The Power of Happenstance

As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early ‘60s, Andy van Dam found himself steeped in math-heavy engineering courses and decided he needed a break.   A new course, programming for digital computers, sounded interesting.

They certainly didn’t have a digital computer at Swarthmore College where van Dam earned his B.S. in engineering sciences and where he had worked with analog computers.  Penn had only one digital computer, the pioneering Univac I, and it was off limits for student work.  “The entire semester we wrote programs, but we wrote them in machine language—zeroes and ones,” he says.  “We never ran them on an actual computer because we didn’t have access to one.”

Van Dam eventually became so hooked on the whole idea of computing that, in 1966, he became the second person in the country to earn a Ph.D. in the brand-new field of computer science.  “I thought it was just incredible that you could tell a computer what to do, and it would do it,” he says.  “The digital computer is the only universal tool we have—the only tool that can do anything you tell it to do with sufficient precision.  There’s nothing like that in human creation.”

Van Dam grew up in the Netherlands, where his father and mother were both professionals. He credits them with giving him “the DNA and the chops” to be persistent and hard-working.  As a Jewish family living in Europe when Hitler rose to power, they were also survivors.  His father took a research job in Java (then part of the Dutch East Indies) in 1939, and in 1942, he and his parents became “involuntary guests” of the Japanese in a sequence of concentration camps until liberation came.  

“We barely escaped with our lives,” he says.  “But every single member of my family who had stayed in the Netherlands were victims of the Holocaust. So we were the lucky survivors.”

Post-war, his family was repatriated to their home city of Groningen, which was a “pretty grim place in 1946. It was also a living that taught him to look beyond what was presently possible.  

In 1952, when he was 13 years old, van Dam and his family started life over in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where his father became a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  The only English Andy knew at first  was “hello” and “thank you,” but steeled by a superior Dutch education, he skipped a grade, and his American experience began.

For more than 40 years, van Dam has been one of the most influential computer scientists in the field.  He collaborated with Ted Nelson on the first hypertext system on commercial equipment in 1967, and as a co-author with Jim Foley, literally wrote the textbook on computer graphics.  To this day, he is a consistent pioneer in the area of human-computer interaction.  “I want it all,” he says, “keyboard, dictation, pens, magic markers, touch.”

He also co-founded and was the first chair of the computer science department at Brown University, where he still delights in teaching introductory courses to “absolute newbies.”  He prefers to work with an army of undergraduate, rather than graduate, TAs because he loves their zeal: “Raw talent and enthusiasm are wonderful commodities.  I exploit them to the max.”

As a beloved professor, van Dam has spawned successive waves of computer scientists who are now prominent teachers and technologists in their own right.  His enthusiasm for the world’s only universal tool reverberates throughout the industry.  

Taking that first computer class on a whim “revolutionized” his life, he says.  He insists that it wasn’t logic, planning and certainly not a vision that led him into computers.  It was curiosity.  Joy.  An openness to new experiences.   

 “All the major things that happened to me in my career were the result of happenstance and serendipity,” he says.  

That’s why, when anxious students ask him for career advice, he tells them to stop worrying and follow their passion.

“My mantra is relax!  Just learn and be open to tackling new subjects.  Balance breadth with depth because you’re going to change your mind about what it is you want to do.  It’s not about specific technology and techniques.  Let the flow of events channel you in the right direction for you.”