Dealers of Lightning Read online

  Taylor offered English a solution to bodi complaints: reproduce NLS, or something like it, at PARC. English could thus fulfill his treasured goal of bringing the system to commercial fruition and be in charge of his own lab, out from under the shadow of the implacable Engelbart. Whether English hesitated leaving the leader he had followed for nearly a decade is hard to say, but he continued the raid where Taylor left off, eventually recruiting a dozen of Engelbarts most important followers.

  As a team they infused Engelbart’s principles into PARC like apos­tles spreading religion. Thanks to them, the Augmentation Research Center left its indelible stamp on almost every major innovation to emerge from PARC in the next decade. Yet this triumph was not with­out its painful ironies. English's reworked version of NLS, the direct descendant of Vannevar Bush's vision and Engelbart s work, would be remembered chiefly as PARC's biggest failure.

  The agents of its ruin, as it happened, came to PARC via Bob Taylor's second great heist. Taylor knew that up in Berkeley a handful of extra­ordinarily talented engineers were about to lose their jobs. In his view PARC could scarcely exist without them. Toward the end of 1970, with George Pake's approval, he took the necessary steps to reel them in.

  CHAPTER 5

  Berkeley's Second System

  The year 1968 was not a tranquil one for Berkeley, Cali­fornia. It was the time of riots on Telegraph Avenue, the battle over People s Park, and the calling out of the National Guard by Governor Ronald Reagan. Buildings on the Univer­sity of California campus were occupied, barricaded, firebombed. The police oscillated between paralysis and overreaction. Turmoil and radi­calism were in the air, along with tear gas and a mysterious white pow­der dropped from helicopters that made demonstrators' skin itch and burn as though attacked by hornets.

  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.

  Berkeley Computer therefore inconspicuously spread itself out over the city in three separate locations. One building housed the program­mers. Then there was what Chuck Thacker remembered as "a somewhat more shoddy place where the hardware people lived, essentially a walkup above a warehouse on Sixth Street." The third was a nondescript edifice a few blocks further along Sixth, a few miles from the campus and not far from the waterfront, in which they were actually building the machine they thought would make their fortune. Thacker recalled: "We found a concrete building that was the fur storage vault for a warehouse, except the warehouse had burned down around the vault. So here was this block structure, two stories, about fifty feet on a side, just a big concrete tube really. When we first saw the place it was filled with two million plastic champagne corks." After they cleared out the corks and fitted out the building to be even more nondescript, he said, "You'd drive by on the street and never know what it was."

  Inside this prosaic structure worked some of the most creative com­puter designers alive.

  The team had taken several years to coalesce. Although incorporated in 1968, BCC's roots reached back to Project Genie, the ARPA time­sharing scheme that designed the 940 computer for Max Palevsky's SDS. One could even date the company's spiritual birth to a day in 1964 when a graduate student named Butler Lampson passed through an unmarked door on the Berkeley campus and found Peter Deutsch on the other side.

  The son of foreign service parents, Lampson had come to study physics at Berkeley with a first-class undergraduate pedigree from Harvard and a reputation for being preternaturally smart. He was rail-thin and stood a little over six feet, with a loping gait that made him seem taller. His man­ner of speaking was fleet but cogent, unless he was in the grip of some particularly compelling idea, in which case his thought system would rush ahead of his speech processes and he would stumble over his words until his mouth caught up to his brain. 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," Wes Clark famously cracked at a professional conference a few years later following one of his customarily breakneck presentations.)

  Sharp as he was, however, even 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. So he was primed for the challenge when a friend he ran into at a computer conference in San Francisco asked how things were going across the bay with Project Genie.

  Lampson returned a blank look. "I've never heard of it," he admitted. He left the party with a description of an intriguing study of computer architectures, along with directions to a building located at the far north­east corner of the Berkeley campus. A few days later he found himself standing on the ground floor of Cory Hall, facing an unmarked door.

  Even in 1964 one could hardly fault the Genie people for their cir­cumspection; the project was funded by the Defense Department. On the other hand there was a limit to paranoia, even at Berkeley. The unmarked door was unlocked. Lampson pushed it open and walked in.

  He might have stepped into the lair of the White Rabbit. It was a big room, mostly empty. On one side stood a Bendix LGP30 computer, a massive and obsolete digital machine serving no purpose he could dis­cern. Facing the Bendix was a much smaller Scientific Data Systems 930, a rugged computer of fairly recent vintage. In a swivel chair parked by the 930 sat a short, pudgy, barefooted human being with a mane of black hair and a dense beard, serenely feeding a paper tape into a computer input. The paper tape was not very long and Lampson watched as the stranger fed it in all the way and then, oddly, took it out and fed it back in again.

  Lampson could no longer stifle his curiosity. "That's weird," he said. "Why did you just do that?"

  "It's a two-pass relocatable loader!" the man said without looking up.

  "But that's ridiculous!"

  "I know! I know!" was the impatient reply. "I'm rewriting it!"

  To an outsider the conversation might have sounded like something out of the Theatre of the Absurd. But as speakers of a shared technical language, the two men understood each other as clearly as fellow initiates to the Masonic mysteries. The two-pass relocatable loader did exist and it was a kludge: an inefficient, overelaborated piece of machinery that had been poorly designed by the machine's manufacturer. And it did require the programmer to input a paper tape twice in succession because on each sequence the computer could only glean half the information it needed to function.

  Lampson recognized the system as a waste of time and energy and appreciated at a glance that the man at the console possessed the inborn skill to redesign it so the damn machine would actually learn something new, like how to absorb all the necessary data on a single pass of the tape. His name was Peter Deutsch. He and Lampson would work side by side for the better part of the next twenty years.

  They were an unlikely pair, one of many that would later give PARC its unique character. Lampson's patrician bearing left people with the impression that he was contemplating science from a great metaphorical height. Deutsch was a white tornado, impatient, perpetually chafing to get his hands on the next arcane programming task. As fast as Lampson s mind grasped concepts and principles, it worked faster when interacting with the people around him (usually attempting to convince them he was right). Deutsch seemed to prefer unraveling the riddles of computer pro­gramming in communion with himself.

&
nbsp; The emblematic image of the gifted Deutsch was a photograph taken of him as a pre-adolescent. It showed him writing a program for the world’s first minicomputer, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1, perched on a chair padded with a cushion or phone book so he could reach the keyboard. By then he was already a master of the occult art of computer programming, which he began to learn at the age of twelve when his father, an MIT physicist, brought home a manual for the cam­pus Univac 1.

  The manual covered the Univac's assembly code, a system of sym­bolic statements which engineers used as building blocks to write programs for the machine. "Somehow it struck a spark," Deutsch remembered. "I said I wanted to meet the person who wrote that man­ual and my father arranged it. He was a person named Lanza, and he actually found a small computational program that needed coding and asked if I wanted to do it. I said sure. I still don't know what the pro­gram computed, whether he trusted the answers he got out of it, or anything else about it."

  But it started him hanging around the Univac, as well as other main­frame computers to which his father’s connections got him access. The grad student programmers in the computer center became accus­tomed to (if not necessarily patient with) this diminutive soul pepper­ing them with impertinent questions about their work. The wiser among them may even have realized that it would not be long before they were asking him questions.

  Soon he was cadging stray time in half-hour segments from the super­visors with the understanding that if anyone came along with serious work, he would get bumped. By the time the university acquired its PDP-1, he had matured into an adept and dexterous programmer with the instincts of an artist. After he moved to Berkeley for his undergradu­ate education, he would still drop in at MIT now and then during vaca­tions to visit his father and dash off a few lines of code. Students would literally ransack the wastebaskets to read what he had discarded with the hope of absorbing a trace of his inventive technique.

  Still a Berkeley freshman, Deutsch had been involved with Genie only a few months when he was encountered by Butler Lampson. He explained that Genie's goal was to refashion the SDS 930 into a small-scale time-sharing machine and that it was run out of the electrical engineering department by David Evans and Mel Pirtle—the first an unassuming computer science professor who limited himself as much as possible to such tasks as raising grant money from the government, the second a garrulous Californian graduate student who designed the hardware.

  Lampson felt irresistibly drawn to this remote corner of the univer­sity campus. "I found out from Peter what was going on, then I started to hang around there a lot," he recalled. "After a while it became clear that this was going to be a lot more interesting than physics."

  With Lampson on board, Genie picked up momentum. The group tore apart the SDS 930, tacked on new hardware, and wrote an entirely new operating system. "There weren't any spectacularly new ideas in the proj­ect," Lampson said later. "The point was to try to take ideas that other people had, some of which had been implemented on other machines, and show you could make it all work in a much less grandiose environ­ment." Genie accomplished its goal, which was to bring time-sharing to the masses by implementing it on the small machine that Taylor and Currie eventually beguiled Palevsky into marketing as the SDS 940.

  The Genie team then turned to the eternal question of what to do for an encore. They were a powerful group of talents, especially after Deutsch and Lampson, as good at designing and debugging operating systems as anyone in the field, were joined by Chuck Thacker, whose hardware skills represented the third side, so to speak, of a very sturdy tri­angle.

  Growing up poor and fatherless in a suburb of Los Angeles, Thacker had paid his way through school with a succession of jobs at small local engineering shops, including one that made the devices Civil Defense would use to measure ground radiation after the Bomb dropped. (This was the 1950s, after all.) He had always been an electronics nut—he could still remember the day he acquired his very first transistor as a schoolboy—but it was from these shirt-sleeved shop men that he learned to pare a decent design into a rnanufacturable one by stripping it down to its frugal essence. "They were the real engineers engi­neers," he said.

  At Caltech, where he made a short and unsuccessful first ran at obtaining a bachelor's degree, physics was divided into two distinct parts. There was the theory side, which involved a lot of math and cosmological speculation, and what Thacker called "the giant tinker toy side," which involved building immense, elaborately engineered struc­tures like synchrotrons and cyclotrons. That was the part he loved.

  In fact, Thacker was animated by the same love of gadgetry that lured countless other physicists like himself into computing. When he moved north to Berkeley to get away from the L.A. smog and give his faltering academic career a fresh start, he fell in among the computing crowd, a course that led him inexorably to the same unmarked door Lampson had discovered a few months earlier.

  Now it was 1968. Work on the 940 had ended and Dave Evans had relocated to the University of Utah, leaving Pirtle and the others to think about working on a much larger canvas than the 940—a time­sharing system, for example, that would serve not a dozen but 500 users at a time. They imagined a machine with several processors, each assigned a specific task and all interconnected, like the tentacles of mating octopuses. It was huge, exciting, innovative, and envisioned not as an academic or government-funded venture, but strictly as a com­mercial one. Thus was Berkeley Computer Corporation born.

  Although BCC was based on speculative technology, its financial structure appeared at first glance to be made of sterner stuff. Pirtle had arranged through his Wall Street connections to secure $2 million in financing from a company called Data Processing Financial and General, underwritten by the white-shoe investment firm of White, Weld & Co. That sounded like plenty, but it was only seed money. The team figured that bringing the Berkeley 1 computer to market would consume that sum many times over, which meant they would have to become very familiar with the demands of bankers and the intricacies of high finance.

  "This was definitely not your two-guys-in-a-garage startup," said Lampson, who by now held a faculty appointment at Berkeley and set his own name down as a co-founder. It was, however, something infi­nitely more risky. The BCC pioneers were about to become victims of the "second-system effect."

  The theory of second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale soft­ware teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month-. "The sec­ond is the most dangerous system a man ever designs."

  The BCC machine could have sprang full-blown from the pages of Brooks's text. As Lampson recalled, the designers of the economical and practical SDS 940 regarded their next machine as an opportunity to "look at all the things you could make much more wonderful, and plan to make them all more wonderful by creating a system that could handle a lot more users and much larger programs and was much faster and used computing resources much more efficiently and was better and more wonderful in even" possible way.

  "It was not a very realistic enterprise," he acknowledged. "But at the time it seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do."

  Their exuberance made Berkeley Computer, by all accounts, a jolly place to work, its scientists and engineers propelled by pure hubris into working the kind of inhuman hours that would become a Silicon Valley cliche—when Silicon Valley came into its own fifteen years later. They believed they were breaking new ground in computer design, and they were right. Among other things, their machine incorporated "virtual memory," a system for swapping jobs from disk to memory and back again that enabled it to accommodate much more activity than its physical specifications otherwise would, like a
house with the exterior dimensions of a bungalow but the interior floor plan of a regal palace.

  In hardware terms, however, the machine was a beast. "The machine consisted of a number of specialized processors, one to handle the disk and drum input/output system, one to handle communications, and one to handle job scheduling," recalled Thacker, who designed them. "And these things cooperated with two processors which were somewhat larger, which were the central processors for the machine which actually ran the user jobs." The processors all had to be physically connected to each other and also to the memory, which required a couple of miles of cable snaking among eight six-foot-tall cabinets full of equipment, and dien out to peripherals such as teletypes and line printers.

  Some of the workers, including Thacker, could tell early on that the project was getting out of hand. The engineers engineer possessed the unique trait of aiming for less, not more, in his systems. "This was so unusual for an engineer," recalled Charles Simonyi, a young immigrant from communist Hungary who assisted Thacker, watching as he chain­smoked through the night designing the machine s logic. "He had this word for what was happening. He called it 'biggerism.' I heard this word from him and my English was not that good and I always thought it sounded slightly obscene, because he'd say, you know, This project has been biggered.'"