Ed Feigenbaum remarks
I too am going to do some reading, sorry about that, but I wrote it all out, ...um, I am really glad to be here, that is I am really glad to be here considering the alternative (laughter). I want to make my comments brief, because there are so many other people who will, I am sure, want to speak; but to paraphrase a famous scientist, no more brief than is necessary.
This is my view, We are here tonight because Les Earnest took the trouble to bring us together (anon: Here! Here! applause ) It is a family reunion, Les’s extended family, and he has always done things for us, his extended family. For me, this is the night we honor Les, for his remarkable contributions he made to SAIL and to AI as the chief executive officer of SAIL. His work at SAIL was of great competence, diligence with compassion for people and their situations and the highest integrity. Les was as well as the chief executive, chief human relations officer, the chief engineer, the chief architect AND now he is our chief patriarch. Now it was not easy doing these things among the visionary but highly variable demands of John McCarthy, the rest of us, the Stanford Bureaucracy and ARPA.
Most of you don’t know how McCarthy and I managed to find Les. Was it divine intervention? No. It was the intervention of Ivan Sutherland, who had just signed off on a rather large amount of research money that we had asked for in our 1965 proposal to ARPA.
Ivan had taken over from J.C.R.Licklider as the head of ARPA’s information processing research office. He had just signed off on an ARPA contract to give us a lot of money to two professors who probably did not know how to manage it, but in any event these were two professors who needed adult supervision. Anyway we got the adult supervision. We want to thank Les. If there is such a thing as a heart and soul of the laboratory, then Les was the heart and soul of SAIL.
Thank you.