fascinating. In fact, I saw this as a theme
in one of the interviews you did. You were
talking about the book, "In Search of Excellence,"
I remember, which you talked quite a bit
about. I think you reflected upon the importance
of failure, [and] what we can learn from
all that. What have you learned from your
failures, would you say? Both software and
otherwise?
It’s a difficult question. I've learned
not to be too optimistic. To realize that
doing
something worthwhile is tough. Things like
that.
In fact, at lunch we were talking about an
aspect of that. One of the things that
motivated you in your work in Fortran, and
subsequently in functional programming, was
this
growing complexity. You used a phrase about
complexity that I thought was interesting.
Oh, the “cesspool of complexity”.
Yeah. Talk about that. What is this "cesspool
of complexity?"
Well, I mean, just look around at software,
and you see it everywhere. You see the
contents of the cesspool, so to speak. Everything
is so complicated. Everything comes with
a manual that thick, and it's a mess.
How should we attack that complexity? I think
Fred Brooks once spoke of it as the
"inescapable complexity” that exists. Is
it truly inescapable, or can we master it?
Well, that remains to be seen. Actually that
functional programming was an effort to
try to go up a level, so that you didn't have
to keep saying how to do everything, but
rather say what you wanted done. That idea
of saying what you want done bumps up against
a
lot of problems in input and output, and stuff
like that.
All those real things.
But that's basically where it should go.
That reminds me, speaking of Fred for a moment.
Did you have much interaction with the
360 project and Fred's work?
Well, I had some interaction with it. I was
involved in one of the design meetings and
stuff. I kind of dislike the whole idea of
different machines. I was really pushing for
an
identical design for the three middle machines
in the class, and I don't know whether that
happened or not, really. So that programs
would be all the same for them.
Interesting. That was kind of a "bet the business”
move on IBM's part, the whole 360
thing. It definitely transformed the company.
Happily, that bet went well for them. Do you
think there are any other big bets companies
should be making these days?
Well, yes. If they can really bet on software
that will make it possible to say what
you want done rather than how to do it. I
think that would be nice.
Here's a philosophical question, speaking
of software. Is the world a better place
because of all the software that's been written
in your lifetime, or not?
Well, in human terms, probably not. Because
it just takes us further and further away
from human affairs. But as far as economic,
and welfare, it's done a lot of good. So it's
a
mixed bag.
It is a mixed bag, it really is. You strike
me as just an amazingly very human and
gentle and caring person from that answer,
and I absolutely love that. Where do we go
from
here? What do you think is going to happen
in my lifetime?
Well, I don't know. But I don't envy you,
I'm afraid. I think that we're getting more
and more technological and less and less human
oriented. And as a country, we're getting
tremendously aggressive, and we're going to
pay for it. So it's a tough call.
I'll sleep well tonight now.  I meet
with a lot of people who are considering,
should they pursue a career in software or
not, hardware or software, anything in this
space at all. Any advice you might offer?
If you were to talk to somebody, say in high
school or something like that, saying, "Gee,
what should I do here?", what would you say
to
that person?
Well, don't go into software. It's just such
a complicated mess that you just frazzle
your brains trying to do anything worthwhile.
Understood. Looking back on it all, have you
had fun?
Yeah, I had a lot of fun.
And the most fun you talked about was the
Fortran days and the SSEC...
Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I had a lot of
fun too working on the functional
programming stuff.
That must have been, because you were breaking
completely new ground there, and you
were unfettered by legacy or anything like
that to pursue it.
And I had good, nice people to work with.
Who were some of the contemporaries you mostly
worked with in the [effort]?
John Williams, primarily.
Do you stay in touch with John? Is he still
active in this space?
Yeah.
So many people you have interacted with over
the years. Many of them were my heroes—
you're one of my heroes— I'm delighted to
have met you. I think I've run out of questions.
Good.
Anything else you would like to ask?
Gardner Hendrie (cameraman): No, but thank
you.
Thank you so much. This was a delight, to
have a chance to meet you.
I've enjoyed it.
And I've learned some tricks about what it
means to become a Fellow. So I'll institute
them. Which says basically, "Just do it."
The Nike approach. “Just do it.”
