Wayne Gramlich was there at the very beginning of the Internet. While still in high school in the mid-1970s, the now 69-year-old managed to access the nascent technology — then called the ARPANET — and he decided on MIT for college because it was one of only a handful of universities in the United States at the time that was online.
True to form, the lifelong software engineer and computer enthusiast, who recently retired from Google Brain’s robotics department, still prefers to use a landline, once helped track down a friend’s brother who needed deprogramming from a cult — and in his spare time helped create the Snoo. (He’s signed enough NDA’s that he can’t describe the experience in any detail, but he calls the famous baby crib “probably the most successful robot on the market today”.)
