David Canfield Smith

2009-current: Still retired. Living in Bend, Oregon. Enjoying hiking, camping, skiing, reading, and photography. Especially enjoying having the time to pursue his nontechnical interests.

2004-2009: Retired – Smith and his wife Janet traveled the country in an RV. He is currently writing a book about their travels.

Smith and his wife Janet retired at the beginning of 2004, sold their house, and bought an RV. For the next five years they toured the country visiting scenic locations, photographing historical sites, and meeting a variety of people. They eventually visited all of the national parks in the contiguous United States as well as many national monuments, recreation areas, historic sites, and state and local parks, both in the U.S. and Canada. Smith is currently writing a book about those years called Travels with Janet, inspired by John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America.

2002-2003: Human-computer interface designer at IBM

Creator is a continuation of Smith's KidSim project at Apple. In 1997, Steve Jobs eliminated the Advanced Technology Group that Smith was working for. This meant that KidSim would no longer receive funding. However, Apple gave Smith and about 12 other employees of the former Advanced Technology Group permission to continue the project on their own. In 1997, Smith and his fellow employees created a start-up, Stagecast, Inc., to continue their work with KidSim. The goal of that firm was to finish the Java implementation of KidSim and sell it as a commercial product. Soon after founding the company, KidSim was renamed Creator. The first version was finished in 2000 and the second version in 2001. As of 2012, it is still available for purchase at the official Stagecast website, www.stagecast.com. However, Stagecast, Inc. went out of business in 2002 due to a lack of funding from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. In his own words, Smith said several venture capitalists told his company, "We love your software, and could we please have a copy for our kids? But we aren’t going to fund you because we’ve never made money on educational software." Smith called the disbandment of Stagecast, Inc., the second greatest disappointment of his career.

1996-2002: Cofounder and user interface designer of Stagecast – After the Advanced Technology Group was abolished by Apple, Smith and some of his Apple coworkers formed a start-up called Stagecast to turn KidSim into a product. They renamed KidSim to Creator. Creator was developed, refined, and extended by a dedicated team of engineers at Stagecast. Creator was completed (versions 1.0 and 2.0) and was sold into schools. But that was a tough market around the turn of the century before the iPad, and eventually Stagecast went out of business due to a lack of funding. Today, tablet computers like the iPad would be a perfect platform for Creator, and the App Store would be the perfect way to sell it.

1988-1996: User interface designer at Apple – Smith worked in the Apple Advanced Technology Group where he and Allen Cypher invented KidSim, with important contributions by Alan Kay. KidSim was based on Smith’s idea of programming by demonstration. But the project invented an equally powerful idea: visual rule programming.

1985-1988: Cofounder and vice president of human interfaces at Cognition – This was a Massachusetts start-up that attempted to do for mechanical engineers what workstations such as Daisy's and Mentor Graphics did for electrical engineers. Architecturally, it was based on Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad; it used constraint-based geometry to portray mechanical devices such as the windshield raising-lowering mechanism in cars. The dimensions, angles, and other measurements in the diagrams were linked to mathematical formulas. When the values in the formulas changed, the diagrams automatically updated to represent the changes. The engineer always had an accurate visual picture of his mathematical model. Smith designed a simple interface modeled on an engineer's notebook. It had sketch notes for the diagrams, math notes for the formulas, text notes for textual descriptions, and others. These could all be placed into the pages of a notebook. It was a modular design that made it easy to incorporate new note types as users invented them. The product was finished and sold, but Cognition was never profitable and went out of business. Cognition had been implemented on dedicated high-power workstations, which became uncompetitive due to the increasing power of low-cost personal computers using Intel chips. However, the Cognition interface was successful and won a General Motors competition to become its User Interface Management System (UIMS).

1984-1985: Cofounder, system architect, and user interface designer at Dest Systems – Smith, and other former employees of VisiCorp, formed a start-up under the umbrella of Dest Corporation to combine Dest's optical character recognition (OCR) reader with mass storage devices, such as optical disks to transform large amounts of paper documentation into a searchable and editable electronic form. The team was influenced by statistics such as: the documentation for the Boeing 747 weighed more than the airplane itself. Again, Smith and his team prototyped the product, but Dest suffered financial difficulties before they could fully execute it.

1983-1984: User interface designer at VisiCorp – At the time, Smith joined VisiCorp, it was larger than Microsoft and produced four of the top ten best selling personal computer applications - including VisiCalc. He joined VisiCorp because he admired VisiCalc inventors Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin. Similar to them, he wanted to contribute a breakthrough PC application. Consequently, he prototyped a new application that was going to do for relational databases what VisiCalc had done for financial modelling. Unfortunately, VisiCorp went out of business before he could turn his prototype into a product. Smith describes this as one of the biggest disappointments of his career.

1976-1983: User interface designer at Xerox in the Xerox Systems Development Division. Smith was one of the six principal designers of the user interface for the Xerox Star computer.

(needs to be rewritten) Smith served as a user interface designer for the Xerox System Development Division between 1976 and 1983. His role as one of the six principal designers for the Xerox Star constitute his main contributions to the field of human–computer interaction. The other five designers were Larry Clark, Eric Harslem, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, and Jim Reilly. While working on the Star, Smith helped develop four main features: the desktop metaphor, dialog boxes, the icon designs, and universal commands.

1975-1976: Programmer in Douglas Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Smith was drawn to ARC because of the many forward-looking papers coming out of it and by Englebart's The Mother of All Demos. However, Smith didn't feel that Englebart was keeping up with the cutting-edge research that he had just seen at PARC. Most importantly, Englebart was committed to time-sharing systems, whereas PARC was pioneering personal computers.

Smith attended Oberlin College, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in mathematics in 1967. During his senior year, Smith realized he didn't want to pursue a career as a mathematics professor, which had been his goal up to then. Fortunately, the field of computer science was just getting started; it seemed tailor made to funnel his interest in mathematics into solving real world problems. He developed an initial interest in artificial intelligence (AI) after reading Computers and Thought by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman. That inspirational book suggested that AI was the future of computing, and Smith wanted to be involved. While it took thirty years longer than people had expected, today AI does seem to be the future of computing. (For better or worse.)

In 1967 he began pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Following Feigenbaum and Feldman, Smith wanted to make a computer able to learn. His thought was that if a computer could learn, then it could apply that ability to the task of learning itself, and thus learn how to learn better. After a few iterations, it should become an expert learner. At that point people could apply it to some of the thorny problems of human civilization, and real scientific progress could be made. However progress was slow in AI and would remain slow for the rest of the century, due to the underpowered computers of the day. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that computers finally became powerful enough for artificial neural networks (ANNs) to reach their potential. ANNs are the source of the current renaissance in AI. The only question is are they going to become too powerful and supplant humans as the dominant species on Earth?

1967-1975: Pursued a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University. During this time, Smith also worked at Xerox PARC, where he associated with Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group which developed Smalltalk, one of the first object-oriented programming languages. Smith’s thesis project Pygmalion was written in Smalltalk.

1963-1967: Pursued a B.A. in mathematics at Oberlin College

Smith was born in Roanoke, Virginia on March 29, 1945. Smith graduated from Chillicothe (Ohio) High School in 1963 and was inducted into the Chillicothe High School Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame in 2007