Dealers of Lightning (74 page)

"I
figured if
I
had a zero-sum
game"—that is,
if
PARC's
budget were to
remain static overall—"I was
going
to
have to
cut back slowly in some
areas," he recalled. "It would
not be
sudden,
but
some people's oxen
were
going to get gored more than others.
I
was
going
to change the status quo."

Spinrad's plan violated
PARC
and
Xerox
orthodoxy in at least one
important respect. Xerox's corporate culture
always
treated budget cuts
as burdens to be shared equally
by
every
cell of
the organism.
If
a 10 per­cent cut was indicated, every
division and branch
office took
a
10 percent
cut whether it was a marginal
contributor to the
company or an indis­pensable cog in the machine.
"I was probably the
first one not to be egal
itarian
about cuts," Spinrad recalled.
"I had prejudices,
and
I
thought one
of the few roles management has is to
make
choices and judgments."

But
inside
PARC
many people found
it hard
to distinguish Spinrad's
prejudices from Bob Taylor's. "Spinrad succumbed to
Taylor's
unre­lenting pressure," was Harold Hall's judgment. Pake agreed.
"My
per­ception was that Taylor, being in complete ascendancy in the political
jockeying between the two labs, enlisted
Spinrad."
That the realloca­
tion
plan took direct aim at the physicists
in Pake's
pet laboratory—and
Taylor's
bete
noire
—
only reinforced
that impression. Pake
had spent
ten
years defending the General
Science Lab
from Taylor's carping.
He
was not about to sit by and let it be
gutted
now.

Pake
viewed the situation even
more urgently
because he harbored
growing doubts about Spinrad's overall
performance.
For several months
he had been fielding complaints from
within
the research center about
Taylor's
ambitions—complaints
that would never
have reached him if
Spinrad had kept Taylor on a properly
short leash.
Moreover, he believed
Spinrad had deliberately dragged his
feet in
recruiting a director for the
new
integrated circuits lab, which
consequently
had not yet gotten off
the
ground.

On March
21 Pake summoned Hall to his office and, clearly anguished,
outlined his concerns along with what he called a "really zany solution."

"Maybe I
can split the center in two parts," he told Hall. "That might
solve the problem."

Specifically, he would divide PARC into two independent research
centers, manifestly configured to keep Taylor isolated. One, the "Sci­ence Center," would comprise SSL, GSL, and the new IC lab and be
headed by Hall. Spinrad would retain jurisdiction over the "System
Center," which was limited to CSL and the Optical Science Lab.

Hall assented to return to line management. Within hours after Pake
first broached it, the change was official. "I suppose if I had been a sci­entist when this was happening I wouldn't have known what was going
on," Pake acknowledged later, "because all of a sudden everyone gets
this memo through the internal mail saying PARC is now two PARCs."

In truth, everyone at PARC regarded the arrangement of two research
centers sharing the same building—and in some cases the same floor -
as unsustainable over the long term. But Pake could see no other solution
to the dual problems of Taylor's imperialism and the stalled progress on
the IC lab. Spinrad, philosophical as ever, accepted the rebuff com-
plaisantly. But he was clearly chastened, and within a year accepted a
reassignment back to the corporate staff.

Meanwhile Hall assumed responsibility for recruiting a chief for the
integrated circuits lab. After several months he was convinced he finally
had his man: a physicist from the University of Kansas named William J.
Spencer.

The physically imposing Spencer's academic credentials were less than
sterling—before taking his Ph.D. from Kansas he had gotten his bache­lor's degree in physical education—but at the age of fifty-six his profes­sional career was distinguished by management posts at Bell Labs and
the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. Although
Spencer had been Hall's third choice for the job (the two other candi­dates had turned him down), he felt better about his find as time went on.
Heading the IC lab, he thought, would only be the start of things for Bill
Spencer. As he reported to Pake, "When he's ready for the big job I'll let
you know, but I can't help thinking that I've hired not only my successor,
but yours."

Meanwhile, the pressure of the outside world was being felt more
and more inside PARC. "The only problem with PARC was a law of
physics," Charles Simonyi
observed. "A star that
bright eventually has
to
blow
up."

Simonyi began to sense the
impending supernova
in 1980.
One
day
that fall he found himself wandering the
hallways
of Xerox headquarters
in Stamford, having his lowest
expectations
confirmed.
The
disparity
between
the opulence of his
surroundings and the
paltriness of the brain­power housed therein beggared
the
imagination.
He
felt wholly irrele­vant, like
a
wayward tourist
rather than an employee
being interviewed
for
a
corporate staff position.

Simonyi had been inveigled
into
making
this
trip by Jerry
Elkind,
who
sensed
that the Advanced
Systems Division was
losing its charm for his
young subordinate.
He
was right.
The excitement
Simonyi
had
savored in
getting Altos out to the world
had
worn
thin.
With BravoX nearing com­pletion he was unsure of his next
step, especially
given the absence of any
sign
that
Xerox
meant to follow up
ASD s market
probes with
a
full-scale
merchandising program.

He
had only grown more restive when
a friend
showed him an Apple
II
running VisiCalc. The spreadsheet
program
was new to him but daz­zling in its power. One typed numbers or
formulas
into the cells of
a
grid
and
linked them, so the answer from one
cell
could be part of the formula
of
another.
This
allowed anyone to tabulate
data
in an infinite number of
permutations.
It
was particularly valuable
for
businessmen and engi­
neers, who
could perform "what-if
analyses
simply by altering a figure
here
or
there
and letting the grid
automatically
calculate the myriad ram­ifications of the change. Sure enough,
within
months VisiCalc had trans­formed the Apple
II
into a commercial
sensation.

By
contrast, at
PARC,
where funds had
flowed
so limitlessly that
no
one
ever felt the urge to run "what-if' budget scenarios, the spreadsheet idea
had not even occurred to the greatest
software
engineers in the world.
What
Simonyi found even more depressing
was
that VisiCalc was simple,
intuitive, and fast
—
all the qualities he and his colleagues had strived for
in their work over the past decade.