Dealers of Lightning (3 page)

To
Chuck Thacker the thrill was indescribable.
He
knew he had
done more than create a
novelty. He and his
colleagues had reduced
the computer to human scale
and recast its
destiny forever.
The
goofy
figure
munching its way
across the display gave
only a hint of
what
this
technology would mean to
people ten, twenty,
even thirty
years in
the
future.
But
its course was set.
It was as though
they had all
stepped
off
a cliff into the void and
alighted in a new
world, bearing proof
that
time travel, after all, was real.

In
1973 the companies and individuals
later
to be identified with the
advent of the personal computer were otherwise engaged.
IBM
was
still turning out electric typewriters; Microsoft's Bill
Gates was a
fresh­man entering Harvard; and Steve Jobs, the future co-founder of
Apple
Computer, was a college dropout wandering around
India
in search of
his
Zen
master.

But the Alto had arrived. Compact and powerful, small enough to fit
under a desk and simple enough for children to use, it was truly the
world’s first personal computer. It was also nearly ten years ahead of its
time, for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, the first successful
commercial expressions of the ideas PARC brought to fruition in 1973,
did not appear until the 1980s were well under way.

Such was the operating standard in the lab where Alto was born. At
Xerox PARC, the home of one of the most exceptional teams of invent­ing talent ever assembled in one place, prodigious feats of invention
and engineering sprouted as commonly as daisies in an open field.
Legendary names among the computer elite but almost entirely
unknown to the general public, PARC's scientists pioneered the tech­nology behind today's most exciting innovations. America and the
world are today in the grip of an unprecedented technology craze; very
few are aware that most of what drives the frenzy was invented,
refined, or perfected at Xerox PARC.

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 Braggado­
cio
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.