---
title: "Robert Taylor"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Robert W. Taylor"
aliases: ["Bob Taylor","Robert W. Taylor"]
first_seen: "2026-10-19T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["DARPA/IPTO","ARPANET","Larry Roberts","J. C. R. Licklider"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1966 to 1969, who conceived and funded the ARPANET project and recruited [[entity-larry-roberts|Larry Roberts]] to ARPA in 1966 to run it — the hiring Roberts himself recounts in his CBI oral history (OH 159, 1989). Taylor later ran Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory, where Ethernet and the personal-computer GUI were built, though that chapter hasn't surfaced in this vault's reading yet. Matters to the vault's DARPA/IPTO cluster as the direct institutional predecessor between [[entity-j-c-r-licklider|Licklider]] (IPTO's founder) and Roberts (IPTO's Mansfield-era program manager) — the vault had Licklider and Roberts without the person who connects them.

## References
- Capture: 2026-10-19-does-robertss-primary-1988-bartee-chapter-or-the (OH 159, read via Wayback recovery; Taylor appears in Roberts's own hiring account but is not yet the subject of a promoted claim-note)