Dealers of Lightning (66 page)

Kay remained preoccupied
with a lesson he
had assimilated from
Mar­
shall McLuhan: Once humans shape
their
tools, they turn around and
"reshape us." That was fine if the tools
were
the right ones, but he was
unconvinced that Smalltalk fell into that category any longer. Within a
few weeks of the Pajaro Dunes offsite
he
enticed Adele Goldberg and
Larry Tesler, two who were still willing
to
follow him off on a tangent, into
joining his quest to regain the simplicity initiative.

The result was the Notetaker.

As
Kay first sketched it out early in 1976, the Notetaker would be com­pact enough to perch on the user's lap. Although a direct descendant of
the Alto in its basic concept, it would jettison the Alto's hard-wiring-and-
microcode architecture in favor of one using microprocessors, the new
family of silicon-based integrated circuits being developed by Intel and
others. In his first sketches Kay incorporated a number of innovative
technologies that had not yet appeared in the marketplace—but nothing,
he insisted, that would not be available within a few years.

One thing that shortly became clear was that in building the Note-
taker, Kay’s group would be on its own. The days of turning to CSL for
hardware help were past. Lampson, whose word on technical issues
was paramount in that lab, regarded Kay's new project with icy disdain.

"Sometimes Alan isn't really in touch with reality," he said later. The
Notetaker offended Lampson's doctrine of research priorities, which
stated that one needed to look ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead.
As a Time Machine the Notetaker was pitched so far into the future that
Lampson could not believe it would teach PARC anything useful. Given
the limitations of the new chips, the machine was shaping up to be
smaller, slower, and dumber than anything they had ever built.

"I told them that within the limitations of the technology of today
you will not be able to build anything interesting," Lampson recalled.
"You'll be able to build a gadget that will work and it will be possible to
program it. But you won't be able to make it do anything interesting
because the technology's just too limiting. And that turned out to be
absolutely correct."

To Kay, Goldberg, and Tesler this was just Butler being exceedingly
subtle. Who was he to say what was "interesting"? If they could build a
truly portable machine that had, say, fifty per
cent of the Alto's functional­ity, or thirty per cent, or ten, would that not be "interesting"? In any case,
he had made the same arguments about Dick Shoup s Superpaint being
too far ahead of the curve. Well, the Systems Science Lab had given
Shoup a refuge from CSL's cold contempt. If necessary they would steam
ahead with the Notetaker by themselves.

But there was more to Lampson's dismissal of the Notetaker than his
doubts about the design. At about the time Kay first broached his idea for
a compact portable machine, CSL had come under the spell of an idea
that amounted to its polar antithesis. While Kay was scorning biggerism,
the Computer Science Lab was embracing it, in the form of a dream
computer they called the Dorado.

Like the Notetaker, the Dorado claimed the Alto as its direct forebear.
But the resemblance ended drere. The Dorado was to be the most ambi­tious computer PARC ever built. Where the Notetaker was to be delib­erately modest and compact, Dorado would be fast, powerful, big, and
noisy. Where the Notetaker turned out small enough to fit inside a suit­case, the Dorado was the size of an industrial refrigerator, with five fans
for heat dispersion drat roared like "a 747 taking off."

That the Dorado was the product of rampant biggerism is evident
from the way Thacker, its principal designer, described his earliest
ambitions: "The original idea was that it would continue in the simple
tradition of the Alto. I described it as sort of a 40-nanosecond Nova
(that is, a Nova with a much faster clock).*

His plan was simply to build a machine that would enable him to test a
new generation of chips that promised to be faster and more reliable than
those he had used in MAXC and the Alto. But by 1976, when the project
finally got under way, those modest goals were overwhelmed by the
vaulting ambitions of his colleagues. When Thacker laid out the Dorado's
preliminary schematic on an Alto running SIL, his program for auto­mated circuit design, there was scarcely anvthing available to run on the
Alto
except
SIL. By the time the first Dorado circuit boards came off a
manufacturing line to be fitted into a seven-foot cabinet, the flowering of
PARC technology had produced Mesa, a programming system so big it
could burst the seams of any Alto in the building.

"The Dorado certainly got more complex than I had planned on,"
Thacker said ruefully years later. "I do think it was the second-system
syndrome at work. You're successful and you say, 'I'll build something
that's a little bit better.' Dorado may have been better, but it was

*This 40-nanosecond clock cycle translates to a processor speed of about 25 megahertz
(i.e. 25 million processor cycles per second). Compare this to today's desktop comput­ers, which range in speed from about
133
to as much as 450 MHz
.

certainly a lot more complicated. It took five years to get working and
there were several false starts."

The first of these occurred while he was still assigned to the Systems
Development Division in the old Building 34 across the street from
Coyote Hill. By then the Dorado had been designated to be the heart of
a digital copier
SDD
was planning to build. The flaw in this plan, it
quickly emerged, was that the new chips Thacker had been so eager to fit
in his new design were a major headache to use. Employing a technology
known as
ECL,
for "emitter-coupled logic," they were indeed much
faster and less buggy than the TTL—"transistor-transistor logic"
—
chips
they had used in the Alto. But they were also terrible power hogs and
threw off huge volumes of heat, which required patching in an additional
power source to drive a fan. By the time Thacker finished his first-cut
design of the Dorado processor, he knew he could never make it cheap
enough for SDD to ship as a commercial product.

The labs regrouped. Thacker started over on a processor for the Star
that would use the buggy old (but familiar) TTL chips. This evolved into
the ill-fated Dolphin. Meanwhile, the Dorado program returned to the
Computer Science Lab, which was immune to the ferocious pressures of
shipment deadlines and commercial price points afflicting SDD. Every­one at CSL knew from the start, Lampson recalled later, that the Dorado
would be "entirely impractical as a product." But if the commercial mar­ketplace was not prepared to spend the money to get one, they certainly
were. The Dorado would be the biggest and best Time Machine ever.

The man assigned to oversee what was sure to be a record-breaking
engineering project was Severe Ornstein. A solemn and intense individ­ual whose professional resume included critical roles in the development
of the LINC with Wes Clark and the construction of the first IMPs for
the ARPANET at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Ornstein's black beard and
beeding eyebrows gave him the stern mien of a biblical prophet but
masked an artists temperament beneath. He was the son of professional
musicians—as a Harvard undergraduate he had briefly dallied with the
idea of taking a music degree before settling instead on geology. In any
case, his prickly temperament fit well into CSLs unforgiving environ­ment, where his barked
"Nonsense!"
became
as
familiar
a
hunting call as
Chuck Thackers
"Bullshit!"
Although he
had
been recruited to
CSL
by
Elkind, his stubborn and rigorous mind
rapidly
won over Bob Taylor, who
soon invited him into his inner
circle,
the Greybeards.

Ornstein's long experience
with
quixotic hardware projects made him a
natural to head up the Dorado
effort, even if
his tough-minded assess­ment of the job made his colleagues uneasy about the scale of the under­taking.
"I
said it would take two
years and ten
people," he recalled. "That
was twice what anyone else was talking
about."

One
day Lampson took him
aside
for
an
attempt at jawboning. "Look,
Severo,
I
know you're right," he said.
"But if
you tell people how long it'll
take they'll never start it. You
have to lie to
them." One could almost
imagine Ornstein's eruptive reply:
"Nonsense!"
In the event, his estimate
was right on the money.

Building the Dorado presented new logistical issues compared with
MAXC,
which was physically a bigger machine but was not expected to
be mass-produced, or the Alto,
which was
mass-produced but small.
Since there was no room for an
assembly line
on Coyote
Hill,
Ornstein
rented another building about
a mile away on
Hanover Street, which
became known as the "Garage."

The CSL
engineers' fixation on building the Dorado helped fuel the
Notetaker team's inclination to go
in the
opposite direction.
Given
CSL's
determination to pervert the
Dynabook
concept by building a
machine
bigger
than the Alto, "it'll be a long time before we have the
Dynabook," Goldberg said one day. "Let's do something that's between
the Alto and the Dynabook."