Dealers of Lightning (20 page)

More problems cropped up in designing the operating system. In com­puting, economies of scale often work in reverse: As a system grows
larger it becomes exponentially more complicated. A computer designed
to serve fifty users is not ten times more complicated than a machine for
five users, but one hundred times, or a thousand. Berkeley's 500-user
machine proved more complex than even this exquisitely talented team
could handle. As Frederick Brooks would have predicted, when they
finally got it working it did not work perfectly—and never well enough
for the rated capacity of 500 users.

The full-bore crash of expectations, however, came late in the com­pany's life cycle. For the first year or two BCC's fortunes resembled
the rising curve of an arc. The company ramped up employment to
more than 100 hardware and software engineers. The prototype's
name got upgraded from the Berkeley 1 to the Berkeley 500, the bet­ter to express their confidence in its capacity (and, as Lampson said,
"for marketing purposes").

Pirtle had an artful way of squelching any doubts that might arise about
the program. One recruit, an engineer named Ed Fiala who came from
the Boston engineering firm of Bolt, Beranek & Newman, had taken the
precaution of ordering a Dun & Bradstreet credit report on BCC before
deciding whether to accept the job. "It said, 'Well, they're paying their
bills but we don't exactly know how,'" Fiala recalled. He stifled his mis­givings and moved to Berkeley anyway arriving on a night when BCC
was having a big party.

"Everybody was all smiles and enthusiasm, and I asked Mel Pirtle
how the company was doing," Fiala recalled. "He said, 'We're doing
great!' I was a little concerned. I asked, What sort of financing do you
have?' He said, 'Oh, we have lots. We just got three hundred thousand
dollars.' And I asked how long that would last and he said, 'Six weeks.'

"Now, three hundred thousand dollars sounded like a lot of money to
me but the six weeks didn't seem all that long. So I said, 'Isn't that a lot
less time than it's going to take you to complete your project?' He said,
'Well, yes . .
.
but we can always get more money.'
"

For a while that was true. Backers touring the BCC quarters invari­ably came away convinced by the staff’s high spirits that everything was
on track. ("I know I tried to look enthusiastic," Fiala said.) But in 1970
the well ran dry. Not only had the recession dug in, but the technolog­ical risks confronted so cavalierly by BCC and other time-sharing com­panies turned out to be tougher than anyone expected. There were
new questions about whether the machine would ever get done, and
who would buy it if it did. Pirtle started to pare staff. Early in the year
he placed those who were left on half salary and advised everyone to
look for work.

Around then Bob Taylor made his first appearance on the premises.
To the younger programmers he cut quite the intriguing figure, a natty,
self-assured individual to whom Pirtle and Lampson seemed to pay an
unusual degree of respect—even deference. "I didn't know what to
make of him," said Simonyi, still a cultural innocent living hand-to-
mouth as a Berkeley undergraduate while working part-time at BCC.
"I had this impression of a laid-back Playboy type, a Hugh Hefner
type, good looking, good dresser, athletic, with the pipe of course,
always with the pipe. Taylor never had the airs of the false technical
B.S. artist. It was a plus that he didn't, but at the same time I had to ask
myself: 'If he's not technical, not a technical B.S.'er, then what the hell
is he?'"

The answer was: A man energetically pursuing a deal. Having alerted
Pake to BCC's financial problems and the likelihood of a rare cache of
first-rank talent hitting the market, his initial idea was for Xerox to buy
BCC outright and fold it whole into PARC, like a fresh egg into raw
batter. That way PARC would acquire an advanced time-sharing proto­type along with at least twenty top people and a sizable complement of
junior staff. Negotiations with Pirtle along those lines proceeded into
the fall.

But whether because Pirtle quoted too high a price or BCC failed too
rapidly, the wholesale deal collapsed in favor of a sort of
a la carte
arrangement. Just as BCC filed for bankruptcy (one final drunken party
on Friday, November 13, 1970, drained the last of its petty cash), PARC
hired six of its best people—Lampson, Thacker, Deutsch, Fiala, a hard­ware designer named Richard Shoup, and a software programmer
named Jim Mitchell. Pirtle was not interested in coming along. Instead
he took over the management of a colossal government project to build
the worlds first parallel-architecture supercomputer, the Illiac IV, at
NASA's Ames Research Center in neighboring Mountain View (although
some thought that the real reason was that he knew he would never get
along with Taylor). Simonyi went with him, for the moment.

The Berkeley 500, the only machine of its kind ever built, was pur­chased by ARPA on Taylor’s recommendation and shipped to the Uni­versity of Hawaii to allow that institution to join the ARPANET. The
last employees of Berkeley Computer got it up and running in the
cavernous building on Sixth Street, then watched with bittersweet
emotions as it got crated up. "It was a very complex and interesting
project," Fiala mused later. "It would have been fun to work on it for
five years."

Virtually at a single stroke, Taylor had completed his team—almost.
He had the best hardware man (Thacker), the best designer of operat­ing systems (Lampson), and an entire cell of other computer science
prodigies. PARC was missing only one thing: a philosopher.

For there was still the obstacle that among the leading computer
experts in the country, including those now on his payroll, very few
agreed with him that the goal of computer design was to create a per­sonal machine that interacted with the user via a high-powered display.
The BCC group, deeply rooted in the culture of time-sharing, was still
intent on getting as many users hooked into a single machine as tech­nologically possible. That goal, as Wes Clark contended, remained
incompatible with giving the individual the kind of speed and respon­siveness that interactivity required. When Taylor tried to explicate his
notion of a display-based user interface, they tuned him out. They
would not come around to his point of view for nearly two years.

But one man was way ahead of them all. That one had written a doc­toral thesis at Utah in 1969 describing an idealized interactive com­puter called the FLEX machine. He had experimented with powerful
displays and with computers networked in intricate configurations. On
page after page of his dissertation he lamented the inability of the
worlds existing hardware to realize his dream of an interactive per­sonal computer. He set before science the challenge to build the
machine he imagined, one with "enough power to outrace your senses
of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store thousands of pages,
poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores,
and anything else you would like to remember and change."

To Taylor he was a soulmate and a profound thinker, capable of see­ing a computing future far beyond anything even he could imagine.
Among the computer scientists familiar with his ideas, half thought he
was a crackpot and the other half a visionary. His name was Alan Kay.

The hallmark mop of shaggy black hair is shot with gray,
but as he nears a quite implausible sixty years of age,
little else has changed. Certainly not the energy level,
or the sneakers, so characteristic of his working uniform, or the
unceasing effulgence from his mind of historical observation, moral
instruction, and technological vision.

"Conversations with Alan Kay aren't about any particular thing," says
Carver
Mead,
a Caltech professor who developed the technology of
complex integrated circuits at
PARC.
"They're more a ramble through
Ideaspace."

Ideaspace Central today is divided between two Southern California
locations about ten miles apart.
One
is
Kay's
home in an affluent part
of
Los
Angeles.
It
is unassuming from the outside except for a tower­ing V-roofed addition. This curious annex was custom-built to shelter a
two-story pipe organ professionally hand-crafted of exquisite blond
spruce, on which
Kay
can be heard almost any morning practicing his
favorite music by Buxtehude and J.
S.
Bach. ("Alan believed his role
was to make it possible to build the organ, after which he would be the
happy caretaker," remarked its architect, Greg Harrold.)

The second location is a warehouse-like building in Glendale, a smoggy
precinct of the San Gabriel Valley just north of L.A. Artfully arranged
partitions and bookcases provide Kay with a spacious work area open to
the floor through a doorless passage on one side—not too private, for he
likes to spend the workday in constant stir, eliciting and dispensing ideas
among his co-workers with equal generosity. He greets you wearing an
oval name tag reading "Alan" and bearing a picture of Mickey Mouse. It
should look ludicrous and it does, until you remember that this is the man
whose playful digitized image of Cookie Monster launched the age of the
personal computer. Or that he is now employed—as are two other mem­bers of the extraordinary team he assembled at PARC—by the Walt Dis­ney Company, which has entrusted him with helping to develop new
ways to transmit story and idea from creator to audience.

Alan Kay might have been the role model for the modern com­puter nerd, a Chuck Yeager for the generation that got engaged by
the new technology in the 1970s. If you lived within that era's insular
community of students and electronics nuts you knew his name, per­haps because you had read his lucid explications of microelectronics
and software in
Scientific American,
or read an article featuring him
in (of all places)
Rolling Stone.
You had been socially conditioned to
feel ungainly and isolated by your devotion to machines and math;
Alan Kay positively reveled in it, swaggered with it, declared in the
pages of the counterculture bible itself that you and your awkward
pals in all your nebbishy glory were the prophets of a new world in
which computers and their unparalleled power would belong to the
masses.

The Computer Bum, as he enlightened
Rolling Stone's
readers, was
someone who looked "about as straight as you'd expect hot-rodders to
look. It's that land of fanaticism. He's a person who loves to stay up all
night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship." The hacker as
rebel: Not an undernourished weirdo, merely someone "not very inter­ested in conventional goals."

"Alan had been thrown out of every university in the country," recalled
John Warnock, a mathematician who knew him first as a fellow graduate
student at the University of Utah and later as a colleague at PARC. "He's
not your normal person. He's a child prodigy who doesn't quite fit in with
your normal academics."

His wife, Bonnie MacBird, would transfer his personality to a char­acter (distribute it among several, actually) in her original screenplay
for the first computer-animated high-tech thriller, a Disney film enti­tled
Tron
in which his boldness, his confidence, his exhilarating kines­thesia somehow survived the merciless dilution of Hollywood script
doctoring. Alan Kay today is still the kind of person who communicates
an impression of pure motion even when he is sitting down. As Carver
Mead suggests, a conversation with him is an exhausting scaled-up
affair. Once you get him talking he performs what he calls a "brain
dump" on you, years of accumulated knowledge and synthesis pouring
forth in a flood of narrative in which the protagonists are Alan Kay and
the startling and visionary ideas he holds dear (many of them still
deplorably unrealized), and their adversaries are managers, executives,
bean-counters, corporate boards, schoolteachers, and all others who
regard the unshackled imagination as a menace rather than a gift.

Visible within the flood of ideas is the Alan Kay who made comput­ing cool. He declared publicly that it was all right to use three-million-
dollar machines to play games and "screw around." If that meant grad
students were blasting digital rocket ships off their computer screens
in a game called "Spacewar," it was all part of the weaving of new tech­nology into the cultural fabric. His unashamed view of the computer as
very much a toy liberated many others to explore its genius for proce­dures other than the parsing of numbers and the sequencing of databases—to see it,
in
other words, as a creative tool.

This notion of technology as a means to an end still distinguishes Kay
from most other practitioners of the art and science of technology. One
factor in his powerful kinship with Bob Taylor was their shared curios­ity about
what
this machine could be made to do, more than
how.
Notwithstanding his incessant harangues, most of the inspired engi­neers Taylor recruited to CSL, the Lampsons and Thackers, started
out too blindly focused on the issue of what was within their power to
actually build. They would ask: What is the next stop on the road? Kay
turned the question inside out: Let's figure out where we want to go,
and that will show us how to get there. He never lost sight of the com­puter's appropriate station in the world: to conform to the user's
desires, not the other way around.

"It's almost impossible for most people to see technology as the tool
rather than the end," he was saying one day in his cubicle at Disney Imagineering's Glendale warehouse. He was about to embark on another
excursion through what Carver Mead called Ideaspace, where hyperbole
and metaphor are equivalent coins of the realm (or obverse sides of the
same coin). "People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environ­ment is to be taken as a given. It's part of the way our nervous system
works. But it's dangerous to take it as a given because then it controls you,
rather than the other way around. That's McLuhan's insight, one of the
bigger ones in the twentieth century. Zen in the twentieth century is
about taking things that have been rendered invisible by this process and
trying to make them visible again.

"Parents ask me what they should do to help their kids with science.
I say, on a walk always take a magnifying glass along. Be a miniature
exploratorium.
. .
."

You would have to know something about his life to recognize this as
a scene from his childhood. Kay's father was a scientist, a physiologist
engaged in designing prostheses for arms and legs. "I can certainly
remember going on walks with him," Kay recalled. "And when you go
on a walk with a parent who's interested in science, it's usually about all
the things that you can't readily see."

This sort of unleashed curiosity would allow him to recognize new ways
of placing computing power in everyone's hands. But he had to travel a
fair distance before discovering that his destiny lay in the arcane science
of systems programming. That might never have happened at all had cir­cumstances not left him becalmed on an Air Force base in Waco, Texas,
in the suspended state of existence known as "Figmo."

The term is a military acronym for "Fuck it, got my orders." As always
with service slang, one can hardly think of a better way to describe the
condition. It was 1961 and Kay was marking off the last two years of his
enlistment. At this moment he was working in the pathology lab at James
Conway AFB, on the verge of being transferred on.

"I was in figmo, when you're at your old base but everybody knows
you're about to go somewhere else. You're not for real anymore on this
old base. You sit around and play cards and read books, one of the best
things in the military. I was trying to get a little better at poker with a
figmo who was a professional poker player, the trick being to see if I
could make it a learning experience instead of just getting fleeced."

But if Kay could not be ordered to do a damn thing pending his
transfer, his state of enforced idleness left him wide open to being
enticed. In this case the enticement was the scheduling of an aptitude
test for computer programmers. No one from Conway had ever passed
this test. To a prodigy, however, any standardized test is like a carnival
midway. Kay, whose mind was as nimble as it was underemployed,
viewed it as a lark. "No way I'd ever pass up a test," he said. Naturally,
he passed handily.

As luck would have it, the Air Force did not view programmer train­ing quite so casually Undergoing a full-scale conversion from primitive
punch card tabulators to the IBM 1401, the world's first popular gen­eral business computer, the service was pulling linguists out of Europe
to turn them into programmers and scouring the ranks for anyone
showing the slightest ability.

"They figured that since you'd taken this test, IBM could teach you
to program the 1401 from scratch in one week," Kay recalled. "It
wasn't computer science, just training, but it was the best training I've
ever had. You worked your ass off and at the end of the week you could
program a computer."

On the surface Kay seemed an unlikely candidate to take to the rig­ors of instructing a machine how to operate, for by habit he responded
poorly to rules and regulations not his own. The explanation, however,
lies in how a computer's stern and unyielding logical rules can lead to
infinitely creative results.