Dealers of Lightning (31 page)

The next day he ordered four telescopes from Edmund's for about
$300 apiece. He and Rider replaced the eyepieces of two with low-power
lasers and the others with sensitive photo detectors. They bolted one laser
scope and one detector on each roof, aiming each at its complement
across the way, to create a visible light data link. The circuit worked flaw­lessly in almost any weather, even fog, although minor adjustments were
often necessary after a rainstorm, when the weight of accumulated water
made the roofs sag slightly.

"When SLOT was running I'd send a pulse of light up the hill to signal
the character generator to send a line of data down to the detector on my
roof, which would send it down to this laser and then to the printer,"

Starkweather recalled. "After all, we were only encoding ones and zeros.
It was like sending binary data on a long wire made out of light, instead
of copper."

The only real problem arose from the arrangement's elemental spookiness. One morning after a foggy night Rick Jones was summoned from
his office to field a complaint from a peeved Palo Alto police officer. It
seemed that a local motorist startled by a ghostly red beam crossing over­head had run herself off Foothill Highway into a ditch the night before.
Whatever PARC was up to, it had created a traffic hazard and would have
to stop.

Jones placated the officer and brought the issue to Starkweather, who
averted further mishaps by coarsening the focus just a bit. From then on
the beam would be too broad to be seen even in the fog, but not so much
that it could not be refocused to adequate tolerance at the receptor end.

"That way we were able to keep the experiment going for a year,
until we could move everybody up the hill," Starkweather recalled.
"Outside of that and a couple of birds that got hit with a bright red
flash, we never had a single problem."

Starkweather's SLOT and Rider's character generator were two of the
four legs of the complete interactive office environment PARC was cre­ating on the fly. In the same period Thacker, McCreight, and Lampson
were building the Alto; Alan Kay and his Learning Research Group were
designing a graphical user interface aimed at making computers intu­itively simple to use; and Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs were designing
a network—the Ethernet
—
to tie all the other components together. "We
had in mind that you ought to be able to create a file on the Alto and ship
it via the Ethernet to a print server [that is, a communal computer man­aging everyone's print orders], which would convert it to a raster and
print it out," Rider recalled. When it was finally implemented, the whole
array would be known by the rather inelegant acronym EARS, which
stood for "Ethernet-Alto-RCG-SLOT."

Of the four, the laser printer was closest to being marketable, repre­senting as it did a fairly straightforward modification of a standard Xerox
copier. Yet its road to commercialization would be a long and "gory" one,
as Jack Goldman later remarked—presaging other battles to come in the
war to bring PARC's inventions to market.

The first stumble occurred in 1972, even before EARS's other compo­nents were operational. That year the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, an institution always primed to promote new technologies,
publicly requested bids for five laser printers. Only on the surface was
this a public solicitation, for Livermore knew that PARC alone had devel­oped the applicable technology.

Jack Goldman was eager to fill the bid, figuring that the Livermore
contract would guarantee instant celebrity for PARC's first marketable
product. Unexpectedly, he was overruled by James O'Neill, a former
Ford Motor Company finance man who was in charge of Xerox's engi­neering and manufacturing group.

Goldman was furious. "I raised a fuss with him," he recalled. "I said,
'Why are you turning it down?' He said, 'I'm turning it down because
we'll lose money. The reliability of the Xerox 7000 can't stand the copy
volume Livermore will be turning out. We'll be sending so many
repairmen out there we'll lose $150,000 over the life of the contract.'"

O'Neill had it all wrong, Goldman argued. PARC had shown that the
machine's reliability improved by more than tenfold when it operated
in laser mode, because laser printing circumvented the moving parts
most prone to failure. "We had a lot of experience in the reliability of
this thing," he said. 'We had turned out millions of copies already in
the lab, where everyone was using it."

Yet the two executives' disagreement was more than a technical misun­derstanding. It reflected a fundamental clash of marketing values.
O'Neill saw little point in committing Xerox to selling a machine for
which there was no immediate prospect of high-volume production or
marketing backup. The company would not sell Livermore a prototype
copier; why sell it a prototype laser printer?

Goldman's rejoinder was that there was a world of difference between
introducing a new version of an old copier and launching an entirely new
technology; the only way to accomplish the latter was to feed the appetite
of "early adopters"—clients willing to take a chance on unfamiliar prod­ucts just to see what they might do. But he lost the argument.

"You
have to take certain chances
if
you're going to introduce
a new
product," he said later. "O'Neill
refused
to let us fill
that
order, and
look what he sacrificed. That
machine
would have had the world by
the
tail."

Instead the laser printer spent another two years in product planning
limbo,
at
which point Goldman
had to
intercede again—this time
more successfully—to save it
from extinction.

That happened in 1974 when
Xerox's
product review committee, on
which corporate staff planners
were
overrepresented and engineers
almost non-existent, debated
which kind of
computer printer
Xerox
should bring to market.
At
the
eleventh
hour Goldman discovered that
the
committee planned to
recommend a
Webster-designed machine
known as the "Superprinter,"
which
used
CRTs,
or cathode
ray
tubes—
thousands of times dimmer than
a laser—to
project an image onto a pho­toreceptor.

"A
bunch of horse's asses who
didn't know
anything about technology
were
making the decision,"
Goldman recollected. The
Superprinter,
he
contended, was hopelessly unequal
to the
demands of high-speed print­ing.
"Here
laser printing had
already been
developed by Starkweather,
and the guys back in Rochester
were thinking
in terms of
CRTs,
which
was
absolutely a backward way of doing
it."

This
time Goldman did more than
argue.
Commandeering a com­
pany plane,
he hustled two key
committee
members onto it—
Don
Pendery,
the planning vice president, and his boss, a staff vice presi­dent named Bill Souders
—
for a hastily arranged demo of laser print­ing
at PARC.

"It
was Monday night. I said, 'We're going out tonight and coming
back
tomorrow night in time for Wednesday morning's meeting.'
And
we
made believers out of them. The guys at Palo Alto did a masterful
job of presenting it. Everything worked without a hitch.
These
two
guys looked at it and said, 'Hey, this is really the way to go.'
And
we
were able to override the proposal from Webster."

Still,
it was a Xerox-style victory, Pyrrhic at best. Although the com­mittee accepted laser technology, it rejected Goldman's appeal to build
laser-adapted Model 7000 copiers, as Starkweather had done. This
would have allowed the company to market a laser printer within a
year. The panel decided instead to wait until the launch of Xerox's next
generation of high-speed copiers, the 9000 series—which was not
scheduled for another three years.

It was a perilous delay. The plan to commercialize the laser printer
would be killed and resurrected three times in that period, saved only by
the obstinacy of an executive named Jack Lewis, who ran the company's
printing division and ignored the orders from higher-ups to deep-six the
project. Finally launched in 1977 as the 9700 printer, Gary Stark­weather's laser device fulfilled its inventor's faith by becoming one of
Xerox's best-selling products of all time.

Even so, for the white-light copier engineers of Webster the laser
printer never shed the frightening aspect of an alien technology.

"Years afterwards I went back there," Starkweather said. "I ran into
my old boss, the one who had tried to keep me from leaving. His last
words to me were, 'Are you still playing around with that laser stuff?'

"By then the laser printer was a $2 billion-a-year business."

Chris Jeffers took a deep breath before walking into the
big corner conference room on Porter Drive. Alan Kay,
who had recruited his childhood friend to join PARC as a sort of amanuensis and chief of staff, had guided him through the rigorous interview process and as far as this last hurdle, the delivering of a
technical presentation to his future colleagues sitting in a sort of ple­nary session. Waiting for Jeffers inside the room were about twenty sci­entists and engineers,
all
lounging improbably on beanbag chairs
upholstered in a ghastly mustard-yellow fabric. The weekly meeting
about to convene had come to be known simply as "Dealer." It was
already a PARC institution.

Bob Taylor liked to tell people that his style of managing CSL com­bined the best features of all the research labs he had ever known. But its
structure sprouted largely from a small kernel: the management princi­ples developed at ARPA. Taylors predecessors had bequeathed him the
axiom that the best way to manage research was to select the best people
in a given field and set them loose. Scientists with the lofty skills ARPA
demanded, Ivan Sutherland said, "are people who have ideas you can
either back or not, but they are quite difficult to influence. You can maybe convince them that something’s of interest and importance, but
you cannot tell them what to do."

On the other hand, you can find
a way
for them to tell each other.
The uncompromising give-and-take of Taylors
ARPA
contractor meet­ings lent itself to reproduction at PARC
in
the form of "Dealer."

The name derived from the book
Beat the Dealer,
by Edward
O.
Thorp, an
MIT
math professor who had developed a sure-fire system for
winning at blackjack—"beating the dealer"
—by
counting the high- and
low-value cards dealt out in hands.
(This truly
effective system would
make the unassuming
Ed
Thorp the godfather of professional blackjack
card-counting.)

Taylor was not much of a blackjack buff.
What
interested him about
Beat the Dealer
was its compelling metaphor of a doughty individual
fielding the challenge of a group of trained and determined adver­saries. In casino blackjack the dealer plays against everyone at the
table. In Taylor's variant a single researcher would propose an idea or
project, then stand alone to defend it against dissection by his peers.

Dealer was soon institutionalized as the beating heart of
CSL's
profes­sional organism, a time when the entire lab would gather in a room fur­nished with the beanbag chairs drat Peter Deutsch and his wife,
Barbara,
had discovered at
a
friend's shop in Berkeley. The meetings, which were
usually on a Tuesday (although the designated day changed from time to
time), were scheduled more or less at lunchtime and generally lasted an
hour. Attendance was mandatory for all of Taylor's subordinates, the only
lab rule he rigidly enforced, and the other labs were welcome
to
attend,
at least at first.
Later,
as
PARC
expanded and the crowd at Dealer threat­ened to become unmanageable, non-CSL personnel became welcome
only upon invitation or special dispensation.
(Kay,
though an
SSL
member, owned a permanent pass.)

Taylor would open each session with ten to fifteen minutes of house­keeping items before yielding the floor to that week's designated dealer.
At that point the game transmuted into something more like poker.
It
was
the dealer's prerogative to set not only the topic of discussion, but the
rules of debate.

"I
wanted to have conditions where someone could get up to the table
and set rules as czar," Taylor recalled. "You could say, no interruptions; or
interrupt whenever you want. Or I'll only debate x, y, or z; or only right-handers can argue." The discussion topics were similarly unconstrained.
Certainly they tended toward issues of importance to the lab, but that
category was broadly defined. Bob Flegal, a CSL graphics expert, once
demonstrated for his colleagues how to take a bicycle apart and lubricate
the parts, and Ed Fiala was famous for a memorable presentation on how
programming algorithms resemble kitchen recipes.

Outsiders arriving with influential backing got extra latitude, as hap­pened when Kay surprised Jeffers with the news that he would be
making a speech at the next Dealer. Jeffers, the farthest thing from a
trained computer scientist, had spent the previous few years first as a
Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and then as an official in the agency's
Washington office. He told Kay there was no way he could cook up an
appropriate presentation to the digital elect of PARC.

Kay advised, "Just talk about something you know."

"So I gave a speech about the sociolinguisties of Nepalese language
and culture, and we had a good time with that," Jeffers recalled with
relief. "Actually, I felt quite at home."

This was also part of Taylor's scheme. Once accepted into the lab, you
were immune to the petty harassments common to university depart­ments. "You were part of the extended family," related John Shoch, a
member of Kay's lab. "No one ever asked, "Who the hell are you and what
are you doing here?'" The alternative, Taylor believed, was for one-upmanship to hobble the unfettered exchange of ideas. "If someone tried
to push their personality rather than their argument, they'd find that it
wouldn't work."

But the argument had best be carefully thought out. Anyone trying to
slip an unsound concept past this group was sure to be stopped short by
an explosive
"Bullshit!"
from Thacker or
"Nonsense!"
from the beetle-
browed ARPANET veteran Severo Ornstein. Then would follow a cas­cade of angry denunciations: "You don't know what you're talking about!"
"That'll never work!" "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard!" Lamp-
son might add a warp-speed chapter-and-verse deconstruction of the
speaker's sorry reasoning. If the chastened dealer was lucky (and still
standing), the discussion might finally turn to how he might improve on
his poor first effort.

The criticisms could be particularly ruthless when Dealer turned to the
qualifications of a job candidate. Scientific prodigies who had spent half
their lives defending abstruse research before hostile faculty committees
were easily unnerved by this small group slouched in their beanbags,
rudely firing off comments of annihilating incisiveness. Newcomers
almost always came away from Dealer profoundly unsettled.

But even the most experienced lecturers could get themselves man­handled. The featured speaker at one memorable Dealer was Alan
Newell, a distinguished professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, or
CMU, who was not only friend but mentor to a good half-dozen of the
engineers in the room. Newell literally had written the textbook on com­puter architectures. On this occasion the agenda called for him to solve a
tricky programming problem in front of a video camera so his students
back in Pittsburgh would be able to study his thought process step by
step, as though debugging lines of code. Within the first few steps, how­ever, he unwittingly committed a rudimentary mistake. What the stu­dents got on tape instead was a roomful of smart-assed engineers pepper­ing the increasingly flustered Newell with bluntly phrased suggestions
about how to recover from his blunder.

Only once could anyone recall the group s being specifically ordered
to go easy on a guest. In early 1973 Pake decided to hire Harold Hall,
an avuncular research executive who had worked at ARPA and Ford,
to be the long-awaited replacement for Bill Gunning as SSL chief. Hall
was not exempt from the ritual of the mass interview, but Pake did not
want him roughhoused, either.

"Taylor obviously had been told that he had to make sure Harold got a
nice respectful reception," recalled the CSL engineer Chuck Geschke.
"So rather than have him come in right at the beginning of Dealer, Bob
first gave us a little lecture on appropriate modes of behavior and how
most executives in the Xerox Corporation wouldn't be accustomed to
what normally went on in Dealer." Jim Morris, an acid-tongued trans­plant from CMU, was sitting in the back. "Suddenly," Geschke recalled,
"Morris said, 'Wait a minute! I get it! You're trying to tell us that you're
just about to send a piece of china into the bull shop!'"

But such special handling was rare. The pitiless judgments dis­pensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught
that an answer can be right or wrong, "one" or "zero," but not anything
in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor
in being told you were right, or half-right, or had made a decent try.
"There was nothing personal about it," said Ornstein. "We didn't want
to be coddled or have our time wasted."

That is not to say that the system was entirely objective. One who
thought the lab occasionally used the brutish spirit of Dealer to
enforce its own prejudgments was Bob Metcalfe, who arrived at CSL
in 1972 with the reassuring credentials of a Harvard and MIT educa­tion. Metcalfe was acerbic and free-speaking, a man who never met an
ego he couldn't pierce. At Dealer his radar often detected the unmis­takable "ping" of people pulling rank.

"I'm being cynical now, but if you were from Berkeley or MIT or,
especially, CMU, you'd give your talk, you'd get some questions, you'd
get congratulated, and you'd get a job offer," he said. "But if you were
some poor schmuck from the University of Arizona, they'd grill you
and it was all over. In other words, if the department head at CMU
said you were cool, that was good enough for them."

Others did not overlook the converse of Taylor's effort to promote a
group sensibility at CSL. If there were no walls within the lab, there
were certainly barriers erected against the outside. "It was almost a
cult-like thing," remembered Lynn Conway, an SSL engineer whose
background included work on an IBM supercomputer. "I'm not easily
attracted to cults and it always made me a little uncomfortable. Taylor's
a very powerful personality. Here he was in the background with these
gunslingers out front and the groupies in back."