Dealers of Lightning (46 page)

A few
semesters later Kay attempted
with
characteristic audacity to
broaden his experiment. The program coordinator at Jordan Road
Mid­dle
School had arranged to make a
room
available to the
PARC
researchers, and
Kay
decided to furnish
it
with a working Alto. Unhap­
pily,
spiriting an
Alto
off the
PARC premises was
an outrageous violation
of
Xerox
rules.
Kay
dealt with the implications by the simple stratagem of
keeping management uninformed.
Late one
night he and
Adele
Gold­berg drove up to the loading dock of
Building 34
in her station wagon, the
only
vehicle anyone owned large
enough to
carry the cargo.

"Isn't
this illegal?" she asked nervously.
Stop
worrying,
Kay
replied.
He
would take the heat.

Of
course, it was impossible to keep
the
Alto's presence at a
Palo
Alto
public school secret. Inevitably,
news
of the escapade reached
a
furious George Pake.

Painfully aware of
Kay's
value to the research center,
Pake
had always
treated him tolerantly, if condescendingly. "Alan's irrepressible," he
would say.
"You
can't keep him under control."
Even Xerox's
post-
"Spacewar"
strictures on unauthorized press statements had not stopped
Kay
from granting a steady stream of illicit demonstrations and brazen
interviews, of which some of the latter provoked outrage back in Stam­ford. The California magazine
New
West
once quoted him as saying that
Xerox
"doesn't understand" computers and its executives "really don't
have any idea what I'm doing here," forcing Jack Goldman to reassure his
fellow Xerox executives in writing that "Dr. Alan Kay is a recognized out­standing scientist in his field, albeit somewhat native and unorthodox in
his dealings with the press." ("The article is a piece of undistinguished
journalism and the audior apparently enjoys sniping at large establish­ments," he added.) Kay complained his quotes were fabricated.

Pake had once hoped that appointing Harold Hall as SSL chief
might help rein in Kay; after all, Hall had raised five kids, four of them
boys. "I thought, he's a father figure and he can help to bring Alan up,"
Pake said later. But Hall's discipline did not take. It was shortly after he
was succeeded as SSL director in 1975 by the somewhat more accom­modating Bert Sutherland that the Jordan scandal erupted, with Kay
once again involved in a first-class transgression.

Goldman happened to be on the scene to deliver the obligatory
dressing-down. As Pake looked on, he berated Kay and Jeffers for vio­lating Xerox security and exposing a proprietary program to the world.

"The shit really hit the fan," Kay remembered. "Goldman tore a strip
off me and Chris." But once Goldman had contented himself with
playing the bad cop, he let the experiment go on. As Kay recalled later,
he turned to Pake and curtly commanded, "Let them do it!""

Through 1973 and 1974 the Alto's remarkable power and potential
made LRG's creative environment "a computer hacker's dream come
true," as Ingalls recalled. "We'd go out for lunch and beer and say,
'Wouldn't it be great if you could do this or that?' Then we'd come
back to PARC and in an hour or two do the thing we'd said would be so
neat. And then we'd give a demo and show it off to our compadres in
the CSL."

The partnership was a complementary one, largely because Kay's
lunatic fringe always approached the Alto's capabilities along completely
different lines from the Computer Science Lab. For CSL the issue was

"Neither Goldman nor Pake recalls Goldman's concluding remark as Kay tells the
story. But the Altos were permitted to remain at Jordan, on the condition that they
were first carted back to PARC to be formally "checked out."
how rapidly they could move
data
through
the
machine, whether it was
Bravo text or Thacker s design schematics.
For
LRG it was how to display
the same data in the most mind-blowing, dynamic way.

"Our mission was to really make this hardware do what it was supposed
to do," recalled Kaehler. "Make it suitable
for
kids, flashy and wonderful,
really responsive. And CSL was more concerned with hard-core com­puter science issues. They wound up
not
making that many innovations
in the interface. We knew we couldn't
design
hardware like them, but we
could make the interface much more
interactive."

They worked like orchestra members composing and rehearsing a
symphony at the same time. The day
might
start with Kay bursting in
on Merry and Kaehler, interrupting their hard work on some module
of code.
He
would scrawl some new
idea
across the lab's ubiquitous
whiteboards until they were covered with boxes filled with other boxes
and arrows pointing to yet more boxes
with
pointers across to new
boxes and so on. Kay was determined
above
all to squeeze every ounce
of functionality out of the Alto bitmap. The display screen, he pro­claimed, was small only in terms of its physical dimension. In terms of
its graphic flexibility, it was colossal.
From
that standpoint, why should
the user be prevented from, say, drawing a picture on the screen using
a mouse and a paint program while simultaneously drafting a memo
describing the procedure?

The
answer, unfortunately, was that the Alto's 8½-by-ll-inch screen
encompassed just so much physical real estate
—
the space of a single
sheet of writing paper. That limitation, as it happened, led directly to one
of their most important contributions to the look of the computer
screen
—
the concept of overlapping windows.

The idea began by thinking of the screen in terms of a physical desk­top. People in offices got around the same problem of too much paper
and not enough room, Kay reasoned, by piling pages on top of one
another. The analogous procedure would be to pile up small images on
the screen—perhaps in some way that allowed the user to keep track
of how many sheets, or projects, or windows, were open at once and to
summon the most important one instantly to the top of the pile.

As usual, Kay was formulating a concept in Ideaspace and asking his
team to implement it in reality. Although they knew how to tile the
screen with multiple boxes, even overlapping ones, moving these boxes
around or shifting one or another to the top placed enormous demand
on the processor. The
Alto
complained in the only way it knew how, by
performing the procedure at a glacial crawl.

For several weeks Kaehler worked principally on the overlapping-
windows puzzle. The team had a system for showing when one of them had
hit the wall on a coding problem and needed to hand it off. This was the
"hot potato":
One
of them would walk into another's office with the figura­tive object held gingerly in cupped hands, then drop it into the next one's
lap. Kaehler, having
hit
the wall on overlapping windows, dropped the hot
potato into Ingalls's lap one day in the fall of 1974, and he solved it.

The solution came in the form of a brilliant feat of coding Ingalls
called "BitBlt," an abbreviation of the term "bit boundary block trans­fer" that was pronounced "bitblit." BitBlt was a way to shift whole
rectangles, or blocks, of the bitmap from one location to another in a
single operation.
It
enabled the system to bypass the tedium of delving
into memory, locating all the components of the rectangular image,
and changing them one by one; and thus cut out most of the computa­tion that had made full-bitmap procedures so slow. Suddenly graphical
changes on the display were faster, more direct, and in computing
terms vastly cheaper.

Like the wheel or the gothic arch, BitBlt was one of those discoveries
that was non-intuitive in advance, obvious in retrospect, and ultimately
adaptable to an infinity of uses. For the first time text could scroll up or
down—or across the screen
—
at lightning-fast speed. You could draw a
square and fill it with a hounds-tooth pattern, then push it across the
screen until it disappeared off the side. Or make a copy of some part of
the screen, save it, and display a new image in its place. This was the key
to overlapping windows, for a part of the screen that was temporarily hid­den (one window beneath another, for example) could now be called
swiftly back into view, as though a page hidden halfway down a stack of
papers was pulled out and transferred to the top. "You now had the illu­sion of a separate layer of screen display, which people weren't doing
before," Ingalls said.

Kay's group labored to make this striking new capability more than
merely an intriguing oddity. They worked BitBlt operations into their
developing user interface until the actions of creating and manipulating
multiple windows, each one running a different program, seemed exactly
as effortless as shuffling papers on a desk. Then, in February 1975, they
let CSL know there were a few things they wanted to show them.