Dealers of Lightning (69 page)

The advisor was Jef Raskin, a talented computer engineer and artist
who had joined Apple to help design the Apple II. Raskin knew that the
Apple founders' low opinion of big business was the product of Wozniak's
experience as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where his proposal for a
personal computer project had been rebuffed by his bosses. The incident
"ever after remained part of their psychological motivation," Raskin
recalled. "Jobs repeatedly told me (and anybody else he could get hold
of) that a large corporation like Xerox couldn't do anything interesting."

But Raskin had friends working at PARC. At their invitation, he had
watched dazzling new technologies take shape on Coyote Hill Road.

Around the time the mezzanine financing was being assembled, he won
Jobs over. When Xerox asked to be included in the deal, Jobs made his
pitch: In exchange for an invitation to PARC, he would sell the corpora­tion 100,000 private shares at $10.50 each. XDC agreed to fork over the
$1.05 million, and one of the unlikeliest—if shortest-lived—alliances in
high technology history was forged.

If Steve Jobs harbored an enduring mistrust of big companies, Apple
Computer was scarcely a blip on the radar screen of most PARC engi­neers. They were Ph.D.s who had worked on some of the biggest com­puting projects the world had ever seen; Apple was a bunch of tinkers.
The "personal computers" of the day were hobbyists' kits, contraptions
with names like the Altair and the Commodore PET that arrived in
pieces for sixteen-year-olds to drip solder on until something started to
work, usually to their own amazement, so they could spend hours staring
at the blinking red lights that served as output displays. What a joke!
Blinking lights had gone out with the Whirlwind computer in the 1950s;
they were as relevant to PARC's definition of computing—Altos with
graphics programs and bitmapped displays—as were relics of the Flint
Age. The general opinion on Coyote Hill was that Apple's customers
were a waste of time. They were not very sharp, they were self-taught,
and their machines were toys.

Such, at least, was the reaction of people who had never met Steve
Jobs. Those who had made his acquaintance came away with a stronger,
and often less favorable, impression.

The Jobs of this period—call it the "pre-Armani era"—wore scruffy
like a badge of honor. He was perpetually clad in blue jeans, with a black
beard that never seemed to grow in. His thin lips seemed locked in a
knowing smirk. Ever since he was twenty years old and worth zero on
paper he had worn his pride and contempt nakedly. Thwart him, and it
scarcely mattered whether you were an eighdi-grade dropout or a Ph.D.
in electrical engineering; he would trash your arguments like they were
so much chaff in the blades of a thresher.

Jobs's associates had a label for his unyielding confidence in his own
vision and judgment. They called it his "reality distortion field." He
lived securely within his worldview and seemed to exist chiefly for the
purpose of imposing it on others. He had a way of seeming at once
intolerably brash and older than his years. Those were the qualities
that enabled him to hold the experienced investors of XDC rapt by
relating the story of how he had founded Apple. Those, and the fact
that at the age of twenty-four he was the chairman of a company
already worth $70 million.

A small handful of PARC engineers, like Larry Tesler, had not allowed
their preconceptions about Apples customers or Jobs's personality to
cloud their perception of where these little computers might lead.
Rather than shun the growing underground of youthful hackers, Tesler
dove in. For a year or two he had been attending such cultural events as
meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, where young Altair and
Commodore users met to trade their tiny software programs and swap
lore. He was no stranger to Apple, having gone out with a woman who
worked for the company. "I'd been to an Apple picnic as her date in 1978,
when there were thirty employees," Tesler recalled. "It was at Marineworld in Redwood City and the entire staff, with kids, fit around four
picnic tables."

Tesler thought PARC orthodoxy had blinded it to this alternative cul­ture. He also thought he understood why. PETs and Apples were not the
pedigreed offspring of the academic time-sharing tradition like the Alto
and almost every other machine PARC had built. They had sprouted
from an entirely different technology, that of the silicon microprocessor,
the so-called "computer-on-a-chip" developed by Intel and Motorola
(Apple would long be designed around the Motorola chip, while IBM-compatible PCs, which came later, would be based on the Intel version).
As he had lectured Bob Metcalfe during the Notetaker's design phase, he
believed PARC could learn from the kids. In fact,
had
to. If PARC did
not change its attitude, he felt, it was going to look back one of these days
and discover it had been passed by.

Tesler's opinion was well enough known on Coyote Hill that one day in
late 1979 Harold Hall summoned him to a secret meeting in his office.
Tesler arrived to find himself part of a tidy little gathering that included
Bill Gunning and Roy Lalir, a Xerox functionary who had been dis­patched by Abe Zarem to keep a solicitous eye on Jobs. They explained
that they were seeking advice on how to manage an entry into the per­sonal computer market and had heard Tesler might be an ideal source.

"You see," Lahr revealed, "we've invested in Apple."

"I said, 'That's great,'" Tesler recalled. "Lahr and Gunning explained
that Xerox couldn't build computers cheaply enough to compete because
its cost structures were very high. 'If we built a paper clip it would cost
three thousand bucks,' they complained. I agreed."

Then they informed Tesler that their scheme was to get Apple to
build computers for Xerox.

"Under what kind of arrangement?" he asked.

"We don't know yet," Lahr replied. "But they took our money on con­dition they could see what was going on at Xerox PARC. They didn't
really need the money because everyone wanted in on Apple. But they
let us invest."

Tesler's enthusiasm for giving Apple a look inside PARC placed him
in a distinct minority on Coyote Hill, especially within the Systems Sci­ence Lab, where much of the Smalltalk software was still officially
closely guarded.

The lab fragmented into opposite camps, their membership largely
based on how one assessed the chances that Xerox might eventually
get around to bringing out the technology on its own. Tesler, who had
all but given up, saw no reason not to show Apple everything they had.
Adele Goldberg, who still cherished the hope that they might yet bring
Smalltalk to market under the Xerox banner—or at least that Xerox
might let them keep some control over the work they had slaved over
for so many years—had a different view. She felt adamantly that dis­closing PARC's intellectual property to a team of engineers capable of
understanding it and, worse, exploiting it commercially would be a
mortal error. "I wanted a deal to happen," Tesler observed. "Adele was
trying to kill one."*

*Goldberg maintains that Tesler is incorrect in portraying her as specifically opposing a
Xerox deal with Apple, as she was unaware of any arrangement between the two com­panies until the day of the second Jobs demo. (Goldberg, personal communication.)

It was not that Tesler wanted Smalltalk to be widely published and
Goldberg wished it kept secret. The issue was the more complex one
of who should see the technology and under what circumstances.
Goldberg, for example, was happy to demonstrate Smalltalk to legiti­mate corporate clients who were prepared to help support the group's
research by paying for further development.

That had been the case about a year earlier, when she and Tesler ended
up in opposing camps over a demo to another enterprise that expressed
interest in Smalltalk. This was the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA
had sent a team of engineers to PARC under dre auspices of Xerox's Spe­cial Information Systems division, which sold customized systems to the
federal government.

Goldberg was gratified by the CIA's interest in her work. She viewed
the agency as a traditional Xerox paying customer of the sort that rou­tinely got Smalltalk demos over the years, and one whose representatives
further seemed "remarkably interesting and innovative." The agency's
manifest curiosity about Smalltalk and the Dynabook could not help but
give those technologies and their inventors added credibility within
Xerox, she figured—and at the very least, she said later, the CIA people
touring PARC had needs that fit perfectly with the Dynabook's capabili­ties for ordering and communicating information.

By contrast, the liberal-minded Tesler treated the CIA visit as a chance
for Berkeley-style agitprop. The day of the agency demo he came to work
wearing a trenchcoat, dark glasses, and a fedora pulled down over his
brow. Then he spent the day hanging around the PARC commissary and
conference rooms glowering at the visitors, much to the amusement of
his own co-workers.

Tesler thought Apple was different because it was unlikely to put
Smalltalk to nefarious use; Goldberg thought it was different because it
was likely to become a Xerox competitor rather than a customer. In any
case, one thing that became clear early in the debate was that the deci­sion of what and how much to show Jobs's team did not rest with PARC.
The engineers could decide how to stage the demo, but Xerox headquar­ters had decreed that one way or another, it was going happen.

***

Jobs
later maintained that he harbored
few
expectations about what
he would be shown at PARC when he
arrived
with his team one
day
early in December. "I thought it would
be
an interesting afternoon,"
he said. "But I
had no real concept of
what I'd
see."

What
he did see was as bowdlerized
a
show-and-tell as the Learning
Research
Group knew how to
deliver.
Jobs
saw
the Alto, mouse,
Bravo,
and several other
CSL
technologies,
as well
as a limited number of
innocuous graphical applications
in Smalltalk.