Ensign Earnest, 1953
A Bad Boy with
Good Luck Can Accomplish a Lot. I was born in 1930 in San Diego,
California, and grew up there as a body surfer and bicycling bad boy. After
rising through the ranks of the Cub Scouts I was dishonorably discharged for
artistic misconduct, so I never got to be a Boy Scout. I got an FBI record at
age 11 as a result of dabbling in cryptography during
World War 2. I somehow got into Caltech on a scholarship then ran wild and
flunked out twice but still managed to graduate in 1953. Along the way I was elected Pope of Blacker House, where I and my
College of Cardinals were responsible for lowering student morals.
After
serving three years in the Navy as an Aviation Electronics Officer, in 1956 I
was recruited by MIT to help design the SAGE air defense system, which was a
technological marvel that included the first computer network. However, it also
turned out to be an operational fraud. After that I continued helping to create
Computer
Networks, as discussed below.
When
MIT spun off the MITRE Corporation, I was included. I also earned an MS in
engineering at MIT while helping to design several computer systems for the
corrupt Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex, including parts of the Air
Force, Central Intelligence Agency, and Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I
then escaped to Stanford University, which provided me with a good life. There I
designed, set up, named and managed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (SAIL), nominally in collaboration with Prof. John McCarthy. Along
the way I and my colleagues created many inventions as
summarized on the First Page and discussed
further below and in other parts of this web site.
In 1980 I became founding president of a
bootstrap Silicon Valley startup (Imagen Corp.) that was successful for a time
but I ended up partially disabled because of the stress, then muddled ahead in
a mental fog for 14 years until I got the sleep apnea fixed. Along the way I returned to Stanford as Associate Chair of the
Computer Science Department, then retired in 1988 and have since continued as a
cyclist, world traveler, writer, and troublemaker.
Videos
Here are some videos of me
giving talks of widely varying durations.
á
Lester
Earnest's Acceptance of Sigma Chi FraternityÕs ÒSignificant SigÓ award,
(2 minutes), 2017.03.20.
á
Setting SAIL, (1 hour 41 minutes), Lester
summarizes his innovations and the creation of the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, 2016.05.26. A corrected version of the slides used in
the talk can be seen here.
á
Interviews of Les Earnest and Larry Tesler at the 40th Anniversary of the Invention
of Internet Protocols, (5
minutes), 2014.05.10.
á
How John McCarthy Accidentally Started
Uniting the World, (6 minutes),
at the Celebration of John McCarthyÕs Accomplishments, 2013.03.25.
á
Sustainable Archiving of SAIL, (10 minutes), 2009.11.22.
Biographies
L. Earnest, Steve Jobs set a Precedent that
I Will Not Follow. You may have heard that I might have pancreatic cancer, or
that I donÕt, or that I really do, or that I have the same kind of tumor that
Jobs had and stupidly mishandled or that I plan to ÒWatch and Wait.Ó I knew
that Steve Jobs was eventually killed by pancreatic cancer but having known him
casually and viewed him as an arrogant jerk I knew I would not emulate his handling
of it. In fact, I now seem to be winning. This note includes my Bucket List and
my plan to live until age 112.
Curriculum Vitae of Lester Earnest is an orderly summary of a random walk. Another
short biography can be seen in Wikipedia.
Dag
Spicer, Oral History Text of Lester
Earnest,
2012.11.28, Computer History Museum.
L. Earnest, How I got an FBI record at age 11 by dabbling in
cryptography, then got into more trouble but had fun. Possessing
a cryptographic key was viewed as a suspicious activity during World War II. My
best friend Bobby Bond and I then got into more trouble but much later engaged
in a successful project that saved many lives.
Soon see How I got Four
Up on Cats. I have survived 12 brushes with death so far, so I am now on my
13th life and it remains to be seen how many such incidents it will
take to get me. The title of this story is based on the allegation that cats
are entitled to 9 lives.
L. Earnest, My Ancestry. My parents
were Lester Elvin Earnest and Sue Wolfer Earnest, who
met at what is now San Diego State University and both had successful
professional careers.
L. Earnest, Personal History of Lester D. Earnest will
be incrementally documented year by
year.
Innovations
L. Earnest, LesÕs
Bucket List. Got to get it done by
2043.
L. Earnest, The first cursive handwriting recognizer needed a spelling
checker and so did the rest of the world, At MIT in
the period 1959-63 I developed the first cursive handwriting recognizer, which
included the first use of light pens as drawing and writing instruments and
also included the first spelling checker. In 1966 I
initiated the much simpler task of creating spelling checkers for use in
editing text files. We gave that software away beginning in 1971 and it soon
spread around the world via the new ARPAnet.
L. Earnest, ROUT, the first search engine (1961), and NS, the
first network news service (1975). These services both used inverted indexes to provide
rapid retrieval of documents based on content.
L.
Earnest, Machine recognition of cursive writing, IFIP Congress 1962 (Munich), Information
Processing 62, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1963. Describes the first
successful handwriting recognizer, which includes the first spelling checker. Nilo Lindgren wrote an article about this work in Machine
Recognition of Human Language, Part III Ð Cursive Script Recognition,
IEEE Spectrum, May 1965.
L.
Earnest, Making WYSIWYG characters shape up, Proc Protext
IV Conf., Boston, 1987. Describes a mathematical method for choosing pixel
widths of characters so that lines of text most closely match their ideal
widths.
Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh, BloggingÕs roots reach to the Ô70s, CNET News, 2007.03.20. Discusses the origins of blogs, including
the proto-blog service included in the first social networking program, Finger,
which was created by Lester Earnest in the early 1970s.
L.
Earnest, Modular Software Security, U.S. Patent # 4,888,798, Dec. 19, 1989
(assigned to Minolta-QMS). Patents a scheme for freely distributing encrypted
software for computers with hardware identity codes, then selling numeric keys
to unlock selected parts.
L.
Earnest, A look back at an office of the future, Decision Support Systems: Issues and Challenges,
Pergamon Press, Oxford, England, 1981. Describes SAIL
computer services for document preparation and other interactive services,
including displays on every desk with full bitmap graphics dating from 1971.
L. Earnest, Radio markers needed, Feb. 1965. A letter to the U.S. Secretary of
the Interior advocated that roadside signs indicating points of interest and
providing historical information be replaced by low powered radio systems
providing this information, so that motorists could get it without pulling off
the highway. This received a prompt favorable reply from a representative of
the National Park Service but then nothing further happened, as usual. This
proposal still makes sense and modern digital technology could substantially
lower the cost but will government authorities ever figure that out? Probably
not.
L.
Earnest, Kutta integration with error control, presented at ACM National
Conference, 1956, proposed a way to numerically solve simultaneous
differential equations, such as those used in flight simulation, by
automatically adjusting time steps based on error estimates obtained from a modified
Runge Kutta method.
Opinions
L. Earnest, Testimony on Software Patents, 2003.
Argues that software patents are a bad idea even though venture
capitalists, lawyers and patent trolls love them.
L. Earnest, S*x, lies and politics: Part 4. Terrorists and the politicians who love
them, 2001.09.11. On the morning
of 9/11 I started writing the fourth article in a series aimed at restoring
democracy in USA Cycling, the national governing body of bicycle racing that
had been taken over by commercial interests in a thoroughly crooked way. I was
planning to post it in the Usenet newsgroup rec.bicycles.racing but as I was writing, news came
in about planes being hijacked by terrorists, and rammed into buildings so I
switched topics and predicted the effects this would have on civil liberties. Unfortunately my predictions came true.
L. Earnest, E2A is worse than Y2K CACM July 2000. A wry look at Y2K doomsters,
avaricious contractors and military acronymiacs.
L. Earnest, CIAÕs security theater,
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) likes to pretend that everything is secret and that it is acceptable to
lie whenever their misconduct is exposed.
Soon
see The Cisco Fiasco. How to
start a successful business by stealing technology and embezzling start-up
funds then getting the victim university to buy your stock and grant a very
generous license, then put their Dean of Engineering on your Board of Directors
and fund an Endowed Chair in the names of the chief crooks.
Travel
L. Earnest, Slavia without
Yugo. Reviews visits to the
Balkans in 1971 and 2016.
L. Earnest, Hunter gatherer cultures that survive by default, March 2009. I have made numerous trips to Alaska and have numerous grandchildren and
great-grandchildren there. I also observe that native people there have several
things in common with those in the rest of the United States, such as having been
decimated by smallpox and other imported diseases and being alternately abused
and neglected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Many groups with valuable
mineral or timber resources also have been exploited by commercial interests
and ÒhelpfulÓ charlatans. However Arctic people who live in lands that nobody
else wants have been relatively free of interference
and have been able to preserve much of their culture. They could do even better
by commercially developing the resources that they have but there are cultural
barriers to doing that.