Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2022-08-17 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
Bruce Horn grew up in and around Palo Alto, attending Terman Junior High and Gunn High School. In 1974, at age 14, Horn and his friend Steve Putz were introduced by a teacher to Ted Kaehler at Xerox PARC’s Learning Research Group (LRG), who was looking for kids to participate in the group’s educational computing research using Smalltalk. Horn and Putz ended up joining the LRG as interns and working with Steve Weyer, separately from the classes that younger children were participating in with Adele Goldberg. Horn wrote a number of applications in Smalltalk during this time, include a flight simulator and a program that converted musical notes into notation. Horn became very interested in how Smallltalk worked and learned microprogramming, eventually writing the Smalltalk microcode for the Dorado and the NoteTaker, working closely with Larry Tesler and Doug Fairbairn. Horn also became interested in learning Norwegian, becoming friends with visiting researcher Tryge Reenskaug, the inventor of the Model-View-Controller user interface pattern. Horn was sent to Norway by PARC to implement a Smalltalk system for the University of Oslo during his college years.
Horn continued to work at PARC in between completing his bachelor’s degree at Stanford, and was present during Apple and Steve Jobs’ visit to PARC in 1979. After graduation, Horn had to decide between joining Fairbairn’s new company, VLSI, or following Tesler to Apple. After initially choosing VLSI, Jobs convinced Horn to join Apple, where he landed on the Macintosh software team. Horn was tasked with developing the Macintosh Finder, but drawing on his experience with object-oriented systems, he decided that the Finder needed to use an object-oriented database to separate code from resources such as text strings that could be swapped out, say for Internationalization purposes. This work led to the creation of the Resource Manager, the Desktop Database, and the notion of resource forks and file Types and Creators in the file system to associate files with their respective applications, removing the need for files to have extensions. Horn also created the Dialog Manager as a kind of subclass of the Window Manager.
Feeling burned out after the release of the original Macintosh, Horn spent a brief period consulting for Adobe, working on the print spooler for the Apple LaserWriter. Soon afterwards, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon for a Ph.D. in Computer Science, working with professors Jeanette Wing and Jim Morris, developing an small constraint-based object-oriented language, influenced by Alan Borning’s ThingLab at PARC.
After completing his Ph.D. in 1994, Horn did a lot of consulting, but also created an integrated Finder-like desktop environment called iFile. One of Horn’s consulting gigs was for Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG), run by Tesler, where he worked on a technology called LiveDoc, which translates text such as phone numbers into actionable objects. Horn also consulted for Maya (founded by Jim Morris), where he helped work on a technology known as Hyperfax that rendered documents in 3D. In 1999, Horn cofounded a company named Marketocracy that created a software-controlled mutual fund, using NeXT’s WebObjects technology. Horn then became interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) through his work with the startup Powerset, which provided natural language web search, later acquired by Microsoft. At Microsoft, Horn and the former Powerset team improved Bing, rewriting its search results page to provide more structured results.
Horn left Microsoft in 2011 to join Intel to work on AI in personal cognitive assistants. This resulted in a partnership with Oakley, creating the Oakley Radar Pace, smart sunglasses with a voice interface that could track data for runners. After the discontinuation of this product, Horn departed Intel in 2018, working at various startups for a few years, including Robust.AI, until returning to Apple in 2022.
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Catalog Number: 102792734
Acquisition Number: 2022.0109
5 дек 2023
