other breakthroughs, from designing artificial intelligences to fine-tuning classified military aircraft systems that depended on mathematics for their stability. When you wander into a deep part of Google’s technical database systems, you're touching his work. When you talk to your phone, the interface bubbles with some of his patents. How did Baran’s 1960s idea of a survivable, packet-based system at ARPAnet become the Internet in the 1970s and 80s? Danny was part of a cluster of dirty-fingernail engineers - along with engineers such as Vint Cerf and Jon Postel - who'd done the work to make it possible. His centrality in that project was memorialized in a famous speech he once delivered in which he described having one of the very first email addresses in history - and then whipped out a sheaf of bound pages that represented the entire Internet address list at the time. It ran about 50 pages. To the extent there were membership cards in the New Caste, Danny’s would have had a very low number. It was an easy decision for our prize committee. No Bill Gates. No Steve Jobs. So, here’s how | met Danny Hillis: I called to tell him he had won a million dollars. (I recommend this as a way to start a friendship.)
Hillis had been a tinkerer since he was a child and never seemed to have lost the pleasure of a wild intermingling of joy and practice. You couldn’t tell with him where passion ended and work started. He was so technically adept that he could inject even the coldest digital projects with a bit of hot emotion, like Bernini breathing life into a block of carved marble with one, “just so” grace note of his chisel. One of Hillis’s most famous projects, for instance, was a 15-foot high tic-tac- toe playing tinkertoy robot he’d built when he was 20 years old, in his second year as an undergraduate at MIT in 1975. Made from 10,000 wooden spindles and poles, it was an early attempt of his to show how machines, even simple ones, might seduce us with both brains and looks. The effect of a giant tinkertoy pile sitting there at The Massachusets Institute of Technology had to make you giggle, even as your mind boggled at the fact that this heap of sticks, strings and dials was beating you again and again ata child’s game. Hillis was an artist as much as an inventor - one reason he’d not become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. (And why Gates and Jobs maintained a consistent, admiring respect for him.) He’d once spent a decade at Disney designing rides or thinking up new dreams as a kind of real-world mayor of Tomorrowland. He liked to joke that he knew he was at the right place when, on his first day, he asked where he might find a parachute harness for an experiment and heard, in response, “What size?”
Hillis was an avid reader, and he has the habit to think of his bleeding-edge work in the context of long historical gulps. Conversations with him often tie back to Paleocene era biology or some other deep root. That long-term view, married to his unmatched hands-on feel for complicated systems, made him the ideal designer for the clock, a machine intended to last millennia. The problems associated with such an undertaking were, honestly, as unreal as you might expect. How to power the clock? (Hand winding, the better to ensure it was not forgotten.) How to protect it? (Put in the middle of nowhere.) Did you need to plan for global climate change? (Yes. The design was adjusted to accommodate shifts in the earth’s spin when the planet’s icecaps melt off.) Do you write a users’ manual for people 10,000 years from now?
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