Dealers of Lightning (18 page)

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.

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
thou­
sand
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.

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.