The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith II

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
It is a special honor to receive an award named for Allen Newell. Allen was one of the fathers of computer science. He was especially important as a visionary and a leader in developing artificial intelligence (AI) as a subdiscipline, and in enunciating a vision for it.
What a man is is more important than what he does professionally, however, and it is Allen’s humble, honorable, and self-giving character that makes it a double honor to be a Newell awardee. I am profoundly grateful to the awards committee.
Rather than talking about one particular research area, I should like to stay in the spirit of the Newell Award by sharing some lifetime reflections on the computer science enterprise, reflections which naturally reflect my convictions about the universe. The title and opening section of this talk were first formulated
for a 1977 speech. Let me reiterate the points, since many of you were barely born then.
In some quarters and at some times, computer graphics has been seen as a left-handed stepchild of computer science. Another view of computer science sees it as a discipline focused on problem-solving systems, and in this view computer graphics is very near the center of the discipline.
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