Dealers of Lightning (49 page)

"Here's our stuff on the screen, mind-blowing stuff," he remem­bered. "Most people would stop and look. Then there were other
people who would walk right by and never look. And I'd always won­der, what's with those guys?"

Inside CSL, the person who set the standard of indifference to Super­paint was, unsurprisingly, Butler Lampson. Lampson’s visionary tem­perament was grounded in a unique pragmatism. He was determined to
reach the unseen horizon not by great blind leaps—they posed the unac­ceptable risk of leading one into a dead end—but by a series of small,
measured steps. Big leaps required faith; measured steps required only
science and a ruler.

"I remember once having a very illuminating discussion with Butler
about my dreams for artificial intelligence," said Dan Bobrow, the bril­liant specialist in computer languages who had been brought to CSL by
Jerry Elkind. "He said, 'Danny, how can you work on something where
there's a goal farther out than two years away?' Butler's vision of how you
choose projects was to choose those that would tell you in two years if
you'd succeeded or failed. He always chose incremental things. I can't
recall him ever having what I drink of as a long-term vision. But with his
smarts and his good taste he was able to do important next steps in com­puting and defend them."

Among Lampson’s objections to color graphics was that it was not by
anyone's definition an incremental thing. "We couldn't afford color at the
time because we couldn't afford the memory to drive a color frame
buffer," he was still insisting many years later. "I felt you shouldn't go for it
until its quite easy, because otherwise it's going to be a huge distraction."*

Sure, Shoup acknowledged, color was expensive now, but it would
be cheap in five or ten years, just like memory. Why not think of it as
just another feature of the Time Machine?

Here entered Lampson's other important objection to Superpaint:
He was constitutionally unable to imagine color contributing anything
other than window-dressing to the office of the future. Something so
trivial, he argued, might just as well be ignored until it was not merely
cheap, but free.

Shoup s rejoinder was that Superpaint would do much more than
enhance the office of the future. "I was looking at a bigger picture:
pixel-based imaging in general," he recalled later. The essential strug­gle was to get the rest of CSL to see video, color, and animation as not
just the technologies behind Saturday morning cartoons and Disney
films, but as the foundations of a new type of computer graphics.

Given Lampson's influence over Taylor and the rest of the Computer
Science Lab, this was destined to be a futile mission. Yet the more
Shoup sensed himself becoming marginalized, the more he insisted on
going his own way. "We attempted to bring Dick into the mainstream,
but Dick knew what he wanted to do, and it wasn't that," Lampson
recalled. As for Taylor, he already considered Shoup an unacceptably
reclusive member of a lab he had assembled to serve a shared vision.
Instead of joining in the Alto project, Shoup had turned his back.
While his own lab colleagues found it hard to work with him, Taylor

*"I feel the same way today about 3-D, which is that for most applications of comput­ing it's quite marginal," he added. (This conversation took place
in
December 1997.)

complained, he constantly gave demos of Superpaint to outsiders—
and "non-technical" outsiders to boot, like Smiths circle of artists and
hippies.

As Shoup understood, once you fell out of favor with Bob Taylor there
was no coming back. Taylor’s shit list was a cold, forbidding place. He
made a few half-hearted attempts rebuild his burned bridges. After the
Alto was up and running, he rigged one with a color display. But it was the
only color Alto ever seen at PARC and remained forever an object of
indifference to most of the engineers in CSL. (Kay's Learning Research
Group, always more highly attuned to the content rather than the process
of graphical displays, eventually made excellent use of it.) With every
year drat passed, Shoup s performance appraisals sounded more sinister.
"Dick," one read, "is going to have to find a new home."

One day Taylor walked into the video lab to find Shoup's equipment
festooned with handwritten signs warning: "
Do
Not
Touch Without
My Permission
." To
a manager whose most profound conviction was
that his people were all building components of a single common sys­tem, this was anathema. He became determined to show Dick Shoup
who really owned his precious equipment. One day in late 1974, while
Shoup was out of town, he fired the first shot.

The occasion was the broadcast of a television program about the
artistic avant-garde entitled
Supervisions,
which was produced by the
Los Angeles public television station KCET. Smith's and Shoup's work
on Superpaint had started to win wide notice outside PARC, thanks in
part to a tape called "Vidbits" which Smith had compiled from clips of
his best work for playing to artists' gatherings all around California.
After one such showing, KCET commissioned the two of them to sup­ply some brief color-cycling effects for
Supervisions.
They had scrupu­lously insisted that the producers give Xerox screen credit, assuming
that the parent company would appreciate the honor.

Instead, Taylor marched into the video lab a day or two after the
broadcast and buttonholed Smith. "Xerox wants their logo off every
piece of tape," he said. "Right now."

He ordered Smith to screen for him every snippet of videotape in the
lab—miles of tape. While Taylor sat next to him for an entire afternoon,

Smith laboriously ran every reel, including every copy of his own "Vid-
bits," punching the
erase
button to excise any frame bearing Xerox's
name or trademark. When Shoup returned home he and Smith managed
a nervous chuckle over the sheer absurdity of the incident. But in their
hearts they knew it presaged worse trouble to come.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, Smith was dismissed—or more precisely,
his purchase order was canceled. The word came from Jerry Elkind, who
was nominally Smith's boss but had never even spoken to him before.
'We've decided to go with black and white," he said. "This project is over."

Smith was stunned. "You're crazy!" he blurted. "It's going to be all color
from here on out, and you guys can own it all! I can't believe you're shut­ting it down."

"Well," Elkind replied evenly, "it's a corporate decision."

Smith had no choice but to leave. With a fellow artist and Superpaint
fanatic, David DiFrancesco, he drove off toward Utah in quest of per­mission to continue his work on a frame buffer installed at the univer­sity there. He failed to get it, but instead received an invitation to set
up a video program at the private New York Institute of Technology.
The department later transferred
en masse
to George Lucas's Lucas-
film and even later was spun off as Pixar, the studio that produced the
hit computer-generated movies
Toy Story and A Bug's Life.

Meanwhile, at PARC Shoup now stood as a solitary pariah. One morn­ing on his way into the lab he was stopped by a sympathetic colleague,
who told him: "You know, there's a meeting going on about you."

Shoup burst into Taylor's office, interrupting a discussion about dis­mantling and redistributing his video equipment to other projects. The
group fell sheepishly silent until, clearly unwelcome, "I went down to my
lab and waited," he recalled. A short while later the verdict arrived: His
lab space was to be taken away. He was to pack up his taping and record­ing equipment and turn it over to the PARC audiovisual crew, which
would use it to compile a taped archive of administrative meetings.

Shoup's eviction from CSL was answered by a rescue effort by the
Systems Science Lab, which secured him a transfer into Kay's group
and permission to reassemble most of his equipment.

But the computer side of PARC never really embraced color as an
integral part of its mission. Within a couple of years, when it became
clear that Xerox would not support his work on another generation of
video graphics, Shoup left PARC. Forming his own company, Aurora
Systems, he developed a commercial system that produced the first
animated TV weather maps and video logos.

The final irony came in 1983, when the National Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences awarded a technical Emmy jointly to Dick Shoup and
Xerox Corporation in recognition of Superpaint’s role as a pioneering
technology of video animation. Shoup went to the ceremony in New
York, where he sat at the honorees' table with his invited guest Alvy Ray
Smith and a nameless functionary dispatched by headquarters to accept
the award on the company's behalf. The television academy had the fore­sight to prepare two Emmy statuettes. Shoup took his home. After
spending a cordial evening with Shoup, the staff man took the other with
him back to Stamford, where it vanished into the corporate archives. "I
never did find out what they did with it," Shoup said.

he one thing I've learned is you don't ever go into a
completely new situation like this one alone," Harold
Hall told David Liddle one day early in 1975. "I need
someone to watch my back. So why don't you come with me?"

Despite Hall's melodramatic come-on, David Liddle did not need to
be asked twice, not when the pitch was to join a newly created division to
turn PARC technology into actual Xerox products. Of course he knew
that Hall, who had been appointed its boss, was right to be wary. There
was precious little evidence that headquarters understood the scale of
the undertaking it had asked this new division to assume, and no guaran­tee it ever would. Who knew what enemies might lurk in the woods?

But the pluses tipped the balance. Liddle and Hall enjoyed a close and
mutually respectful working relationship. And the opportunity was spec­tacular. Hall needed him not merely to help merchandise PARC's tech­nology, but to assemble its disparate pieces into a coherent whole—to
create an entirely new product line out of a magnificent jumble.

"That was it," Liddle recalled. "I looked at all this cool stuff getting
done and I did not see how it was going to get to market. There was so
much great raw material just piled up there. My idea was to sit down and
think through an architecture
—
because
of
course these things
were all
done somewhat independendy
and
ad
hoc at PARC,
as
you always want
to do
in a research setting.
Also, I frankly felt
that if
I
didn't go
and do
it
they'd probably assign some inappropriate person who wouldn't really
get
PARC
and what we were
trying
to
do."

More
than five years would
pass before this
fledgling division would
bring its first major product to
market. As Hall
had feared, he did
not
sur­
vive
the first purge. But
Liddle did. When the
Systems
Development
Division completed its arduous
work and
introduced the legendary
Xerox
Star
to the world, Liddle would
be the man in
charge.

The Systems
Development
Division had its
genesis in
Xerox's drive
to
expand
its brand name beyond
copiers and
into new lands of
office
equipment. This market, like
the one for
mainframe computers,
was
dominated by
IBM,
if not quite
as unassailable Xerox
actually was
begin­
ning to make serious headway
against Big Blue
with a
product line
of
word processors, fax machines,
and electronic
printers bearing
its well-
respected nameplate. But these
devices were at
best state-of-the-art, not
ahead
of the art.

In
1974 a headquarters task
force concluded
there might
be more
opportunities yet in manufacturing more advanced office "systems"
for
sale
to
large corporate customers with
extensive
and far-flung
opera­
tions.
The
committee recommended the formation of a new division to
serve this market. George Pake and Jack Goldman, understanding that
this was their best chance to get
PARC's
technology into the commer­cial marketplace, maneuvered to place
the
unit under someone
with
a
working knowledge of the territory.

In
this they succeeded, up to a point.
The
new Systems
Development
Division, or
SDD,
was to report not to Goldman but to another
trans­
planted Ford finance man, Donald Lennox, who supervised
Xerox prod­
uct development out of an office in Webster. But on January
1, 1975,
Harold Hall, whose entire Xerox career had been spent
at PARC,
was
named to run it.

Hall
had trained before the war as a nuclear physicist, but it had been
many
decades since he had plied that trade. Instead he had fashioned a
long career as a professional research manager, touching down at places
like the Livermore Weapons Laboratory (under Edward Teller), ARPA,
the Aeronutronics division of Ford, and a high-tech division of Singer
before landing at PARC in 1972. As he put it later with characteristic self-
effacement, after so many years working among exceptionally brilliant
scientists "I had developed and honed the skill of making myself useful to
people whose intellectual gifts dwarfed my own."

A native South Dakotan, he had emerged from grinding poverty on a
Depression-era farm to become an exemplary corporate bureaucrat
with a charming personality and a store of fascinating yarns about his
work on the nuclear weapons program during and after the war. When
in 1971 he got nudged out of his Singer vice presidency by someone
else's power play, he had called upon his old Ford colleague Jack Gold­man for a job. Goldman sent him to PARC because he considered him
the perfect foil for George Pake, who he would serve almost continu­ously as a loyal lieutenant for the next decade.

Pake initially assigned Hall to take over the Systems Science Lab from
Bill Gunning, who yearned to get back to hands-on research. True to his
instincts, as SSL chief Hall familiarized himself with the work being done
in his lab just enough to be genially manipulated by Alan Kay and Adele
Goldberg. "I knew better than to pretend knowledge I lacked, the surest
way to be rejected by PARC," he said, joking that the job seemed to con­sist chiefly of affixing his signature to Alan Kay's expense reports.

Athletic, silver-haired, and free-thinking, Hall led a contented life rais­ing his five accomplished children in the intellectually stimulating atmos­phere of Palo Alto, displaying such neatly constrained ambitions that he
could hardly pose a threat to anyone above him in the Xerox organiza­tional chart. What he found particularly gratifying about his new assign­ment was that it came with a vice presidency
—
the one corporate title he
had aspired to since the day he lost his last one at Singer.

Hall found, however, that he and his new boss were on entirely differ­ent wavelengths in terms of how they viewed SDD's mission. Don
Lennox was another ex-McNamara whiz kid—one of the troupe of young
and brilliant technocrats who had helped Robert McNamara remake
Ford management (and would attempt the same at the Pentagon, with
less distinguished results, when their boss became J.F.K. s Defense Sec­retary). He was a "friendly, direct, and well-meaning" financial expert,
but profoundly at sea with the complexities of advanced product devel­opment. Where Hall anticipated that SDD would design and market an
entirely new generation of office information systems, Lennox appeared
to think the task involved nothing more than mixing and matching a few
off-the-shelf components. The disparity between their visions became
clear the day Hall reported to Webster for his first meeting with Lennox.
Fully expecting to be granted a staff of 100 persons or more, he learned
instead that he had been assigned a rump platoon of six ex-SDS engi­neers in El Segundo, along with four open positions to fill as he pleased.

Hiding his dismay, he returned to Palo Alto to get on as best he could.
His first call was to Dave Liddle. "Come with me," he said, "and you can
pull together an architecture out of all the good work you guys have done
at PARC."

For Liddle, Halls invitation was an act of deliverance. Xerox had
recently asked him to head up a research project on display devices in
Webster. Even though this would be a promotion, he found the offer
unenchanting. For one thing, he hated the diought of moving back East.
Plus he thought of himself as a computer scientist, and the people at
Webster were anything but. Finally, he was bored with display technol­ogy, which had been his field of study since his days at the University of
Michigan.

The SDD job answered all those concerns. So while Hall filled out
his meager roster by recruiting Ron Rider, Charles Simonyi, and
Chuck Thacker to his last three open slots, Liddle dove into the task of
drafting a technical road map to guide the new division.

"Harold was a smart guy, so he had some sense of which technologies
were most appropriate to use," Liddle recalled. "But it was really up to
me to assess them. And I got lots of opinions, talked to lots of people at
PARC, and had different folks look it over."

The "Office Information Systems Architecture" as he called the docu­ment, formally set down all the elements of an integrated office informa­tion system as he and his PARC colleagues envisioned them. There would
be personal workstations for every individual (fronted by high-quality
bitmapped display screens) as well as communal machines, or servers, for
printing and file storage. All were to be linked to each other by Ethernet
with a capacity of ten megabits per second—more than diree times the
power of PARC's Ethernet—and powered by industrial-strength versions
of PARC's most advanced operating systems and application software. It
was the work of PARC's magnificent first five years transformed into a
commercial product. In short, as Liddle said, "It was son of Alto."