Dealers of Lightning (34 page)

Yet here was its new multi-million-dollar research center spread out for
unsupervised public view in a ratty rock music magazine, with actual
Xerox scientists photographed in their T-shirts and jeans, barefooted,
lounging self-indulgently in beanbag chairs. In the light of the times and
in the context of
Rolling Stone's
usual fare, corporate executives could
only conclude from their insular perch in Stamford that PARC was reel­ing out of control, shamelessly squandering the research facility's budget
on adolescent techno-fantasy trips rather than solid, marketable scientific
pursuits. This was symbolized by Pake's (inaccurate) recollection years
later that the
Rolling Stone
article "flat out stat[ed] that a lot of these guys
were brilliant druggies. [That] wasn't the kind of publicity the corpora­tion wanted."

In fact, the article neither stated nor even remotely implied anything
about drug use at PARC. Brand was no Ken Kesey chronicling the
escapades of a merry band of stoned-out party guys but a self-styled
social theorist interpreting the new technologies against the era's polit­ical backdrop. Nevertheless, for the stolid traditionalists who inhabited Xerox headquarters "Spacewar's" text and pictures inescapably evoked
lax morals and California hippiedom.

Pake was anguished about "Spacewar" because more than almost
anyone else at the research center, he was intensely aware of PARC's
shaky standing at headquarters. It had been scarcely a year since John
Bardeen had saved the center from extinction. PARC had yet to turn
out a product of indisputable value; nor had it garnered the Bell
Labs-like renown that would have been proof against further attack.
(The notoriety of an article in
Rolling Stone
would hardly fill that void.)
But at least he was insulated by distance from the worst of the shock
waves. The same could not be said about Jack Goldman, who was stuck
on the East Coast to weather the storm. Murmurs of reproach lurked
around eveiy corner on the executive floor: For
these
slobs you cadged
a 20 percent pay differential? More ominously, he was getting blamed
for a serious breach of security.

At first Goldman tried to deflect the criticism by arguing that on bal­ance the portrait of PARC was a positive one and that
Rolling Stone,
alien as it was to the indignant mandarins of Stamford, had an undeni­able appeal to the population from which PARC drew its best recruits.
"It's probably indicative of the culture that was prevalent at PARC that
they looked up to
Rolling Stone
as a proper vehicle for their commu­nity," he said later. "It was their peer group who would read about
what's going on there." But this argument, he acknowledged, unsur­prisingly failed to sway "the white-shoe legal types, who looked at
Rolling Stone
as something to be disdained." There was no use arguing
that more than half of "Spacewar" dealt with Bay Area labs other than
PARC (where "Spacewar" the game was in fact seldom played). The
piece would be forever remembered as the one that introduced PARC
to the world in an entirely undignified light.

In the end Goldman had no choice but to make a show of reining in
PARC's free spirits. Accompanied by a corporate lawyer, he flew out to
read the riot act to his pet researchers, paying special attention to
those unwise enough to have allowed themselves to be directly quoted,
Taylor and Kay.

"I recall almost a sadness on Jack Goldman's part," recalled David
Thornburg. "Here we were operating in a very free environment, and
somehow there was a sense that a trust had been violated. It was made
crystal clear to us that this was
not
all right. If it happened again, the lab
was
going to be shut down."

Within weeks the consequences became concrete. The inmates-
running-the-asylum democracy that had prevailed since the founding,
particularly on the computer science side, was ended. All employees
were issued identification badges and instructed to keep them dis­played at all times. The building entrances were outfitted with security
stations, where visitors were stopped and handed a nondisclosure
pledge to sign. (Quirkily enough, the pledge attested that the visitor
would not "import" any of his
or
her ideas
into
PARC, a departure
from customary agreements, which bar visitors from carrying proprietary information
out
of the lab. In any case, the goal was to protect
Xerox from a claim that PARC had misappropriated someone else's
ideas, and it was still in use as of this writing.)

Xerox also clamped down hard on PARC's contacts with the media,
especially the popular press. Although publication in peer-reviewed
technical journals was allowed to continue, the articles were closely
vetted by corporate examiners newly aware that there might be devel­opments at PARC worth safeguarding.

A few people tried to make light of the new arrangements. Badges
got blown up into T-shirt imprints, so they could be more fashionably
worn. One employee turned his into a belt buckle. If the guards and
receptionists noted that the ID photographs on others had been art­fully pasted over with the heads of Mickey Mouse or the face of
George Washington cut from a dollar bill, they never said so.

But the atmosphere at CSL and SSL subtly and permanently
changed. In a sense the
Rolling Stone
flap catalyzed a process that was
bound to take place anyway. With MAXC behind them and the com­puter labs' head counts approaching critical mass, it was time to recog­nize that their work was too innovative and important to be any longer
the grist of carefree gossip. It was time for them to abandon the child­ishness of prodigies. They were engaged in a greater quest.

At the same time, however, "Spacewar" carried the seed of the

PARC mystique farther beyond its boundaries than ever before.
Before its publication the centers fame extended only to the limits of
an insular circle of computer pros. Then came Alan Kay, sharing with
Stewart Brand’s hip and impressionable readers his assessment of his
colleagues as "really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as
far as talent and creativity. The people here all are used to dealing
lightning with both hands."

These were bold words when Kay uttered them to Brand in the fall
of 1972. Once PARC unveiled its newest machine a few short months
later, they would sound like an understatement.

The race to build
the Alto began
one beautiful day in
September when
Chuck Thacker
and Butler
Lampson
showed up at
Alan Kay's office
door.

"Alan,"
they said, "do you have
any money?"

"Sure," he replied. "I've got about $230,000 in my budget. Why?"

"How
would you like us to use it to build your little machine?"

"I'd
like it fine,"
Kay
replied. "But what's
the
hurry?"

"Well,
we were going to do it
anyway,"
Lampson replied.
"But
Chuck's just made a bet that he can
design a
whole machine in just
three months."

For Kay,
the appearance of his two colleagues from down the hall
marked the end of a long, difficult summer.

The
year had started with a glimmer of optimism.
Kay
had the feel­ing
he
might finally be within striking distance of turning some of his
great ideas into reality.
He
had reworked his Dynabook concept into
something he called "miniCom," a keyboard, screen, and processor
bundled into a portable, suitcase-sized package.
Meanwhile,
the soft­ware aces he had brought together as
PARC's
Learning Research
Group had turned his outline for a simplified programming language
into real code, to which he gave the characteristically puckish name
"Smalltalk." (Most programming systems "were named Zeus, Odin,
and Thor and hardly did anything," he explained. "I figured that
'Smalltalk' was so innocuous a label that if it ever did anything nice
people would be pleasantly surprised.")

Kay's team had already demonstrated Smalltalk's implicit power by
running rudimentary but dazzling programs of computer-generated
graphics and animation on a video display system built by Bill English's
design group. Kay himself was a compulsive promoter, producing a
steady stream of articles and conference abstracts, often illustrated
with his own hand drawings of children in bucolic settings playing with
their Dynabook, to proclaim the death of the mainframe and the
advent of the "personal computer."

By the spring of 1972 he was ready for the next step. Having drawn on
Seymour Papert's LOGO for some of Smalltalk's basic ideas (although
the two languages worked much differently under the surface), Kay was
anxious to give it a Papert-style test ran. That meant giving children, its
idealized subjects, a shot at performing simple programming tasks on
miniComs. He figured he would need about thirty of the small machines,
to be built by the Computer Science Lab's crack hardware engineers.

The only thing left to do was persuade CSL to take the job.

That May at a CSL lab meeting, Kay made his pitch. As the lab staff
lounged in front of him in their beanbag chairs, he laid out the argument
for building the world's first personal computer. He understood this
would mean pushing the envelope on display technology—the smallest
screens used at PARC were still the size of household television sets,
although systems in which digital bits controlled "pixels," or dots on the
display screen, had been tested by numerous researchers in the building.
They would have to spend thousands of dollars on semiconductor mem­ory to drive the miniCom's high-performance graphical display, but they
all knew the price was destined to fall sharply. In fact, there was hardly
anything in the blueprint that would not be commercially accessible to
the average user widiin ten years. And wasn't that why they were here—
to build the most capable system they
could
imagine, so far ahead of the
curve that they could figure out what
to do
with it by the time the rest of
the world caught up?

"We
know everything," he told his
audience. "We
know exactly how
big the pixels are, we know how
many pixels
we can get
by
with,
we
know how much computing power
we need. The
uses for
a
personal
gadget as an editor, reader, take-home
context,
and intelligent terminal
are fairly obvious.
Now
lets build
thirty of these
things so
we
can get
on with it."
He
regained his seat,
confident as
always of having made
an incontestable case.

Then
Jerry
Elkind took the
floor.

At CSL
Elkind held the purse strings.
No
large-scale hardware project
like
Kays
could be undertaken without
his
say-so. But Jerry
Elkind
and
Alan Kay
were like creatures from
different
planets, one an austere by-
the-numbers engineer and the other
a brash
philosophical freebooter.
Let others have stars in their eyes—
Elkind
was not the type to be
beguiled by
Kay’s
romantic glow.
As a manager
he responded to ratio­nales on paper and rigorous questions
asked
and answered, not hazy
visions of children toying with computers
on
grassy meadows.
He
was a
tough customer, demanding and abrasive.
He
asked too many questions
and, mores the pity, they were often
good
ones. As Jim Mitchell once
remarked, "Jerry Elkind knows enough to be dangerous."

At
this moment he pronounced the words that most
CSL
engineers
had learned to dread as his lass of death.

"Let
me play devil's advocate," he said.

He
proceeded to pick apart Kay's proposal in pitiless detail.
The
technology was speculative and untested,
he
pointed out.
To
the extent
that the miniCom was geared toward child's play, it fell outside
PARC's
mandate to create the office system of the future.
To
the extent that it
fell within that mandate, it was on entirely the wrong vector.

Perhaps
Kay
had not noticed, but
PARC
had not yet finished
exhausting the possibilities of time-sharing. That was the whole point
of building
MAXC,
which was after all a time-sharing minicomputer.
As Kay
recalled later, the sting still fresh: "He essentially said that we
had used too many Green Stamps getting Xerox to fund the time-
shared MAXC, and this use of resources for personal machines would
confuse them."

And what about the issue of PARC's overall deployment of
resources, Elkind asked. A major office computer program was already
well under way in Kay's own lab. Had Kay given any thought to how his
project might fit in with that one?

Elkind was referring to POLOS, the so-called "PARC On-line Office
System," which was Bill English's attempt to reproduce the Engelbart
system on a large network of commercial minicomputers known as Nova
800s. He was correct in stating that POLOS ranked as PARC's official
entry in the architecture-of-information race. This was so in part because
English had cannily put a stake in the ground with a round of purchase
orders for the Novas, which committed Xerox to following through. The
small, versatile machines were already proliferating at SSL like refrigera­tor-sized
Star Wars
droids.

But Kay considered POLOS irrelevant to his project. POLOS was
explicitly a big-system prototype, an expensive luxury model as far
removed from the homey, individualistic package Kay had in mind as a
Lincoln Town Car is from a two-seat runabout. But under Elkind's con­descending assault Kay's customary fluency deserted him. He sat mute
while Elkind patronizingly dismissed his life's work as a quixotic dream.

"I was shocked," he said later. "I crawled away." Once outside the
room and beyond the hearing of his audience, he succumbed to his
ordeal and broke down in tears.

A few days later, back in the Systems Science Lab, Kay sought out Bill
English. To the extent Elkind thought of English and Kay as rivals for
PARC resources, he was mistaken. In truth, English had become some­thing of a father figure for Kay, whose academic training at Utah had left
him with the impression that one acquired research funds simply by calling
up ARPA and asking for money. Shortly after they both arrived at PARC,
English had taken it upon himself to introduce Kay to such elementary cor­porate concepts as research budgets. ("I'm afraid I really did ask Bill,
What's a budget?'" Kay recalled of the first lesson English ever gave him.)

Now English volunteered some further advice to his wounded young
colleague. Among the PARC brass, Kay lacked credibility. All the way
up to George Pake he was regarded tolerantly as a sort of precocious
child, engaging enough in his place but profoundly in need of adult
supervision. His reputation as a dreamer only made it easier for
bureaucratic types like Jerry Elkind to dismiss his ideas without afford­ing them serious scrutiny. English informed Kay, in essence, that his
barefooted treks through Ideaspace would no longer do. He had to
learn to develop written research plans, compile budgets, and keep
notes—in short, to look and act like a serious researcher.