“The notion of a human being having to punch holes in lots of cards, keep these cards straight, and then take this deck of what might be hundreds and hundreds of cards to a computer…You come back the next day and find out that your program executed up until card 433 and then stopped because you left out a comma. You fix that and this time the program gets to card 4006 and stops because you forgot to punch an O instead of a zero or some other stupid reason. It was bleak.”
something his mother, Audrey, revealed to him at a very early age. He had been adopted as a twenty-eight-day-old infant. “The first bedtime story I remember being told was about how I had been chosen. Picked out by my mother and father. All the other parents had to take what they got, but I was chosen. That probably gave me an undeserved sense of confidence.”
But what if the system were designed so the computer was no longer a mute data manipulator, but a participant in a dialogue—something, he had written in that paper, like “a colleague whose competence supplements your own?”
“Bob worked by finding out what he couldn’t do, and then going for it. He could have gotten me a level or two higher without too much trouble, but GS-13? That was off the scale. But he got it done.”
He would visit his grant recipients several times a year, but not solely to hear the researchers’ obligatory progress reports. He was engaged in something more like community outreach, developing new teams, nurturing up-and-coming young researchers, cultivating an entire new generation of virtuosi.
Taylor had spent enough time in academia to know that the most interesting intellectual ferment took place well below the stratum of full professor. “Who are your youngest faculty?” he would ask around. “What are their ambitions? Where are the most impressive graduate students
Not that the purpose was chiefly to play. Rather, it was to build a network of people mirroring the one he would soon propose for computers. Lifelong professional and personal bonds were forged at these events. They would start the day with a communal breakfast, followed by several hours of discussion in the morning. They would eat lunch together, then were set free until dinner, another communal affair. The day ended with further colloquia.
Each participant got an hour or so to describe his work. Then he would be thrown to the mercy of the assembled court like a flank steak to a pack of ravenous wolves. “I got them to argue with each other,” Taylor recalled with unashamed glee. They went at the intellectual roughhouse with the scientist’s unemotional candor, oblivious to everything but the substantiation of truth.
“These were people who really cared about their work. They weren’t interested in politics, they weren’t interested in impressing anybody,” Taylor said. “If they thought that something I was saying was dead wrong, they’d just as soon tell me as not. They’d just as soon tell one another as not if they thought they were wrong. And in the end these people, all of whom were pretty bright, got to know one another better.”
Better to let his experts challenge each other while he watched, like a platoon leader subjecting his men to the rigors of field maneuvers to see whether they will break, and if so, where. “This way I would get insights about their strengths or weaknesses that otherwise might be hidden from me,” he said. “If there were technical weak spots, they would almost always surface under these conditions. It was very, very healthy.”
Impugning a man’s thinking was acceptable, but never his character.
Taylor strived to create a democracy where everyone’s ideas were impartially subject to the group’s learned demolition, regardless of the proponent’s credentials or rank.
Barry Wessler, not long out of grad school himself, was delegated to supervise, receiving no instructions other than “to get people together and make something happen.”
In contrast to his boss, he was deeply impressed by the machine and its commercial potential. “I think Max is wrong,” he said. “I know he is,” Taylor replied. “What are you going to do about it?”
the celebrated Xerox 914 copier, which became the most successful industrial product in history.
Olsen’s answer was a flat refusal. Only years later did General Georges Doriot, one of DEC’s original financiers, inform Goldman that Xerox had approached the wrong person. “Peter was my student at Harvard,” he complained. “He should have known you don’t approach the president on a matter like this. You talk to the backers.”
Research is a funnel through which you can bring in people who normally won’t talk to the guys down in the trenches designing equipment,” he said. Xerox had not been getting new ideas, and it showed. By allowing its researchers to isolate themselves the company had become as musty as a sealed tomb.
The Xerox to come, he declared emphatically, would control “the architecture of information.” The phrase was classic CEO-speak, grave, tendentious, and nebulous enough to be perfectly consistent with any strategy Xerox chose to pursue.
“It was a great phrase,” one PARC engineer said later, “because nobody knew exactly what it meant. So there were quite a few interesting things you could do and simply cite that as the justification.”
Pake spent the year contending with all sorts of reactionary trustees and alumni who, he recalled, “wondered why we didn’t just fire the students and keep the faculty.”
I had married a Rochester girl in 1966, but when I said, ‘How about leaving Rochester and moving to California?’ she said, ‘Sure.’”
The community was less like a nation than a swarm of tribal hamlets, often mutually unintelligible or even mutually hostile. Design differences among their machines kept many groups digitally isolated from the others. The risk was that each institution would develop its own unique and insular culture, like related species of birds evolving independently on islands in a vast uncharted sea.
armed with little more than this vague notion of a digital web connecting bands of time-sharers around the country. At any other agency he would have been expected to produce reams of documentation rationalizing the program and projecting its costs out to the next millennium; not ARPA.
“I had no formal proposals for the ARPANET,” he recounted later. “I just decided that we were going to build a network that would connect these interactive communities
“How much money do you need to get it off the ground?” “I’d say about a million dollars or so, just to start getting organized.” “You’ve got it,” Herzfeld said. “That,” Taylor remembered years later of the meeting at which the Internet was born, “was literally a twenty-minute conversation.”
Taylor later crowed: “I blackmailed Larry Roberts into fame!”
Unsurprisingly, this system produced ludicrous results. Estimates of enemy casualties exceeded the known population of North Vietnam, while the reported quantities of captured sugar reached levels equivalent to three-quarters of the world supply.
Taylor’s belligerence toward the Ph.D.-laden physicists who he viewed as sucking down half of the PARC budget as members of the “General Science Lab.” He was determined to prove that his ragtag bunch of engineering gunslingers could out-research any credentialed physicist in town, and he would never let an opportunity pass without reiterating the challenge.
While that small drama played itself out in Stamford,
While that small drama played itself out in Stamford,
The owners of Berkeley Computer Corporation thought it wise to lay low. Radical groups of the time manifested a distinctly Luddite streak, and computer facilities were prominent targets—witness the bombing by one anti-government group of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, which cost a young physicist his life. UC Berkeley seemed a good bet for much of the same.
When all the inputs and outputs were synchronized, it often seemed as if his mind worked about a thousand times faster than anyone else’s. (“We can now appreciate that in spoken discourse the theoretical speed limit is the Lampson,”
Butler Lampson was a little daunted by the challenge of physics at Berkeley. Later he claimed that he transferred into computer science because it was “not as hard” as physics, but he scarcely meant it the way normal persons do. He meant he found the task of advancing a science that history’s greatest intellects had been mining for 300 years fundamentally uninteresting. Especially when a brand-new field beckoned in which every new discovery represented a terrific leap forward in human enlightenment.
it was from these shirt-sleeved shop men that he learned to pare a decent design into a manufacturable one by stripping it down to its frugal essence. “They were the real engineer’s engineers,” he said.
You had been socially conditioned to feel ungainly and isolated by your devotion to machines and math; Alan Kay positively reveled in it, swaggered with it, declared in the pages of the counterculture bible itself that you and your awkward pals in all your nebbishy glory were the prophets of a new world in which computers and their unparalleled power would belong to the masses.
The hacker as rebel: Not an undernourished weirdo, merely someone “not very interested in conventional goals.”
Once you get him talking he performs what he calls a “brain dump” on you, years of accumulated knowledge and synthesis pouring forth in a flood of narrative in which the protagonists are Alan Kay and the startling and visionary ideas he holds dear (many of them still deplorably unrealized), and their adversaries are managers, executives, bean-counters, corporate boards, schoolteachers, and all others who regard the unshackled imagination as a menace rather than a gift.
“It’s almost impossible for most people to see technology as the tool rather than the end,”
“People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given. It’s part of the way our nervous system works. But it’s dangerous to take it as a given because then it controls you, rather than the other way around.
I was trying to get a little better at poker with a figmo who was a professional poker player, the trick being to see if I could make it a learning experience instead of just getting fleeced.”
“By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. They didn’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.”
There was an exorbitant discrepancy between the purpose of the machine—which was to simplify human endeavor—and the effort required to realize it.
I was completely thrilled that this guy seemed to think so much of my abilities. One thing I resolved was that he’d never find out the truth.”
“The best outputs that time-sharing can provide are crude green-tinted line drawings and square-wave musical tones. Children, however, are used to finger paints, color television and stereophonic records, and they usually find the things that can be accomplished with a low-capacity time-sharing system insufficiently stimulating to maintain their interest.”
“If ‘the medium is the message,’ then the message of low-bandwidth time-sharing is ‘blah.’”
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams”).
Thacker lassoed him into designing the disk controller, a hardware unit that would supervise the way the machine moved data to and from a spinning magnetic hard disk. McCreight recalled, “I told him, ‘I don’t know squat about disk controllers but, hey, I’m game. If you promise to answer all of my questions I’ll do it.’”
They would build nothing that could not be put to work, because that was the only way to find out in the end if the stuff was any good.
Then there was the added satisfaction of testing their mastery of a new technology.
Then there was the added satisfaction of testing their mastery of a new technology. “It was fun,” Lampson said later, “to see how easy it was.”
The 1103 required users to supply it with all sorts of “weird voltages,” as Lampson later put it, and looked like it might be prone to a host of data errors arising from the density at which designers crammed it with microscopic transistors. Such flaws made the 1103 a spectacularly stubborn and perverse contrivance. Its patriarch, Gordon Moore, termed it “the most difficult-to-use semiconductor ever created by man.”
Intel had so much difficulty turning out an economical volume of working chips that it had to assign entire teams of engineers and technicians to the drudgery of picking good chips out from the river of useless silicon coming off the fabrication line, a job so fervently detested it was labeled “turd polishing.”
Pendery “really didn’t understand what we were talking about,” Kay recalled. Instead he was “interested in ‘trends’ and ‘what was the future going to be like’ and how Xerox could ‘defend against it.’” In the course of one frustrating encounter Kay blurted out the line destined to become his (and PARC’s) unofficial credo. “Look,” he said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it!”
Whenever he could steal an hour or two early in the morning or late at night he would run some equally clumsy tests by bombarding an unused xerographic drum with laser beams. Eventually he learned how to scan an original image and turn out a duplicate. True, his first samples were crude and pale, not at all ready for prime time. Still, they were scarcely any worse than the faded, scrawled “10-22-38 Astoria” Chester Carlson had reproduced on a coarse apparatus in his kitchen. From Carlson’s crude and pale sample, Starkweather kept reminding himself, an awesome new industry had sprung. Who was to say that his might not do the same?
Nevertheless, Starkweather got scarcely more respect than Carlson had at the start of his own researches. “The theoreticians gave me every excuse,” he recalled. “All hogwash. They told me the beam would be moving so rapidly the photoreceptor would never see it. They talked about ‘photoconductor fatigue’ and asked, How will you modulate? They thought there was no practical value in it.
Over months and years of trying, fueled by the inner conviction that drives natural inventors, he fashioned experiments that answered every objection.
As for the complaints about the devices’ cost, Starkweather figured lasers were bound to come down in price. What, after all, was the laser? A neon tube with mirrors on the ends. A sign that says “Eat at Joe’s,” unfurled into a straight line. “There’s a feeling down in your stomach where you’re sure the thing has potential,” he recalled of those solitary days and nights. “You have to believe against all odds that the thing will work.”
For more than two months he wrestled with the puzzle. “I would sit and write out a list of all the problems that were difficult. One by one they would all drop away, but the mirrors would still be left.”
That happened in 1974 when Xerox’s product review committee, on which corporate staff planners were overrepresented and engineers almost nonexistent, debated which kind of computer printer Xerox should bring to market.
“A bunch of horse’s asses who didn’t know anything about technology were making the decision,” Goldman recollected. The Superprinter, he contended, was hopelessly unequal to the demands of high-speed printing. “Here laser printing had already been developed by Starkweather, and the guys back in Rochester were thinking in terms of CRTs, which was absolutely a backward way of doing it.” This time Goldman did
“A bunch of horse’s asses who didn’t know anything about technology were making the decision,” Goldman recollected. The Superprinter, he contended, was hopelessly unequal to the demands of high-speed printing. “Here laser printing had already been developed by Starkweather, and the guys back in Rochester were thinking in terms of CRTs, which was absolutely a backward way of doing it.”
Webster.” Still, it was a Xerox-style victory, Pyrrhic
Taylor’s predecessors had bequeathed him the axiom that the best way to manage research was to select the best people in a given field and set them loose. Scientists with the lofty skills ARPA demanded, Ivan Sutherland said, “are people who have ideas you can either back or not, but they are quite difficult to influence. You can maybe convince them that something’s of interest and importance, but you cannot tell them what to do.”
such special handling was rare. The pitiless judgments dispensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught that an answer can be right or wrong, “one” or “zero,” but not anything in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half-right, or had made a decent try. “There was nothing personal about it,” said Ornstein. “We didn’t want to be coddled or have our time wasted.”
Kay sometimes had to retreat and regroup for another run at the fence. “I can’t ever remember winning an argument with Butler on the same day,” he said later. “I could win quite a few on the second day. His mind worked about twice as fast as anyone else’s.”
“There isn’t an organization newly begun where you don’t find those honeymoon years where there’s a special bond among people,” reflected Jeffers, who recognized the phenomenon from the Peace Corps. “It was true there, it was true in PARC. It’s true in anything that’s new. It’s a great period. Everyone should be a part of something at the beginning.”
Like Tom with his paintbrush and whitewash, someone would set forth his idea or project—whether it was in a formal meeting or a hallway bull session was unimportant—to mobilize a few intrigued colleagues in an attempt to make it happen. If you saw a glimmer of how to implement a new operation in microcode, you would gather a few expert coders in a room and have at the problem until every whiteboard in the place was filled with boxes and arrows and symbols as arcane as Nordic runes. If you had a big project with a lot of soldering to be done, everyone who knew how to wield a soldering gun strapped on his holster.
“You know,” someone said as cards riffled in the background, “there’s no reason why we couldn’t make the electronics work just as well. And for a lot less money, too.” Appropriating a basement room in Building 34, the group took apart Kay’s speakers and painstakingly analyzed the design. They bought cone speakers from the same Kentucky factory that supplied them to Bose, and on a shrieking diamond-toothed radial saw in Jones’s garage they cut and shaped the sound baffles out of high-density particle board. (The marathon session left Kay covered with an inch-thick coating of sawdust and Jones with a lifelong case of tinnitus.)
state-of-the-art Bose 901s, which came with their own electronic equalizer and cost $1,100 the set
All told, they manufactured more than forty pairs at $125 each.
“It was so typical of PARC,” Kay recalled. “If you didn’t know how something was done, you just rolled your own.”
Xerox had once been a small, scrappy, risk-taking company, but the long years of monopoly had driven that sort of passion clear out of the corridors of power. What had replaced it by 1972 was the sober mentality of professional finance and sales management. There was no room for the unexpected, especially where the corporate image was concerned.
A few people tried to make light of the new arrangements. Badges got blown up into T-shirt imprints, so they could be more fashionably worn. One employee turned his into a belt buckle. If the guards and receptionists noted that the ID photographs on others had been artfully pasted over with the heads of Mickey Mouse or the face of George Washington cut from a dollar bill, they never said so.
his assessment of his colleagues as “really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity. The people here all are used to dealing lightning with both hands.”
They would have to spend thousands of dollars on semiconductor memory to drive the miniCom’s high-performance graphical display, but they all knew the price was destined to fall sharply. In fact, there was hardly anything in the blueprint that would not be commercially accessible to the average user within ten years. And wasn’t that why they were here—to build the most capable system they could imagine, so far ahead of the curve that they could figure out what to do with it by the time the rest of the world caught up?
He asked too many questions and, more’s the pity, they were often good ones. As Jim Mitchell once remarked, “Jerry Elkind knows enough to be dangerous.”
The next day Clark returned to find the two engineers profoundly ashamed at not having read the literature earlier. “Wes,” said McCreight, “my only excuse is I was in the eighth grade at the time.”
he related acerbically years later. “But I hated Harvard. At MIT students got to do stuff and at Harvard they didn’t. At MIT you learn by doing because you’re an engineer. At Harvard they want you to be a scientist, and scientists would never soil themselves by doing things.”
At MIT students got to do stuff and at Harvard they didn’t. At MIT you learn by doing because you’re an engineer. At Harvard they want you to be a scientist, and scientists would never soil themselves by doing things.”
Metcalfe, by contrast, resubmitted his doctoral dissertation to Harvard, fattened up with a properly theoretical digression covering the ALOHAnet. In June 1973 his thesis, entitled “Packet Communication,” was finally accepted (“without enthusiasm,” he later groused).
“I loved it,” said Kay, one of its earliest fans. “It was one of the great finesses of all time, an object lesson in how to make something work when you don’t know how to make it work well.”
he arrived on a student visa, which prohibited employment. “So I told the authorities that due to extraordinary circumstances I had to take up work. The extraordinary circumstances were that I was running out of money.”
He fancied himself a great programmer, which he was, having learned the art on one of the most recalcitrant computers ever built. But he was also aware, as he said later, that “it’s not enough to be a great programmer; you have to find a great problem.”
“What Butler contributed was the will,” Simonyi said later, “and what I contributed was that I agreed with him.
They even described the processes in terms of the tools they had always used. That is why to this day every conventional word processor’s commands for deleting a block of text and placing it elsewhere in a file are called “cut” and “paste”—because Ginn’s editors, the first non-engineers ever to use such a system, were thinking about the scissors and paste pots they used to rearrange manuscripts on paper.
“After I would give a talk there would always be a fair number of people who would come up at the end with special stars in their eyes. At that stage nobody really knew how to do this stuff anyway, so I tended to hire people who could buy into the romance of the whole thing, because you could go a really good distance on romance.”
Kay reveled in his people’s eclectic backgrounds, which did not always include work toward a doctorate. “A doctoral thesis is anything you can get three faculty members to sign,” he would say in their defense (quoting Ivan Sutherland, who had been a signer of his).
“There used to be an old joke that we really didn’t care whether a new recruit could do any computer science, what we really needed was a bass fiddle,” she said.
“When you’re a kid, adults either don’t want you around, or when you ask a question they give you a lecture,” recalled Marian Goldeen, then twelve, the daughter of a Palo Alto piano teacher and a businessman. “But they weren’t like that.
“I looked at all this cool stuff getting done and I did not see how it was going to get to market. There was so much great raw material just piled up there. My idea was to sit down and think through an architecture—because of course these things were all done somewhat independently and ad hoc at PARC, as you always want to do in a research setting. Also, I frankly felt that if I didn’t go and do it they’d probably assign some inappropriate person who wouldn’t really get PARC and what we were trying to do.”
As he put it later with characteristic self-effacement, after so many years working among exceptionally brilliant scientists “I had developed and honed the skill of making myself useful to people whose intellectual gifts dwarfed my own.”
“I knew better than to pretend knowledge I lacked, the surest way to be rejected by PARC,” he said, joking that the job seemed to consist chiefly of affixing his signature to Alan Kay’s expense reports.
Over the next three and one-half years SDD had three chiefs, none of them lasting more than a matter of months, until finally, in 1978, the top job devolved to Liddle, who somehow had managed to keep his head down amid all the turmoil. As Metcalfe later joked: “For a while the most dangerous job to have at Xerox was to be David Liddle’s boss.”*
Liddle, who had long bragged of having played ball at Michigan with Lakers guard Cazzie Russell. “We’d all say, yeah, yeah, you were at Michigan and Cazzie Russell was there too, yeah, sure,” Metcalfe recalled. On this occasion, he and Liddle took their seats on the floor of the Los Angeles Forum just as the Lakers came out for their warmup. As Metcalfe watched in mute astonishment, Cazzie Russell made a beeline for Dave Liddle. “He came over and said something to the effect of, ‘How you doin’, Liddle, my man, it’s been a long time,’ then he brought over another famous guy like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and it’s, ‘Meet my friend David I’ve been telling you about…’ Well, thereinafter I believed Dave Liddle could never lie, because he had obviously not been exaggerating in the slightest about his relationship with Cazzie Russell.”
For him the task of designing a substitute processor resembled a jazzman’s noodling on a handy sax.
“The dispute was over screws and things, all the minor stuff,” he recalled. “And they were the experts in that. As engineers they were most extraordinarily anal—in the right sense. They actually went through and asked me what would be the finish on the screws. Would I be using beryllium plate? Then they’d look it up and tell me how many cents that would cost. They did a very thorough job verifying that our costs were right…And Dallas still didn’t believe it.”
“We broke Xerox rules when we needed to get things done,” Ellenby recalled. “Certain things were expensed that probably never should have been.” And not, to be truthful, only for conventional business. “Some of the guys decided I needed to have an alligator in my bathtub. So they went off in one of these airboats to where the pilot said he’d show them some alligators. Two very hefty engineers jumped in and wrestled this alligator into the boat, tied it up much against the protests of the pilot, brought it back, and stuck it in my bathtub. I expensed the floatplane for them, as ‘special transportation’ or some such thing.”
Xerox’s top executives were for the most part salesmen of copy machines.
the most discomfiting revelation was the contrast between the executives’ reactions and those of their wives. “The typical posture and demeanor of the Xerox executives, and all of them were men, was this”—arms folded sternly across the chest. “But their wives would immediately walk up to the machines and say, ‘Could I try that mouse thing?’ That’s because many of them had been secretaries—users of the equipment. These guys, maybe they punched a button on a copier one time in their lives, but they had someone else do their typing and their filing. So we were trying to sell to people who really had no concept of the work this equipment was actually accomplishing.
“It didn’t register in my mind at that event, but that was the loudest and clearest signal we ever got of how much of a problem we were going to have getting Xerox to understand what we had.”
Taylor believed that the unique success of the 914 copier had inculcated Xerox management with the doctrine that good things derived only from hardware. He was determined to show them that this idea was obsolete.
And we had it all structured so they would never touch the keyboard. It was all mouse-pointing and mouse-clicking, because we knew these guys wouldn’t type. In those days, that wasn’t macho.”
“Adele, the Ooze design is wrong,” he said. “We didn’t plan for all these subclasses.” “Yeah?” she replied warily. “What does that mean?” “It’s not clear it’ll hold up during the seminar. And if it crashes, we’re in trouble.” “Well, what’s the alternative? Should I simplify the curriculum?” Kaehler had nothing so modest in mind. “It seemed obvious to me,” he said later, “that I should just fix the problem
“Adele, the Ooze design is wrong,” he said. “We didn’t plan for all these subclasses.” “Yeah?” she replied warily. “What does that mean?” “It’s not clear it’ll hold up during the seminar. And if it crashes, we’re in trouble.” “Well, what’s the alternative? Should I simplify the curriculum?” Kaehler had nothing so modest in mind. “It seemed obvious to me,” he said later, “that I should just fix the problem in Ooze.”
Kaehler finished his reworking in one evening and demonstrated the fix to his colleagues. To Goldberg’s relief and amazement, it worked perfectly. “It was like you’re building the Taj Mahal,” she said later, “and just as you’re about to put the final cap on it you decide that the foundation brick isn’t right and you need to replace it. Just jack it all up, replace it, and put it back down again. That’s what he did. Pretty remarkable stuff, and also a remarkable guy who could do that.”
Ellenby denied having had anything to do with sending the report upstream. But now that it was done, he remained unrepentant. He was fed up with Xerox and considered the proposal his last crack at achieving his goals within the organization. If it did not fly, he was ready to go off and start his own company. He also felt that the proposal would never have made it to top management any other way.
“We were told to participate in the meetings,” Shoch said. “But we were ordered not to describe what we were doing.”
they were reduced to getting their points across by a weird pantomime of asking inscrutable but cunningly pointed questions. “Somebody would be talking about the design for some element and we’d drop all these hints,” Shoch recalled. “We’d say, ‘You know, that’s interesting, but what happens if this error message comes back, and what happens if that’s followed by a delayed duplicate that was slowed down in its response from a distant gateway when the flow control wouldn’t take it but it worked its way back and got here late? What do you do then?’ There would be this pause and they’d say, ‘You’ve tried this!’ And we’d reply, ‘Hey, we never said that!’”
“The TCP/IP guys will never tell you they did this because of Xerox, because they don’t remember it that way,” Shoch said. “But we would sit there explaining the problems and trying to coach them along. We had all this shit up and running, and we couldn’t tell them.”
“They were the best and the brightest,” he said later. “That was the good news. The bad news was that they knew it.”
“In SSL I could survive. I could get all excited about an idea that was half-formed and go tell Bert about it, and he’d get all excited about it, maybe tell me somebody I should talk to about it. In CSL I’d be really afraid to present anything until it was perfect, and it would probably get immediately shot down anyway.”
I wasn’t very driven to start a career but was thinking, what’s my next job? Then I heard about Xerox and thought, ‘If Alan Kay’s there, I bet I won’t have to wear a tie to the interview.’ And I didn’t.”
“This headed us in the direction of designing and building bigger, better, more elegant things,” Conway said. “Everybody’s ambition was cranking up month by month.”
While discussing this one day with Mead and Fairbairn she realized the problem was not just scientific, but cultural. VLSI had not been around long enough even to generate textbooks and college courses—the paraphernalia of sound science that, she was convinced, would force everyone else to take it seriously. “We should write the book,” she told Mead. “A book that communicates the simplest, most elegant rules and methods for VLSI design would make it look like a mature, proven science, like anything does if it’s been around for the ten or fifteen years you normally have behind a textbook.”
By mid-1979 she was able to offer an additional incentive to a dozen schools: If they would transmit student designs to PARC over the ARPANET, PARC would arrange to have the chips built, packaged, and returned to the students for testing.
he was also driven to explore all the commercial possibilities of his work, academia be damned. (“I love the metric of business,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “It’s money. It’s real simple. You either make money or you don’t. The metric of the university is politics.”)
Carver Mead performed one more service for PARC after completing of the VLSI text with Lynn Conway. This was a visit he paid to Stamford to warn Xerox of the dangers of squelching the inventiveness at PARC.
Every individual’s ingrained way of thinking affected how he or she programmed. And was it not the same in every other field of human creativity? “A remarkable number of artists, scientists, philosophers are quite dull outside of their specialty (and one suspects within it as well),”
Ingalls was particularly determined to transform Smalltalk into a full-service programming language, the last thing Kay desired. Were it anyone else, he might have been able to keep control of the effort. But he could not fight Dan Ingalls, one of the few people in the world whose skill in his chosen field awed even Alan Kay. He had to let it go and admire the system for what it was, not what he wished it to be.
“That told us it had to be light enough to carry around so the kids could use it to take notes in class, then bring it home and back to school,” Tesler observed. “Adele had in mind the eMate,” he added, referring to a small schooloriented laptop Apple Computer manufactured years later which bore a striking resemblance to Kay’s original Dynabook sketches.* “She knew it had to be somewhat heavier than the eMate, though she was hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be what it did, which was forty-five pounds, heavier than the kid.”
Where the Alto had been slow even for its time, the Dorado was a speed demon by any contemporary standard. “All the funky old Alto software ran on the Dorado so fast I got headaches from not waiting,” Jim Morris recalled. “Suddenly I realized that for the first time, I’m the bottleneck.”
He had a new girlfriend, Bonnie MacBird, who he had met while she was researching a screenplay about computer wizards and who lived in Los Angeles. (After endless tinkerings by Hollywood executives this screenplay became the movie Tron, which came out in 1982, two years after Kay and MacBird were married. “We like to say the marriage turned out a lot better than the movie,” he said.)
She felt adamantly that disclosing PARC’s intellectual property to a team of engineers capable of understanding it and, worse, exploiting it commercially would be a mortal error.
But who knew what else the savvy Apple engineers might pick up during another hour or two on the premises, and how much more they might insist on being shown? Deep down she was frustrated that Apple had been permitted to wheedle its way into the building in the first place. She blamed Hall and Lahr equally for lacking the technical savvy to understand the risks of showing Apple—especially its professional programmers—anything at all.
Atkinson had clearly come prepared. “He was asking extremely intelligent questions that he couldn’t have thought of just by watching the screen,” Tesler recalled. “It turned out later that they had read every paper we’d published, and the demo was just reminding them of things they wanted to ask us. But I was very impressed. They asked all the right questions and understood all the answers. It was clear to me that they understood what we had a lot better than Xerox did.”
He subsequently solved the same problem in his own way but, as he later remarked, “That whirlwind tour left an impression on me. Knowing it could be done empowered me to invent a way it could be done.”
Neither the Lisa nor the first versions of the Macintosh were equipped with network ports. (A famous story had Jobs answering a question about how to network the Mac by flinging a floppy disk at the questioner and barking, “There’s my fucking network!”)
Xerox needed to embrace radical new technologies to resuscitate its product lines. But they were trying to squeeze the last drops of blood from the same tired copiers by applying snazzy new management theories and pinching pennies. Had the crisis been rooted solely in Xerox’s complacency or a bad economy, their reorganizations and cost-cutting strategies might have borne fruit. But the affliction ran much deeper.
Tribus realized within a few weeks of his arrival in Rochester that Xerox executives did not define their business as making copiers, but rather as making money. The products generating the revenues were almost irrelevant; for them the issues of management would have been no different had they been turning out cars, or raw steel, or shoes. “They saw Xerox as a money pump and they organized it around that concept,” Tribus said. “The people at the top of Xerox were not really interested in technology.”
“They connived to get rid of me,” Tribus recalled. “I had never been in a corporation. I found myself in an alien land, and working at the top I saw a lot of things going on that I thought were just plain stupid: But the other guys had MBAs and I did not, and they talked a common language and I was clearly an outsider.
You could see that Microsoft could do things one hundred times faster, literally, I’m not kidding. Six years from that point we overtook Xerox in market valuation.”
“They had a system with a million lines of code in it built by a team of people hired off the street,” he said. “The whole thing took four years, and in my experience any project that had those properties had another property, which is it wouldn’t work.
Don Massaro had joined Xerox when it purchased Shugart Associates, a disk drive company he had co-founded. Brash, risk-oriented, abrasive, and persuasive, he seemed a throwback to the glory days of Shelby Carter. For his divisional symbol he chose the Road Runner from the Warner Brothers cartoons, the better to taunt the Xerox “coyotes” he maintained were constantly out for his tail.
“I had not spent twenty years of my life climbing the Xerox ladder rung by rung, playing according to the rules,” he told an interviewer. “I was prepared to fail.”
But where the Star sold for $16,595-plus, the IBM PC sold for less than $5,000, all-inclusive. Where the Star’s operating system was closed, accessible for enhancement only to those to whom Xerox granted a coded key, the PC’s circuitry and microcode were wide open to anyone willing to hack a program for it—just like the Alto’s. And it sold in the millions.
After years of painstaking work and several intermediate versions, Geschke, Warnock, Bob Sproull, Lampson, and others had at last invented a so-called page description language allowing printers of any type to output a document that accurately reproduced its on-screen representation, regardless of the incompatibilities between display and laser. But the difficulty of persuading Xerox to integrate Interpress into its laser printers and other typographical products made the process of actual invention look like a cakewalk.
He was sitting and chatting in Taylor’s office when a member of the CSL staff poked his head in to mention that he was going out for a game of tennis. As Spencer recalled, “Taylor said, ‘I see you’ve got a new can of balls there. You’re not good enough yet to play with new balls. Here’s a can of old ones. Use these, they’ll be better for you.’ “Now, here’s a thirty-five or forty-year-old man, a Ph.D., and he needs Bob Taylor to tell him how he’s going to play tennis!”
The exodus did occur as they predicted, although not instantaneously. While Thacker left immediately to work with a startup company marketing a paging device he had invented, many other CSL staff members deferred their resignations until after the end of the year, when their bonuses, retirement credit, stock options, and other perks would vest for 1983.
Yet to chalk up the mixed fate of PARC’s technologies purely to Xerox’s blundering, as has been done for many years, is misleading. It encourages others to believe that the commercializing of advanced new technologies is easy, provided only that one has the will to do so; and that a company’s early domination of a high-tech market will reward it with an unassailable competitive advantage for decades to follow.
Whether Microsoft itself will be the “Microsoft of the nineties,” in Steve Jobs’s phrase, will not be known until well after the turn of the millennium.
“Our attitude at PARC was sort of that it was a higher calling to do pure research. But here at Adobe our advanced technology group does not just stay in advanced technology. If they put together the germ of an idea and start to get it close to prototyping and even decide to turn it into a product, we encourage them to follow it all the way through to first customer shipment. The only way I know to transfer technology is with people.”