Dealers of Lightning Read online

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  The Time Machine

  CHAPTER 1

  The Impresario

  CHAPTER 2

  McColough's Folly

  CHAPTER 3

  The House on Porter Drive

  CHAPTER 4

  Utopia

  CHAPTER 5

  Berkeley's Second System

  CHAPTER B

  Not Your Normal Person"

  CHAPTER 7

  The Clone

  CHAPTER 8

  The Future Invented

  CHAPTER 9

  The Refugee

  CHAPTER 10

  Beating the Dealer

  CHAPTER 11

  Spacewar

  CHAPTER 12

  Thacker's Bet

  CHAPTER 13

  The Bobbsey Twins Build a Network

  CHAPTER 14

  What You See Is What You Get

  CHAPTER 15

  On the Lunatic Fringe

  CHAPTER 16

  The Pariahs

  CHAPTER 17

  The Big Machine

  CHAPTER 18

  Futures Day

  CHAPTER 19

  Future Plus Due

  CHAPTER 20

  The Worm That Ate the Ethernet

  CHAPTER 21

  The Silicon revolution

  CHAPTER 22

  The Crisis of Biggerism

  CHAPTER 23

  Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell

  CHAPTER 24

  Supernova

  CHAPTER 25

  Blindsided

  CHAPTER 26

  Exit the Impresario

  Epilogue

  Did Xerox Blow It?

  "Read this book. A treat for anyone with

  even a passing interest in the origins of today's siliconized culture."

  -Business Week

  In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '8os, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of com­puter eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.

  Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and executives who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC's humble begin­nings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp, and ultimately exploit, the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered. Dealers of Lightning offers an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions, and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of techno-history—and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.

  "A veritable ripsnorter... a great read that's also a must read." —Business 2.0

  Michael A. Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked for the Los Angeles Times as a financial, political, and foreign correspondent and as a technology writer and editor. He lives in Los Alamitos, California.

  HarperBusiness

  An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers ISBN 0-88730-989-5

  www.harpcrcollins.com

  dealers of lightning

  Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

  Michael Hiltzik

  From a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist comes this riveting, true story of an extraordinary group of inventors who brought about a technolog­ical revolution that would change the world.

  In the bestselling tradition of The Soul Of A New Machine and Acci­dental Empires, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intel­lectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a braintrust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group would create several monumental innovations including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors to the Internet) only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corpora­tion. Yet instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that would radically alter contemporary life and change the world. Based on extensive interviews with the people who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC's beginnings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp and ultimately exploit the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered.

  "Superb. A gem of a story that has never before been so well told."

  —New York Times Book Review

  "Read this book. A treat for anyone with even a passing interest in the origins of today's siliconized culture." —Business Week

  DEALERS OF LIGHTNING

  Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

  Michael Hiltzik

  A HarperBusiness Book from HarperPerennial

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1999 by HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Copyright © 1999 by Michael Hiltzik. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per­mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  First paperback edition published 2000.

  Designed by Jennie Malcolm

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Hiltzik, Michael A.

  Dealers of lightning : Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age / Michael Hiltzik. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-88730-891-0

  1. Computer science—Research—California—Palo Alto—History. 2. Xerox Corporation. Palo Alto Research Center—History. I. Title. QA76.27.H55 1999

  004' .0720794' 73—dc21 98-47043

  ISBN 0-88730-989-5 (pbk.)

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  Timeline

  INTRODUCTION

  The Time Machine

  It was April in California's Santa Clara Valley, a fine time to be changing the world.

  Very late one night in 1973 a small group assembled inside the office of an electronics engineer named Charles P. Thacker. The room was located on the ground floor of a low-slung building set upon the crest of a gentle ridge in the foothills of the Santa Cruz range. Pastureland and apricot orchards covered one side of the hill; a spreading growth of industrial laboratories and research facilities dotted the other, so that the ridge itself seemed to mark the divide between the region's agricultural past and its high-technology future. The building housing Thacker's lab, along with two others located in a dale about a half-mile away, encompassed Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, known to its small but growing staff as Xerox PARC.

  The visitors had come to attend the birth of a computer. Today such an event inevitably would be accompanied by crowds, banners, music, speeches, multimedia shows projected on three-story-high outdoor screens, press releases, media tours, and admiring cover pieces in all the important magazines. Not to mention the smell of money, the unambiguous signal of society's insatiable thirst for any technology promising a smarter, faster, and brighter destiny.r />
  On this occasion there was no such fanfare—a shame, given that the machine Chuck Thacker was about to unveil to his colleagues would help plant the seed of that modern frenzy. There was no smell of money, only the barbed aroma of ozone and solder. None of those present had joined PARC with the thought of becoming rich, anyway. Xerox paid them well enough, a couple of notches over the standard for scientists and engineers possessing their considerable skills. But today's popular image of the computer nerd as incipient high-tech millionaire was nobody's fantasy then. Instead they had been attracted to PARC by the thrill of pioneering. One of them compared it many years later to the sheer joy of making the very first footprints in a field of vir­gin snow.

  Thacker checked a few last electrical connections on his machine, his cigarette smoldering nearby. He was thirty and of medium height, with a squarish build and an unruly cowlick that seemed perpetually to overhang his wily eyes like an awning. Among this group of youthful Ph.D.s he was unusual in possessing merely a bachelor's degree in physics, but their deference to him on questions of engineering was unequivocal. Acknowledging the gifts that had already made him an indispensable participant in the design and construction of two trail- blazing large-scale computers, they paid him the ultimate accolade: Chuck Thacker, they said, was an "engineer's engineer."

  Thacker's designs were simple and spare, devoid of the egotism that often spoiled the work of even the best of his fellow professionals. He was a master of parsimony and the sworn enemy of its opposite, which he called "biggerism." In a Thacker schematic one never found a logic gate or a ground wire out of place, and he policed the work of his col­leagues so they would meet the same exacting standard. Any engineer who set forth a dubious or dishonest idea in PARC's Computer Science Laboratory, where Thacker worked, was likely to be stopped in his tracks by an explosive "Bullshit!" At PARC one found no shortage of big egos and stern judges, but one thing on which all agreed was that once Chuck Thacker pronounced your idea "bullshit," you had best shut up and start shoveling.

  It was therefore not surprising that when in 1972 the scientists of PARC conceived a revolutionary kind of digital machine they relied on Thacker to convert the concept into circuitry. The machine he and his hand-picked team built in the course of an amazing few months con­formed to specifications never before required of a working computer.

  Its most arresting element was its human scale. Where the typical computer of this era was the size of two or three refrigerators standing back to back and wired to many more racks of special-purpose hard­ware, the "Alto" was to be self-contained and small enough to bark a shin on as you wheeled it under your desk.

  The Alto was interactive, which meant instantly responsive to the users demands. Contemporary computers communicated with their users indirectly, through punch cards or teletypes so slow and awkward that a single bleak exchange of query and response required days to complete. It was like trying to sustain an urgent conversation by Morse Code. But the Alto would communicate with its user via a full-sized TV screen that could display text and images mere nanoseconds after they were typed on a keyboard or drawn with an electronic device.

  One more thing: Each Alto was to serve a single individual. This was a revolutionary concept to users whose experience consisted exclu­sively of sharing the precious resources of university mainframes with hundreds of other users. With the Alto there was to be no waiting in line for a turn to run one’s own program. To use a term coined by Alan Kay, the PARC scientist who was one of the machine s principal conceptualizes, the Alto was to be a "personal computer."

  Every one of these specifications violated the accepted wisdom of computer science. Computers were big because their hardware cir­cuits took up room. They were slow because they were serving scores or hundreds of users at once. And they were shared because digital technology was so expensive its cost had to be diffused among many users per machine. It was the same rationale by which the airlines cov­ered the cost of aircraft and fuel by transporting 300 passengers at a time in Boeing 747s. One computer per person? To contemporary designers this seemed an act of outrageous profligacy. The computer memory necessary to support a single user would cost nearly ten thou­sand dollars. Squandering so much money would be like giving every passenger from Boston to San Francisco an individual plane.

  But to Thacker and his colleagues such objections missed the point. The Alto aimed to be not a machine of its time, but of the future. Computer memory was horrifically expensive at the moment, true, but it was getting cheaper every week. At the rate prices were falling, the same memory that cost ten grand in 1973 would be available in 1983 for thirty dollars. The governing principle of PABC was that the place existed to give their employer that ten-year head start on the future. They even contrived a shorthand phrase to explain the concept. The Alto, they said, was a time machine.

  Thacker had spent much of the Alto design phase working out ways to make things smaller while retaining just enough memory and power to run complex software while simultaneously keeping the display active. In quest of efficiency he lifted tricks and shortcuts from every obscure corner of engineering science. Hardware added mass and slowed the system down, so wherever he could he replaced hard-wired circuits with miniature software programs called "microcode." This allowed him to wring bulk out of the design by jettisoning circuit boards like a balloonist dropping sandbags to gain a few more precious feet of lift. He knew his design was spare; he was just not sure it worked. Now the moment had come to find out.

  The Alto's operating software had not yet been written, so its brains resided temporarily in a commercial minicomputer called a Nova, which was cabled to the Altos back panel like a resuscitator to a comatose patient. A few members of the lab had crafted a sort of ani­mated test pattern by converting several drawings of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster into sequences of digital ones and zeros. Thacker flipped a switch or two and the bitstream flowed over the cables from the Nova into the Alto's own processor and memory. There it was reordered into machine instructions that governed which of the dis­play screens half-million dots, or "pixels," were to be turned on and which were to be left dark. If it worked properly this process would produce the series of test images in black outline against a glowing white background.

  Everyone's eyes focused on the screen as it flickered to life. Sud­denly the pattern appeared. As the group watched, transfixed, Cookie Monster stared back at them, shaggy and bug-eyed, brandishing its goofy grin, flashing upon the screen while holding the letter "C" in one hand and a cookie in the other.

  That the image itself stood in absurd counterpoint to the sheer power of the technology did not matter. The message was not in the content, any more than the world-altering significance of the tele­phone could have been found one century earlier within the literal meaning of the words, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you."

  They understood that just as Alexander Graham Bell's phrase had once been shot from one point to another by electrical impulses har­nessed in a brand new way, so had the Cookie Monster been painted onto a phosphorescent screen by an entirely new power: Not drawn by hand, but created via a stream of electrical pulses mapped onto mem­ory chips as digital bits and read out again as a moving image.

  To Chuck Thacker the thrill was indescribable. He knew he had done more than create a novelty. He and his colleagues had reduced the computer to human scale and recast its destiny forever. The goofy figure munching its way across the display gave only a hint of what this technology would mean to people ten, twenty, even thirty years in the future. But its course was set. It was as though they had all stepped off a cliff into the void and alighted in a new world, bearing proof that time travel, after all, was real.

  In 1973 the companies and individuals later to be identified with the advent of the personal computer were otherwise engaged. IBM was still turning out electric typewriters; Microsoft's Bill Gates was a fresh­man entering Harvard; and Steve Jobs, the future co-founder of Apple Computer, was a college dro
pout wandering around India in search of his Zen master.

  But the Alto had arrived. Compact and powerful, small enough to fit under a desk and simple enough for children to use, it was truly the world’s first personal computer. It was also nearly ten years ahead of its time, for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, the first successful commercial expressions of the ideas PARC brought to fruition in 1973, did not appear until the 1980s were well under way.

  Such was the operating standard in the lab where Alto was born. At Xerox PARC, the home of one of the most exceptional teams of invent­ing talent ever assembled in one place, prodigious feats of invention and engineering sprouted as commonly as daisies in an open field. Legendary names among the computer elite but almost entirely unknown to the general public, PARC's scientists pioneered the tech­nology behind today's most exciting innovations. America and the world are today in the grip of an unprecedented technology craze; very few are aware that most of what drives the frenzy was invented, refined, or perfected at Xerox PARC.