To listen to more of W Daniel Hillis’s stories, go to the playlist: • W Daniel Hillis (Scien...
Born in 1956, US inventor, scientist, engineer and visionary W Daniel Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers and co-founded Thinking Machines and Applied Minds, which marked a new era in computing and established Hillis as a computing legend. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes and George Dyson]
TRANSCRIPT: I was a student but I was also very much a hippy. I became a hippy. And I was the head of the Coalition for Peace and Justice which I started. And, you know, there was a very active anti-war movement and I would bring anti-war movies to the school and, you know, show movies about the Vietnam War and how horrible it was, and go to war protests and things like that. And so the high school, like many high schools, was sort of divided into the nerds, the jocks, the hippies, the... I was mostly a hippy. And was always fighting with the administration.
So for instance, there was a student election and I ran on the anti-war ticket, and the reform ticket, and the principal insisted when he heard I was running that they got to censor our speeches. So he censored out all of my speech, basically, I wasn't allowed to say anything. So we got up before the student council, the student body, to make our speeches, and I said, I'm not allowed to... My speech has been censored, I'm not allowed to do it, but I have three minutes. So I'm going to use it. I took out an apple and I ate the apple for three minutes. And everybody was cheering. And then the principal suspended me for eating outside the cafeteria. That was the sort of battle.
And then they had the election, and I had people that were counting the votes who said that I was winning. But then the principal announced that I had lost, which I'm pretty sure was a rigged election. But that was, you know, the way things worked in those days.