While pursuing my PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, I designed and wrote most of the software for what many consider one of the most impressive events in computer history: Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, where Engelbart demonstrated all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing. Since then, my career as a computer scientist has enabled me to contribute to significant advancements in artificial intelligence, office information systems, research, standards, and engineering management.
My professional background spans a variety of roles: hacker, computer operator, software engineer, knowledge engineer, architect, researcher, engineering manager, research manager, lobbyist, not-for-profit president, and standards organization board chairman. I’ve worked in the US and in Europe, in both failed and successful start-ups, in small companies and large companies – and I’m still having fun.
Here I am at 28 and 78. In the image on the left I am in Menlo Park, CA and making a presentation to a computer conference in San Francisco by video. In the video presentation I demonstrated the first display-based, on-line document editor and the way one used a link in a document to jump to another document. I am using the editor I implemented to show computer code for the system. Today's analogy would be a software engineer that works at Apple using Pages and Zoom to show the way he implemented hyperlinks in Pages. The image is from 1968. You may read more on my Wikipedia page.
Artist Statement
In 2016 Dr. Rulifson [Wiki, LinkedIn] retired from a fifty-six-year career as a Silicon Valley computer science pioneer.
Now, he photographs neighborhoods and people. Jeff describes himself as a curious observer of individuals and their surroundings: a wandering semiotician who writes with a camera. Instead of viewing images through the classical aesthetic of causal predication, Jeff sees them as the sentences of a structuralist treatise on functional isomorphism.
With his portraits, on the other hand, he aims to capture the dignity, beauty, grace, strength, and enthusiasm of people in the common and the ordinary of their life and work. He's a concerned photographer in the Cornell Capa sense: “… committed to contributing to our understanding of humanity’s well-being” and he practices in the School of Humanist Photography.
Based in Palo Alto, California, he travels worldwide for his projects.