Oral History of Alan Cooper
- Oral History of Alan Cooper
The date is March 13th, 2017, and I’m Hansen Hsu, curator, Center for Software History, and today, we are here with Alan Cooper.
I was born in San Francisco, California. I like to say I was born in Frisco, just to drive people crazy, in 1952, and right smack in the middle of the century. And I lived there for a few years and my mom wanted to move to Marin County. She wanted to move to the suburbs. My dad, who worked as an electrician in the city was kind of content, I think, with the city life, but my mom had this vision of, you know, the postage stamp lawn and the little house. And so when I was about four years old, we moved to Marin, and that’s—I grew up in a little, tiny town called Kentfield, really a bedroom community.
Can you tell us a bit more about your childhood?
Well, I’m sure I was just insufferable as a child, because I’m very sort of self-centered and self-indulgent, and critical, kind of a creative design type. And those are all the things that get you punched out in the schoolyard, you know. And so I was not really a happy kid, and I struggled for a long, long time, and it was—in many ways, it was marijuana that rescued me, because number one, it was a different way of thinking, but it was a counterculture that I could participate in, you know, so it became my peer group, and I had a peer group for the first time. I wasn’t actually interested that much in pot, and I stopped using it pretty quickly, but I had a group, we had long hair, and, you know, I had an attitude, and I did psychedelic light shows, and I hung out with musicians and artists, and it gave a center to my life. Everyone needs a center.
So what did your mother and father do? What were their occupations?
Well, my mother was a homemaker, you know. That was back in the day, and my father was an electrician. He loved that. He loved the construction trades, all of them. Even though electricity was his thing, he loved to use his hands to make things. He made stuff out of wood, and metal, and he knew all the trades, and he could plumb, and tile, and everything. And he became after a while, while I was still a teenager, he became an inspector, an electrical inspector. He worked for San Francisco, and so he kind of graduated to a more white collar job. And he also taught. He [End Page 100] taught apprentice electricians at a vocational technology school in San Francisco, and he was generous enough to actually let me attend some of his classes. So as a 12 year old kid, I’d sit in the back of the class with a bunch of 20 year old guys. It was all men at the time, of course, and he would teach electrical theory, and I followed as best I could. But that was a real treat for me to watch my dad standing in front of the class.
Do you have any siblings?
I have two sisters. You know, my parents, they were each the youngest of their families, and I’m the youngest of theirs, and so there’s a long distance. Both my folks have been passed for many years, and my sisters are moved away, and we’re not really close, so my family really is my wife’s family. I married into a much more amendable family to me, and as I mentioned, Dave Carlick already was an important part of that, and so I’ve learned a lot from my wife’s family. They’re from Paducah, Kentucky, so they have this sort of southern gentility that was foreign to me. I found it endlessly fascinating. They’re very gentlemanly, and courtly, and so they’ve been my family.
Okay, thanks. So obviously you’re...
