Dealers of Lightning Page 2

  At the moment of PARC's founding, computers were viewed much differently from the way they are now. They were exasperatingly diffi­cult to use, the tools of a cult of professional engineers and designers who seemed to take a perverse pride in making them as obscure and intimidating as the oracles of ancient Greece. (This was, after all, exactly what gave those same engineers and designers their special status.)

  The scientists of PARC changed all that. They took it as their credo that the computer must serve the user rather than the other way around. That it must be easy and intuitive to operate. That it must communicate with the user in human terms and on a human scale, even if at supernatural speeds. They were determined to tame the machine just as their ancestors tamed the wild dog and taught him to hunt and stand guard.

  At a critical moment when the very science of computing stood at a crossroads, its future uncharted, they transformed the machine from a glorified calculator into the marvel of graphical communication it is today. Its role in modern life was far from preordained when PARC's scientists convened. They charted the course.

  Every time you click a mouse on an icon or open overlapping win­dows on your computer screen today, you are using technology invented at PARC. Compose a document by word processor, and your words reach the display via software invented at PARC. Make the print larger or smaller, replace ordinary typewriter letters with a Braggado­cio or Gothic typeface—that's also technology invented at PARC, as is the means by which a keystroke speeds the finished document by cable or infrared link to a laser printer. The laser printer, too, was invented at PARC.

  Surf the Internet, send e-mail to a workmate, check your bank account at an ATM equipped with a touch screen, follow the route of a cold front across the Midwest on a TV weather forecaster's animated map: The pathway to the indispensable technology was blazed by PARC. There, too, originated the three-dimensional computer graph­ics that give life to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the inspired play­things of Toy Story. How pervasive is PARC's technology in today's desktop computer world? When Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 for stealing the "look and feel" of its Macintosh graphical display to use in Windows, Bill Gates's defense was essentially that both companies had stolen it from Xerox.

  One of the most unusual and prolific research facilities in history, PARC was originally conceived in much more modest terms—as a research lab for a computer subsidiary Xerox had recently acquired. How it burst those boundaries in the early 1970s to become something more closely resembling a national resource is part of its special mys­tique. Four factors contributed most to PARC's explosive creativity. One was Xerox's money, a seemingly limitless cascade of cash flowing from its near-monopoly on the office copier. The second was a buyer's market for high-caliber research talent. With the expenses and politics of the Vietnam War cutting into the government's research budget and a nationwide recession exerting the same effect on corporate research, Xerox was one of the rare enterprises in a position to bid for the best scientists and engineers around. The third factor was the state of computer technology, which stood at a historic inflection point. The old architectures of mainframe com­puters and time-sharing systems were reaching the limits of traditional technologies, and new ones were just coming into play—semicon­ductor memories that offered huge gains in speed and economics, for example, and integrated circuits that allowed the science's most far- sighted visionaries to realize their dreams for the first time. Never before or since would computer science be poised to take such great leaps of understanding in so short a period. The intellectual hothouse of PARC was one of the few places on earth employing the creative brainpower to realize them.

  The final factor was management. PARC was founded by men whose experience had taught them that the only way to get the best research was to hire the best researchers they could find and leave them unbur­dened by directives, instructions, or deadlines. For the most part, the computer engineers of PARC were exempt from corporate impera­tives to improve Xerox's existing products. They had a different charge: to lead the company into new and uncharted territory.

  That Xerox proved only sporadically willing to follow them is one of the ironies of this story. The best-publicized aspect of PARC's history is that its work was ignored by its parent company while earning billions for others. To a certain extent this is true. The scientists' unfettered creativity, not to mention their alien habits of mind and behavior, fomented unrelenting conflict with their stolid parent company. Determined in principle to move into the digital world but yoked in practice to the marketing of the copier machine (and unable to juggle two balls at once), Xerox management regarded PARC's achievements first with bemusement, then uneasiness, and finally hostility. Because Xerox never fully understood the potential value of PARC's technology, it stood frozen on the threshold of new markets while its rivals— including big, lumbering IBM—shot past into the computer age. Yet this relationship is too easily, and too often, simplified. Legend becomes myth and myth becomes caricature—which soon enough gains a sort of liturgical certitude. PARC today remains a convenient cudgel with which to beat big business in general and Xerox in particu­lar for their myriad sins, including imaginary ones, of corporate myopia and profligacy. Xerox was so indifferent to PARC that it "didn't even patent PARC's innovations," one leading business journal informed its readers not long before this writing—an assertion that would come as a surprise to the team of patent lawyers permanently assigned to PARC, not to mention the center's former scientists whose office walls are still decorated with complimentary plaques engraved with the cover pages of their patents. (As is the case with most corporate employees, the patent rights remained vested with their employer.) Another business journal writes authoritatively that the Alto "failed as a commercial product." In fact, the Alto was designed from the first strictly as a research prototype—no more destined for marketing as a commercial product than was, say, the Mercury space capsule.

  Another great myth is that Xerox never earned any money from PARC. The truth is that its revenues from one invention alone, the laser printer, have come to billions of dollars—returning its investment in PARC many times over.

  Xerox could certainly have better exploited the manifold new tech­nologies issuing from PARC in its first fifteen years, the period covered in this book. The reasons it failed to do so will be examined in the chronicle ahead. But whether one company, no matter how wise and visionary, could ever have dominated, much less monopolized, tech­nologies as amorphous and Protean as those of digital computing is a wide-open question. What is indisputable is that Xerox did bring together a group of superlatively creative minds at the very moment when they could exert maximal influence on a burgeoning technology, and financed their work with unexampled generosity.

  This book is largely an oral history, drawn from the words and recol­lections of people who were there. Many have moved on to other work, some of it based on their discoveries at PARC and some of it spectacularly lucrative. Almost to a person, however, they remember their years at PARC as the most exciting and fulfilling of their lives.

  It should be emphasized that PARC in this period was an exception­ally multifarious place, embracing not only computer technologies but solid-state physics and materials science. Most of the work accom­plished at the research center in those latter disciplines lies outside the scope of this book for several reasons. For one thing, the more tradi­tional physical sciences did not offer the same opportunities for extrav­agant and revolutionary results as computing, at least not at that moment. Nor did the physicists test Xerox's corporate strategy, internal politics, or, indeed, standards of employee behavior with quite the same zest as the computer people. This is not to say the physicists should be wholly deprived of their place in the limelight; in truth, some of the most exhilarating work of PARC's second fifteen years has occurred in the center's physics labs—another testament to its founders' patience and foresight. But because the intellectual ferment of PARC's formative years was concen
trated so powerfully in the Com­puter and Systems Science Labs, I have chosen to focus on them.

  In doing so I have strived to give the reader as close to a hallway- level view of PARC as could reasonably be attempted, starting with its birth pangs as a collection of youthful prodigies, through the rapturous years of exploration and discovery, and ending as the members of its first generation disperse to bring their discoveries to the rest of the world. It would be impossible for anyone who did not live through it to paint a truly comprehensive portrait of this period at PARC; even those who were there emerged with conflicting—sometimes wildly conflicting—recollections of the same events. My goal has been to assemble these recollections into a coherent history, and through it to shed light on how a unique convergence of events, personalities, and technologies happened to beget one of the most productive and inven­tive research centers ever known.

  PART I_______

  Prodigies

  CHAPTER 1

  The Impresario

  The photograph shows a handsome man in a checked sport shirt, his boyish face half-obscured by a cloud of pipe smoke. Robert W. Taylor looks amused and slightly out of date, his sandy hair longer than one might wear it today but unfashionably short for the distant time period when the picture was taken by the famous photographer of a trendy magazine. His gaze is fixed on something beyond the camera as though contemplating the future, which would befit the man who brought together perhaps the greatest collection of computer engineering talent ever to work in one place.

  On a sunny afternoon in July 1996 the same photograph looked down at a gathering of that same talent in the open-air restaurant of a Northern California winery. There were some changes from when it was first shot, however. This time the picture was blown up bigger than life, and the people celebrating under its amused gaze had aged a quarter-century.

  They were there to mark the retirement of Bob Taylor, the unlikely impresario of computer science at Xerox PARC. Among the guests were several of his intellectual mentors, including a few who ranked as genuine Grand Old Men of a young and still-fluid discipline. This group included Wes Clark, an irascible genius of hardware design who started his career when even the smallest computers had to be oper­ated from within their cavernous entrails; and seated not far away, the flinty Douglas C. Engelbart, the uncompromising prophet of multime­dia interactivity whose principles of graphical user interfaces and mouse-click navigation were disdained in his own time but have become ubiquitous in ours.

  Most of the company, however, consisted of Bob Taylor’s chosen people. They were unabashed admirers whose careers he had launched by inviting them to sit beneath his commodious wing. Geniuses, prodigies, owners of doctorates from the leading halls of learning, they lived in the thrall of this psychologist from The Univer­sity of Texas who stammered frightfully when trying to communicate an abstruse technical point, yet still managed to impart a vision of com­puting that reigns today on millions of desktops. Many moved on to more splendid achievements and some to astounding wealth. But none ever forgot how profoundly their professional lives were changed when Bob Taylor fixed them with his discerning eye and invited them to enlist in his tiny company of believers.

  "As a leader of engineers and scientists he had no equal," said Chuck Thacker, who worked beside him longer than almost anyone else. "If you're looking for the magic, it was him."

  Thacker served as the afternoon's master of ceremonies. Under his deft supervision the familiar old Bob Taylor stories got dusted off to be howled over anew. Bob arranging for Dr Pepper, the Texas state drink, to be imported into PARC "by the pallet load and stored in a special locked vault." Bob bombing through the streets of Washington in his Corvette Stingray as though saddled on a wild stallion. Or rigging his Alto to beep out "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You" whenever he received an e-mail message on PARC's unique internal network. Taylor listened to it all in great good humor from the table of honor, way in the back, dressed in a short-sleeved striped shirt and resplendent cherry-red slacks. But then, nothing ever pleased him more than func­tioning as the lodestar of the proceedings while pretending to be noth­ing but an unassuming bystander.

  Charles Simonyi, who was a naive young Hungarian immigrant with­out a green card when Taylor brought him to PARC in 1972, flew down from Seattle in his own Learjet, one of the perquisites that accrue to a man who moved from PARC to become employee number forty of a small company named Microsoft.

  "I remember Bob preparing me to deal with the three most powerful forces of the twentieth century," he said. "One of these was personal distributed computing. The second was the Internet. And the third very powerful force is football."

  Appreciative laughter rippled across the floor. Everyone present understood football as an emblem of the darker currents driving Bob Taylor’s personality and career. They knew that as a competitor he was an absolutely ruthless creature and that to protect and glorify the work of his group he would blindly trample anyone in the way like a fullback scenting the goal line—be they rivals, superiors, or members of his own circle judged to have fallen prey to heretical thoughts.

  Over the years these habits left a trail of roasted relationships. Most of the guests at the retirement lunch were polite enough not to remark openly that the company giving Taylor the gold watch was Digital Equipment Corporation, not Xerox. Or that among the party's conspic­uous absentees were George Pake, who had hired him to establish and oversee the computer science laboratory at PARC, and Pake's succes­sor, Bill Spencer, who evicted Taylor from PARC more than a decade later. The common knowledge was that for every guest who owed a career to the guest of honor there existed not a few individuals who had felt the sting of Taylor's rivalry and damned him as one of the most arrogant, elitist, and unprincipled persons on the planet.

  The allusions to this discomfiting truth were mostly indirect. At his touch football games, it was recalled, he was always the quarterback. The former PARC engineer Dick Shoup recalled how at softball Taylor would invariably wave all the other infielders off a pop-up. One day Shoup complained, "Bob, the other people came to play, too!"

  "But they might miss it!" Taylor snapped. "Don't you want to win?"

  Others dropped hints about Bob's genius at "managing down and in," meaning pampering and defending his own team, without explicitly stat­ing the corollary: At managing up and out he was often a disaster. Finally one old colleague put into words what everyone always knew. "It's a lot better to work for Bob," he observed, "than to have Bob working for you."

  Most of the pioneers of personal computing in attendance that day had worked for Bob, not the reverse. At PARC for thirteen years he managed a world-class collection of technical virtuosi with the same uncompro­mising passion as Diaghilev, that impresario of an earlier age, guiding his own troupe of temperamental artists—soothing ruffled feathers here, mediating egotistical outbursts there, sheltering them from enemies, and clearing a psychic space so their talents could reinforce each other to build a whole immeasurably greater than the dazzling parts. No doubt there were times when the task demanded all the reserves of psycholog­ical discernment Taylor owned. That is to be expected when one is sur­rounded by thirty prodigies who are all measurably smarter than oneself (and know it). Yet seldom would any of them think of challenging his ulti­mate authority. In Bob Taylor's lab you accepted his management, or you cleared out.

  How and where Taylor acquired his gift for finding and cultivating the most talented researchers in his field no one ever quite figured out. Part of it was instinct. He might not be able to articulate or even understand all the technical details, but somehow he always knew when a researcher or a project would lead to something important, and how to prepare the ground for that person or project to ripen.

  This mysterious quality of leadership was most aptly summed up by Butler Lampson, the only person on the floor who could match Thacker's record of playing time with Bob Taylor. Lampson's intellectual power was such a dominating feature of the Taylor lab tha
t people joked about how it sometimes seemed that Bob Taylor worked for Butler Lampson rather than the other way around. Lampson disabused them of the notion by repeating the great old story about what occurred when he and Thacker were building the first PARC computer. This was a time-sharing machine called MAXC, which was cloned in the astoundingly short span of eigh­teen months from a leading minicomputer that had taken a major com­pany years to develop (by coincidence, it was Digital Equipment). Taylor kept telling them they ought to be considering an alternative architecture without actually explaining just what alternative he had in mind. It was not until a couple of years later, when they completed work on the Alto, that they realized they had built what he meant them to from the very beginning.

  "The master often speaks in somewhat inscrutable fashion," Lampson said to peals of knowing laughter, "with a deeper and more pro­found interpretation than his humble disciples are able to provide. In retrospect you can really see that the path has been plotted years in advance, and you've been following his footsteps all along."

  Not long after that retirement party Taylor invited me to visit him at his home in Woodside, a bedroom community for high-tech executives and entrepreneurs that overlooks Silicon Valley from atop a thickly forested ridge. "Leave plenty of time," he said. "It'll take you a good hour to get here from where you are."