Dealers of Lightning (42 page)

Tesler hated the very idea of sharing computing cycles, an emotion
that dated from an incident that happened when he was a fifteen-
year-old senior at New York City's elite Bronx High School of Science.
In short, he had gotten banished from a university computer center for
throwing the wrong switch.

The year was 1960. Tesler had acquired permission, somewhat illic­itly, to use an IBM 650 at Columbia University during unbooked slots
on weekends. The 650 was about the size of three tall armoires stand­ing back to back. Among its more curious features was its memory
apparatus, a magnetic drum driven by an endless rotating belt like the
fan belt of a car. The computer's operators were indoctrinated with the
stringent rule that if power to the system ever failed they were to wait
a minimum of fifteen minutes before turning it back on, to make sure
the drum could first come to a complete stop.

Left alone in the center one day, Tesler hit the wrong switch and
inadvertently turned off the machine. "Instinctively I flipped it back on
again—and the moment I did I went, 'Oh, shit!'"

The belt instantly snapped with a report like a pistol shot. The har­vest was a maintenance call to IBM, considerable expense to the com­puter center, and for Tesler a summons to the director's office.

"He told me I could never use their computer again," Tesler recalled.
"That day I resolved that someday I was going to have my own computer,
because I didn't want anybody to ever do that to me again. And from then
on many of my decisions about my life were weighed against the ques­tion: 'Does this help me get my own computer?'"

Tesler’s second objection to POLOS was the hopeless inscrutability
of its user interface. This violated another personal credo, that the pro­grammer’s primary duty was to render the computer intelligible to the
layman. By the time he reached PARC he had already written several
programs aimed at turning computers into handy tools for average
users, including one to print and format simple documents which he
called "Pub" and sold commercially by mail-order.

Tesler had assumed that at PARC, the world capital of the interactive
imagination, he would find everyone working toward this same goal.
Instead he had been thrown among the POLOS team, which seemed
bent on making things even harder for the user. He could not resist
mocking the system and its silly theology. Every chance he could, he tried
to show his smitten colleagues that Engelbart’s dazzling system was so
complicated that it created more work for the user rather than less, like a
telescope viewed through the wrong end.

"They had to justify the fact that it took people weeks to memorize the
keyset and months to become proficient," he recalled. "So they came up
with this whole mystique about augmenting intellect' and how in order
to become literate with a computer people would need six months of
training. Basically, I showed that this stuff that took six months really only
had to take a week, with the right system."

Rather than heed his words, they shunned him like a parson at the orgy.
"They were fed up with me and decided I was more of a pain than any­thing else," Tesler recalled. "I was the naysayer. I was bringing down the
morale."

Finally Bill English summoned him to his office. "Larry," he said,
"we've found you a new assignment."

While Tesler had been crabbing about POLOS from the inside, the
system had been getting the once-over from a perceptive visitor from
the outside. Timothy Mott had been dispatched to PARC as an emis­sary by the head of Ginn & Co., a Xerox subsidiary that published text­books out of an office in Boston.

For a sixty-year-old publisher, this man, the provocatively named Dar­win M. Newton, was an uncommonly enterprising individual. Sometime
earlier he had discovered that Xerox was charging Ginn a portion of its
annual revenues to cover "corporate research." As far as he could tell, this
tax had never purchased Ginn a dime’s worth of knowledge or technol­ogy, a deficit he resolved to correct. His inquiries led him to PARC,
where he had received a short demo of the latest work on office sys­tems—that is, POLOS. Newton returned home thinking that something
like POLOS might help relieve the tedium of editing manuscripts and
laying out pages, and in the process help Ginn turn out better books.

But the question of how to actually determine if his suspicions
were right had him stymied. He knew everything about editing but
nothing about computers. Then one day Tim Mott showed up for a job
interview.

Mott was a displaced Briton with a computer science degree from
Manchester University. This was a place with a much older claim to com­puting distinction than Palo Altos, for it was at Manchester that the
world's first electronic stored-program computer, based on the concepts
of Alan Turing, had been built in 1948. After completing his studies Mott
had relocated from Manchester to Oberlin College in Ohio, where he
had spent a couple of years teaching math and helping the school set up
its computer department. He then moved to Boston to enroll in business
school. What brought him to Newton's office was a tip that Ginn had a
part-time opening that might tide him over until the school year started.

Once Newton learned that the man seated before him was a certified
computer scientist, he jumped at the chance to explore how to apply
the intriguing system he had seen in a real world production fine. The
part-time job suddenly disappeared. Instead, Mott found himself
shipped out to Palo Alto with instructions to bring back POLOS as an
editing system.

As a Briton, a stranger, and an ambassador from the far reaches of
Xerox land, Mott spent his first few days on the West Coast with his
head spinning.

"I had heard of PARC, though probably only through the stuff Stewart
Brand had written. I didn't think of myself as being in the mainstream of
computer science research," he recalled. What he found at PARC "from
the standpoint of personal computing as opposed to either batch process­ing or time-sharing was really
fascinating. And I
got the joke about the
price of the technology and
where
it was going and the fact that what was
being worked on there was really going
to be
commercially viable, in time."

But he also saw where the research train was going off the rails.
On
the
POLOS
team, he found, "there wasn't a lot of time spent looking at what
mere mortals would be able to do with the system." Instead they had pro­duced a system bewilderingly technical and counterintuitive. English
and his software chief, Bill
Duvall,
had faithfully reproduced Engelbart's
system of "structured text" in which
every
line and paragraph of a file
incorporated reference pointers to other pertinent text, allowing users to
follow a sort of subterranean intellectual path through a document.
Mott
regarded it as a fascinating model for analyzing computer programs or
navigating through information space. "But it wasn't a particularly good
model for editing manuscripts, let alone doing page layout of text and
graphics." Like Tesler, he shuddered at the thought of training a typical
Ginn editor or secretary, or any ordinary user, to utilize
POLOS's
baroque routines.

POLOS's
inadequacies in the real
world
posed a real dilemma for
Mott.
Since his charge was to
study and adapt POLOS
for Ginn, after six
weeks in Palo Alto he had essentially
studied
himself out of a job.
"My
report back to Ginn was basically a letter of resignation, saying this isn't
technology you can use," he recalled.

Fortunately, before sending it he happened to spend a few moments
in
Bob
Taylor's office, outlining his misgivings.

Taylor
puffed at his pipe. "You're not going to just go away, are you?"
he asked.

"What choice do I have? This isn't a system suitable for a publishing
application."

"So
stick around and help us figure out what
will
work for Ginn.
That's
why we're here."

Taylor's proposal to Mott was not an entirely disinterested one.
At
that
moment
POLOS
and the Alto were moving along parallel paths toward the
same goal
—
delivering computing cycles interactively to users. Taylor fig­ured the two programs were almost certain to end up vying for money and
staff in a zero-sum game. He was not alone: Even observers with little stake
in the success of either system realized that when the smoke cleared only
one would be left standing. No one could be surprised that Taylor would do
anything to ensure the Alto was the one that would prevail.

By 1974, when his conversation with Mott took place, this rivalry was
already creating tension between the Computer Science and Systems
Science labs. Lampson and his colleagues were convinced the POLOS
architecture was obsolete. It was true that scrapping the traditional
heavy-duty mainframe in favor of the Nova pool relieved the system of
the memory management and job scheduling that made time-sharing
so burdensome and complex. But since one or two Novas had to be
reserved for specialized tasks such as scheduling print jobs and coordi­nated with the users of the pooled machines, the complexity got added
right back in.

"It was actually worse than trying to do it on a classical time-sharing
system," Lampson explained later. "You had to keep all these balls in
the air to keep everything working, which we're not that good at today.
And we certainly weren't very good at it then."

The CSL staff campaigned to undermine POLOS. If Taylor's recruits
from Berkeley Computer felt at all abashed about torpedoing the prize
project of his recruits from Engelbart's lab, they did not show it; this was
a question of engineering, in which personal feelings were not a factor. In
any case, English and his people now belonged to a different lab. In staff
meetings and hallway bull sessions the Computer Science Lab never let
slip a chance to make its views known, as though following the habit Bob
Taylor had learned in his early itinerant years among the dusty little
towns of rural Texas. They were making sure the Alto's superior position
in the hierarchy was established and rendered unassailable.