Dealers of Lightning Page 8

  When the meeting ended they were sure they needed him on board. He was equally certain his plain talk had ensured he would never hear from them again. "I left thinking, 'I don't want them and they don't want me,'" he said. Therefore he was all the more surprised when Pake called him a few days later in Salt Lake.

  "I want you to come help build the computer lab," he said.

  Pake's offer sounded straightforward enough, but there were oddly ambivalent feelings on both sides. Taylor understood that the titular head of the PARC computer lab would have to spend most of his time "attending to matters with corporate types and educating Pake," rather than directly supervising research. This was a job he considered out of his competence and disinclined to learn. Fortunately enough, it was not exactly what Pake had in mind, either.

  The job, he told Taylor, would involve recruiting an entire laboratory staff—including his own boss. Taylor would be hired in an associate management position, but Pake took pains to warn him that on paper he was underqualified even for that and would have to prove himself before advancing.

  "I didn't exactly say to him, 'You don't have the right research cre­dentials for the job I'm about to offer you,'" Pake recalled. "What I did say was: 'Bob, it seems to me that what you need to do is to develop real research credentials if you want to go on. Why don't you come into this laboratory as associate manager and help me recruit its manager, your boss, and undertake a research program that would develop these credentials for you?'"

  What he meant, of course, was chiefly that Taylor lacked a respectable Ph.D. In Pake's hard science universe, where researchers laid their bricks upon foundations that had been built as long as three centuries earlier, a doctorate was a certificate of genuine originality and achievement. That was not true in the fledgling science of computing, which was erecting its own academic foundation as it went along. Nor did Pake's viewpoint apply very well to Taylor's unique abilities as a master motivator of top research talent, which could never be encompassed within the rubric of any advanced university degree. In the coming years this absurd yet unspoken issue of Taylor's non-existent Ph.D. would help poison the two men's relationship. It would never cease to color Pake's assessment of Taylor's abilities, which only added to 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.

  For the moment, however, enraptured by the chance to finally real­ize his own vision of computing with a hand-picked team, he tried to ignore Pake's condescension. He and his proteges had encountered these quaint prejudices of "hard science" bureaucrats on every univer­sity campus. All he asked to be spelled out was Pake's understanding that Xerox's cherished "office of the future" would embrace network­ing and interactive computers. Pake agreed without devoting much thought to what those terms implied.

  Shortly after arriving in Palo Alto to take up his new responsibilities, Taylor found a more direct way to explain himself. Walking down the hall one day he noticed Pake's secretary, Gloria Warner, showing off her new IBM Selectric typewriter. With its distinctive golf ball-shaped striking mechanism, this machine was the most elegant and popular piece of office equipment of the time. Taylor stepped up and tapped it with his finger.

  "You know," he said, "we're going to make this thing obsolete."

  CHAPTER 4

  Utopia

  David Biegelsen s first impression of PARC almost made him sick to his stomach.

  A freshly minted physics Ph.D. from Washington

  University, Biegelsen had been personally recruited by George Pake in March 1970, when the Porter Drive building was still a littered and empty shell. It had been cleaned up but not filled up by September, when he and his wife arrived to lay eyes on California for the first time. The remodelers had been in, partitioning off the space in the big building so that both sides of the square corridor were lined with (mostly vacant) offices, but the first thing Biegelsen noticed when he walked into the building was its sunlit interior courtyard.

  "The atrium had an olive tree in it and not much else," he remem­bered. "But the ground underneath was just covered with olives. I thought, 'Wow, this is California, the food is just lying there on the ground!' I picked one up and put it in my mouth and just about died from the acidity in it. Later I spent hours in the library trying to find out how to cure the things."

  That was a fair enough introduction to the virtues and challenges of this mysterious place, so new that everyone's first task was deciding what to do with their freedom. For Biegelsen there was a bittersweet and slightly frightening aspect to the empty offices and the clean slate. It was the trepidation sensed by any pioneer in the split second before he takes his very first step into the unknown.

  "Here I was fresh out of graduate school and I didn't have the vaguest idea of what I was to do. I was groping through the insecurity of trying to find something really worthy of this job. But the area was so beautiful, so lush and green, and there was this mixture of wonder­ful good luck of this really great job and the need to make something happen."

  Over the next few months the arrival of more young scientists like him­self lent the glass-walled building on Porter a deceptively bustling air. In fact, the staffing proceeded slowly by design. Although the announce­ment of PARC's founding had brought in more than 900 resumes in the first few weeks, Pake and Squires took their time making offers. Govern­ment funding cuts and the dire economics of the aerospace and defense industries, they figured, were sure to produce a robust supply of gifted candidates. Pake was especially cautious, his ambitions fixed on assem­bling a cadre of exceptional scientists capable of winning Xerox a Nobel Prize, as Bell Labs had already won two for AT&T.* At its six-month anniversary on New Year's Day 1971, PARC's staff, including administra­tors and secretaries, still numbered only twenty-three.

  The languid pace of recruitment left plenty of time for the cere­monies that often accompany the launch of new corporate ventures. PARC was formally dedicated at a dinner in October by none other than Peter McColough, who happened to be in California peddling an issue of Xerox bonds to West Coast investors.

  Pake was delighted to show off his fledgling research center and its minuscule staff. Jack Goldman flew in for the occasion and invitations were dispatched to such Silicon Valley luminaries as Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, and Stanford President Richard Lyman. Rick Jones ordered a catered dinner and rented extra tables and chairs.

  *As of 1970. In the subsequent decade Bell Labs scientists won two more.

  Then a freak heat wave struck and the temperature settled at a humid 95 degrees.

  This meant trouble. The one system not yet operational on Porter Drive was the air conditioning. Envisioning a hundred guests dozing through the ritual speeches and keeling over into their fancy hors d'oeuvres, Jones hastily equipped a couple of workmen with ladders and water hoses and instructed them to cool off the roof while he sped down to San Jose to rent a few big floor fans.

  By the time the guests arrived that evening, the building was cool enough for Silicon Valleys founding generation of high-tech entrepre­neurs to mingle comfortably with the freshman class of PARC scientists in the harmony of shared knowledge and ambition. But as the guests moved to the buffet, something made Jones glance up at the ceiling, where a dark stain was spreading among the tiles directly over the buffet table. "My God," he said to himself, "they forgot to turn off the hoses!" He bolted upstairs to stanch the flow of water while several intrepid guests bore the tables, laden with expensive delicacies, to safety—just before the compromised ceiling started to drip.

  Finally the groaning boards were relocated under a dry area and, dis­aster averted, Goldman and Pake made their welcoming speeches. A beaming Peter McColough basked in his newfound reputation as an e
nlightened technological leader. For the rest of his administration he would think fondly of PARC as one of his finest achievements and Xerox's crown jewel. It was not an opinion all his successors would share. By the end of 1970, long before PARC reached its full complement of staff, Pake established its long-term organizational structure by sub­dividing the center into three distinct units. The Computer Science Laboratory had Taylor as acting manager over five scientists, including Jim Curry and Robert Flegal, a pair of graphics specialists he brought along from Utah. The Systems Science Laboratory (SSL), also with five professionals, had been placed temporarily under the management of a reluctant Bill Gunning, who had accepted the job as a stopgap but was anxious to return to hands-on research (a more willing research manager would not be recruited for another two years). The third leg of the structure was the General Science Lab (GSL), the solid-state physics branch nominally headed by Pake. GSL employed four scien­tists, one of whom, an ex-Webster physicist named Gerald Lucovsky, served under Pake as GSL's associate manager.

  This structure mirrored Pake's determination to set the new science of computing and the classical science of physics on equal footings, which he believed would encourage the two sides to intermingle. Even if this dream would never be realized, the optimistic structure endured through the next decade with only minor changes, as when Pake sev­ered the Optical Science Lab from SSL to give its work on laser print­ing and optical memory technology greater status.

  Pake also established by the close of 1970 a full research agenda. In a corporate memo dated January 4, 1971, he outlined an ambitious pro­gram for his group of twenty-three, augmented by another eight or ten professionals due to start work over the following few months. The Sys­tems Science Lab was to take over development of a laser-driven com­puter printer whose inventor, a Webster engineer, had come west after failing to interest his bosses in its potential. SSL researchers would also investigate optical memories, a technology that would eventually give rise to today's compact disc and CD-ROM, and speech recognition by com­puter. Taylors Computer Science Lab was to pursue his pet interest in graphics while developing specifications for a basic center-wide com­puter system. And GSL was assigned studies in solid-state technologies, including the electrical and optical qualities of crystals.

  Pake warned his superiors that under the projected growth curve the Porter Drive complex, which at the time housed everyone comfortably, would certainly burst its seams by the close of 1971. He was too upbeat. In the first weeks of the year Xerox headquarters knocked the staffing projections flat by imposing a company-wide hiring freeze.

  Xerox at that moment was a company in siege mode. Its pattern of consistently rising earnings, virtually unbroken since the introduction of the 914, was cracking. The year just ended had brought a general economic slowdown and, consequently cutbacks in capital spending by its biggest customers. More troubling, 1970 had also marked the end of Xerox's monopoly over the copier market. In April IBM had brought out its first office copier. It was a slow, clunky machine that could scarcely match the Xerox line for speed and reliability. But with one of the great names of American industrial muscle behind it, the new entry cast a very menacing shadow.

  Meanwhile, Xerox's patent was about to expire on its selenium-alloy photoreceptor, the material that lined a revolving drum inside every copier. The selenium was a critical element of xerography. Its electro­static charge was neutralized by light and preserved by shadow in a way that mirrored the image of a page to be copied. Particles of toner stuck to the charged regions of the drum, which corresponded to dark marks on the original, and could then be transferred to a fresh page to reproduce the image. Although numerous other parts of the process— notably the composition of the toner itself—were still protected by patents or by corporate secrecy, the expiration of the selenium patent demolished one key barrier preventing interlopers from playing in Xerox's private preserve. IBM used a different process, but others were sure to take advantage of this technological bonus. Eastman Kodak, the company's Rochester-based big brother, was already known to be working on a rival machine. More ominously, halfway around the world, teams of American, German, and Japanese engineers were developing a small tabletop copier, ultimately to be marketed in the United States as the Savin 750. By offering high-speed office duplica­tion to the millions of mid-sized and small customers Xerox had always ignored, the Savin would threaten the company's very survival.

  These events kicked off what corporate historians dubbed Xerox's "lost decade." The 1970s, a period of conspicuous creativity at PARC, would be better remembered at headquarters as an era of shriveling market share, financial stagnation, and unceasing litigation over patent and antitrust claims. Presaging the coming storm, the company had missed its revenue and profit targets for November and December 1970. The pan­icked Stamford headquarters, no longer under the control of the engi­neers and sales executives of Joe Wilson's era but of accountants and financial engineers, moved rapidly to rein in spending.

  The danger to PARC in this period was even graver than a simple hold on new hiring. Few of its tiny staff ever knew how close the research center came to being exterminated before it even reached puberty. For among the cost-cutting steps the finance-minded execu­tives proposed to the board of directors was the closure or sale of the new Palo Alto facility. There did not seem to be anything to lose or much point in carrying on: The fixed investment was still negligible; the buildings leased; the value to Xerox still conjectural. (Had not Pake warned them not to expect a return for at least five years?)

  But at the last minute one director stood up to interpose his incon­testable authority before the hangman. John Bardeen was a towering figure of scientific research, perhaps the most accomplished engineer of his time. In 1971 he already had one Nobel Prize under his belt, for co-inventing the transistor at Bell Labs with William Brittain and William Schockley. (Another would follow in 1972, for his contribu­tions to the theory of superconductivity.)

  Bardeen crisply informed his fellow directors of his opinion that divest­ing PARC would be an irresponsibly short-sighted act. Its budget was $1.7 million, barely a flyspeck on the bottom line. By contrast, its potential was limitless. "This is the most promising thing you've got," he said (as Jack Goldman, also a board member, nodded silent and relieved assent). "Keep it!" The center was saved.

  While that small drama played itself out in Stamford, PARC's first few recruits got to know each other amid rented furniture and vacant offices. In time the administrative divisions Pake established would congeal into battle lines of contentious perspectives and personalities, but that was still far in the future. "We were all intermingled with each other, so it wasn't as if one group was in one part of a building and the systems people were in another part and the computer people were in another part," recalled David Thornburg, who slid in just under the wire of the hiring freeze and arrived for work shortly after New Years Day as employee number twenty-five. "We were a small enough group so everyone knew everyone else."

  For a glittering instant it seemed as though PARC might fulfill Pake's dream of a Utopia where physicists and computer scientists communed in quest of a common science. They mixed freely in PARC's small yet somehow all-encompassing world, a place full of possibilities and mys­terious conjunctions. Thornburg was still unpacking his things on his very first day when Biegelsen, who on the strength of his three months' tenure already ranked as a seasoned PARC veteran, showed up at his office door.

  "I just came to introduce you to your next-door neighbor," Biegelsen said, leading Thornburg into the adjoining warren. "This is George. I thought you guys should get together because you shared a similar research interest in grad school."

  Thornburg was perplexed. He understood George to be working on speech recognition and he had come in as a thin-film metallurgist.

  "Really?" the neighbor asked. "What did you do your work in?"

  That was all the voluble Thornburg needed to set off on a thorough explication
of his doctoral career, not excepting the time he had to change themes in midcourse thanks to the pre-emptive publication of a thesis on the same subject by a guy from Oregon named George White.

  "I'm pleased to meet you," his neighbor said, smiling. "I'm George White."

  What particularly delighted the new staff was the atmosphere of deter­mined informality and lack of pretension. That PARC seemed more like a university department than a corporate research facility was unsurpris­ing, given that most of the staff were being exposed to the non-academic world virtually for the first time in their lives. Since all but two of the prin­cipal scientists (John Urbach, an optical expert from Webster, and Lucovsky) were newcomers to Xerox, Pake and Jones took to sending them on field trips to Rochester, Webster, El Segundo, and the Electro-Optical Systems division in Pasadena, just to give them some feeling for the cor­porate culture. But the center of their existence remained the two build­ings on Porter Drive.

  "We would get together once a week and just sort of share what was going on in the lab," Thornburg recalled. "It became almost a quasi- social event." PARC was so new that no one had been issued security badges or company identification. With scant equipment of any value on the premises, the building stayed unlocked and hospitable to out­siders. "We were physically adjacent to Stanford University, so there were visitors dropping in and out of the lab all the time. A lot of us even came to feel we were sort of like university instructors who got to spend all our time doing research without having to teach classes. So we operated as though this were an open environment where we were free to share what we were doing with anyone we wanted to."