Man who helped invent brain of computer apologises profusely

"I AM DEEPLY ashamed of the problems we've let come through" says Stan Mazor, surveying the nearly 40 years of computer development since he joined the team creating the Intel 4004 microprocessor in 1969.

"I am always very apologetic for what we have brought to the public."

Chief among these problems: "Computers are much too difficult to use," he says. "The screen says to my wife, 'You've performed an illegal operation'. Are the police coming? There is a whole range of terminology that is inappropriate for the public." Plus, he says, computers force people to encounter all sorts of things that make no sense in terms of their real world experience.

"I think the strategic mistake that should be obvious in retrospect is that after the wave of cheap hardware would come the wave of the importance of software. So I guess I should have turned more attention to the software world and what was going on there." He did work in software - but for CAD companies, focusing on designing chips. That said, he figures he couldn't have done much in hardware to change the course of software development.

Ironically for someone often dubbed "inventor of the computer chip" (although he is quick to note it was a team effort), he calls himself a "technology laggard".

It seems hard to believe. After designing - and winning a patent on - the memory system for the 4004, Mazor went on to work on its successor chips, the 8008 and the 8080. He's taught other designers, worked for six start-up companies including BEA Systems, and is in several Halls of Fame. And he's written books (he calls Word "one of the most aggravating software products I've ever used").

For the past few years, he's been trying to apply some of the lessons he learned in designing computer architectures to building a French neoclassical chateau out of styrofoam blocks in Ashland, Oregon. The most significant of these is building it from a complete design, in stages.

"I needed to know where the interfaces are." Interfaces: wiring and plumbing. The first section was a 500 square foot cottage; next was a tower on each end. "Styrofoam" doesn't mean it will fall down when a passing pig blows on it. The blocks are 85 percent ground-up styrofoam mixed with 15 percent liquid concrete cast in ten-foot by 30-inch blocks with holes in them like breeze blocks. Each block weighs 300 pounds. To make a wall, stack, glue together, and then pour concrete through the holes to provide structure. This being earthquake country, there are also steel reinforcing bars that run through the concrete.

"The walls are mainly concrete," he says, "with a styrofoam wrapper." The material breathes to let air in and moisture out, they are good insulators, and the blocks echo the big limestone or sandstone block of real French castles.

The idea for styrofoam blocks came to him when he walked past an alleyway in Japan and saw a bunch of pieces of styrofoam packing waiting for the garbage men. "I thought, what if you made a supersized Lego block," he says. He thought of patenting the idea - and then discovered to his chagrin that someone had done styrofoam blocks 20 years ago in Austria.

In computing, Mazor says that ever since the 1960s he's had two landmarks in mind. The first is the "talking typewriter", where you can talk to the computer and have the text appear in a word processor. That, he agrees, is more or less there. The other, however, is the robot nanny: the computer that can understand what it sees well enough to watch children on swings and tell them to slow down.

"That's the thing we're furthest away from and need most, is eyes on robots. The eye is one of the best faculties we have as humans. In terms of where microprocessors need to go, for computerised vision we're going to need a huge jump in computational power. But when robots have eyes they'll be smarter and more capable." µ

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and a page linking to in this series. Readers are welcome to send email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).