Thank you.

Last time I got an introduction that good, after I gave my speech, a young lady came up to me and asked: "Did you really invent the internet?"

I couldn't resist: "Yea, that was me. Well, me and Al Gore, actually..."

To set the record straight, I had very little to do with the actual creation of the internet. I put 16,000 people on it, built something like 3000 web sites, helped create a really cool internet cafe, (even wrote a song about that), and I helped broadcast some of the first live concerts over the net. More recently I did a lot of work on wireless networking and graphic displays, and some of the work I've done on that is in a bunch of personal video recorders and more of it will be showing up in cell phones this year.

I did all this because I felt that connecting like people from far away places, and getting different people to understand one another was the most important thing in the world, in a world where people still warred over food, territory, and oil.

The work that I've done is only the tiniest fraction of the work that has gone into making the internet the force for good, for information, and for communication that it has become. The real work has been done by people like you, your teachers, and you graduates today.

Up until recently I'd felt that everything I had put so much work into was being misused. That the people that I was trying to connect were trying to disconnect everyone else. I was schlumping around, carrying this guilt, this pain around, I had two major problems in my life that I couldn't solve... and it seemed like time was running out... And then, something happened to change all that for the better.

I got into engineering because of my Uncle Bill. Not just because he was chief of design for the Sikorsky RH-53D Sea Stallion Helicopter, which seats 55, flys to 21,000 feet, and lifts seven tons.

But because he had this really cool Texas Instruments programmable calculator, and instead of going outside and playing in the snow with the "normal" kids, I curled up in a warm bed, and learned how to program that calculator. I can still remember those glowing red LEDs. And one day, when I was about seven, he told me about his helicopter, and all the things it could do, and I've kept it in flying in my mind ever since.

So I've gotta tell you this true story, about the trials of life, and of engineering:

Mars

On September 23rd, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, after travelling from earth to Mars, missed its re-entry to the atmosphere by 143 kilometers, and burned to a crisp. Why? One engineering group used english units, and the other used metric. Three years of labor. Toast. They'd made a big mistake. They'd screwed up.

Email to engineering: Clearly communicate essential facts. Otherwise, spaceships turn to smoke and ash. If you can't convert between meters and feet, don't leave the United States, or the planet!

Those same two teams managed to get up the next day, somehow, because they had to work on the Mars Polar Lander. It had to land in nine weeks, on December 3rd, 1999. Working together, they fixed all the bugs where meters became feet. As the clock ticked... they tested their software, checked and rechecked every single line of the bug fix; and simulated and re-simulated the atmospheric re-entry, and tried really hard not to make another mistake.

They finished on time, make their deadline, and uploaded their new software, sending the bits 345 million kilometers from here to Mars.

And then they had to wait, three days, to see if it would really work. I'd like you to know, what a countdown like that, when what've just done has to work and two years of your life is on the line, is like:

Countdown

Three days out from landing, you've got time to watch "The Right Stuff" and read the book, and replay the whole thing, several times, in your head. You've got time to read two more books You can fit in a couple episodes of Star Trek. If you can eat without throwing up, great. Most engineers eat a lot of pizza, yet lose a lot of weight during the countdown.

On the second day you can read "Russian Spring", and watch "Blade Runner", and "Apollo 13: The Director's Cut". If you can't sleep, which is likely, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and the "Foundation Series" are pretty good.

You might as well, read, you can't do anything coherently. Give someone else your car keys. During a countdown the government should automatically suspend your drivers license. Heavy exercise is good, but sex is impossible.

Nobody remembers the last day of a landing very well. But if you're like me, you can't eat or sleep and your mind keeps flashing on images of the Challenger blowing up or the Columbia spread across the skys of Texas. You take multiple showers, and spend time counting the knotholes in the ceiling and talking to yourself.

The countdown resumes: 24 minutes out, the spacecraft makes the correct course change. Your stuff worked! You feel pretty good. You're not directly responsible for what happens next But you still gotta hope everyone else in Mission Control will get that thing to land.

Twelve minutes out the Polar Lander blazes through the Martian sky at 10,000 mph, right on course! In three minutes everything you've worked on is going to succeed, or not. And the radio goes silent.

The only thing I can compare this to, is when, at twenty, your kid stops talking to you... For three years! We all have to land this way. It's just life, in this case it's physics. There's a "crackle" on the radio.

Ten kilometers, right on target - five kilometers - one kilometer... 500, 100, 90, 80, 70, 60, 50 meters, the legs extend out and the landing rocket fires!

And stops. Early. The Mars Polar Lander, on December 3rd, 1999, actually crashed. It hit sideways, bounced, smashed itself to smithereens and the pieces rolled to the bottom of the crater.

The Helicopter

Now, you may think all the action in this story takes place on Mars, but I tell you - I've been in a crater like that, more times than I care to remember. How many of you have tried really hard and failed and crash landed in a crater? Hands up! (If your hand isn't up, you're not listening, or lying!)

Have the courage to get up and try again.

I know that my just saying that doesn't help. You're in bed with a fourteen-thousand -pound pillow over your head. There's no way you're getting up, not that day, maybe not ever.

If you're lucky, right next to you in bed is someone you love. Turn over and give him or her a hug. You'll feel better. Hugs are far more poweful than the internet itself. In fact, stand up, right now, tell 'im that everything's going to be all right, turn to your neighbor and give them a hug. Doesn't that feel good?

There's another device, just within reach, from under that 14,000-pound pillow. It's called a telephone. At the other end of it are all the friends, and family, and loved ones you have in the world.

And out on the internet, there's more friends and support groups than you can ever imagine. Than I ever imagined, and I helped build the darn thing...

But sometimes, that crater that you are in is too deep and that 14-thousand pound pillow just weighs too much to get out from under. Let me give you the full sensory fantasy that works for me.

Off in the distance... through the pillow... I hear this:

<chopchopchopchopchopchopchopchop> Suddenly there's dust and wind all around, there's this incredible noise, the smell of kerosene, and a huge Sea Stallion helicopter appears in the sky above me. I hear my uncle Bill's voice. A spotlight lights me up!

<chopchopchopchopchopchopchopchop> A giant claw drops down and lifts that 14-thousand pound pillow away! A rescue chair drops down. There's a hint of perfume. Christie Brinkley leans out - this is my fantasy, I can do whatever I want - she picks me up, straps me in to that rescue chair, <chopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchop> and the helicopter lifts me up, out of that crater, and drops me off... right at the coffee machine.

And once you're out of bed, you're halfway to anywhere.

The role of Christie Brinkley can be played by just about anybody. If anyone here wants to audition for it and hang with a somewhat neurotic, overstressed, overworked engineer, come see me after commencement.

Uncle Bill's Helicopter is great. It can rescue you every time you imagine it coming for you.

Take joy in how close you got. In the case of the Mars Polar Lander in a few hectic weeks those teams went 350 million kilometers and missed by 40 meters - this is like if you drove from Los Angeles to Santa Clara... and missed your parking spot by 1/5th of an inch! And while this was the difference between total mission failure - or a nasty scratch on your car - take a moment to cherish all the things you've done right in all the times this globe has spun around just so you could get to today.

Why did the Mars Polar Lander Crash? Murphy's law. "Anything that can go wrong, will." If you don't know this law, I'm going to talk to the Dean, and make sure you don't graduate today. Real Life is dangerous and full of surprises. Engineers have battled with Murphy since the beginning of time. This particular bug was in a place where no-one had looked. While that was something of a mistake, it's really hard to beat Murphy. They could have made it. They didn't.

Email to engineering: You can't simulate real life, sometimes you have to crash a spacecraft or two to learn something. Nice try. You got close. Get up, and try again.

Close

When I wrote this speech, four months ago, my nephew Josh, uncle Bill's grandson, had disappeared for two long years. For all I knew he was on Mars. And I was desperately ill, and I wanted to see him one last time before I kicked the bucket.

So I posted the speech, and why I wrote it, on the internet, and I started emailing everyone I even vaguely knew, for help. Two widely read web columnists, Eric Raymond and Doc Searls, read my plea, and wrote about it. Overnight, someone in England, found out where my nephew been only a few months prior... and the story of Uncle Bill's helicopter mushroomed, thousands of people read it, it was all over the the internet on a virtual global search and rescue mission. Josh's friends and family wrote in, former bandmates, college roomates, girlfriends, all got in touch with me, and total strangers like Ann Waldron from Australia offered their support.

Through some terrible yet amazing weeks, there was this incredible outpouring of information, love, and email from all these wonderful people on the internet - the internet that I'd helped build, the internet of the wonderful people that I'd tried so hard to connect - and ultimately the one person who knew where Josh was got in touch with me.

And to make a really long story short, that guy over there, doing sound - is my nephew, Josh Taht, my Uncle Bill's grandson. Along the way, through using the internet, and talking with all these people, I found the cure for my malaise.

I've realized that the internet really was the force for good and bringing people together that I'd always wanted it to be. I know that, as engineers, we work on things that don't immediately reward us, we generally work on things that don't love us back. That sometimes the technologies we've worked on are misused and underappreciated. But sometimes, they come back to us in totally unexpected ways, and make all the heartache and hard work worth it. I know that we can come back from making terrible mistakes.

End

I know, now, that we have to get up, and try, every day, to solve the problems we face.

The dean asked me to touch on the economy. If someone like me were to touch the economy, it would break worse. All I can say is that if you rally to the support of your friends and family, we can pull through it. Maybe you'll have to create your own job, but you are already in the process of creating your own future - you already know that if you get up every day, and try, you ultimately will graduate school. I know today, you're probably feeling pretty great - although the future looks kind of hard.

I swear to you that if you have enough faith and courage you will succeed. But you will have good days and bad. And if one bad day, if that 14-thousand pound pillow you're under seems too much to bear, and nothing else seems to be working... I'd like you to hear, off in the distance,

<chopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchop>

Uncle Bill's helicopter.  Thanks for listening.

Copyright 2002 - 2003 Michael Taht

About the Article

This essay became an internet phenomenon last year while the author was searching for his nephew. Their's was a happy ending, and Michael Taht, finding this inspiring speech in constant demand, has been polishing it ever since. This version was presented on March 15th, 2003.

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