Dealers of Lightning
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Dealers of Lightning

Michael A. Hiltzik

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eBook - ePub

Dealers of Lightning

Michael A. Hiltzik

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In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.

Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and executives who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC's humble beginnings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp, and ultimately exploit, the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered. Dealers of Lightning offers an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions, and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistoiy--and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.

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Year
2009
ISBN
9780061913501

PART 1

Prodigies

CHAPTER 1

The Impresario

The photograph shows a handsome man in a checked sport shirt, his boyish face half-obscured by a cloud of pipe smoke. Robert W. Taylor looks amused and slightly out of date, his sandy hair longer than one might wear it today but unfashionably short for the distant time period when the picture was taken by the famous photographer of a trendy magazine. His gaze is fixed on something beyond the camera as though contemplating the future, which would befit the man who brought together perhaps the greatest collection of computer engineering talent ever to work in one place.
On a sunny afternoon in July 1996 the same photograph looked down at a gathering of that same talent in the open-air restaurant of a Northern California winery. There were some changes from when it was first shot, however. This time the picture was blown up bigger than life, and the people celebrating under its amused gaze had aged a quarter-century.
They were there to mark the retirement of Bob Taylor, the unlikely impresario of computer science at Xerox PARC. Among the guests were several of his intellectual mentors, including a few who ranked as genuine Grand Old Men of a young and still-fluid discipline. This group included Wes Clark, an irascible genius of hardware design who started his career when even the smallest computers had to be operated from within their cavernous entrails; and seated not far away, the flinty Douglas C. Engelbart, the uncompromising prophet of multimedia interactivity whose principles of graphical user interfaces and mouse-click navigation were disdained in his own time but have become ubiquitous in ours.
Most of the company, however, consisted of Bob Taylor’s chosen people. They were unabashed admirers whose careers he had launched by inviting them to sit beneath his commodious wing. Geniuses, prodigies, owners of doctorates from the leading halls of learning, they lived in the thrall of this psychologist from The University of Texas who stammered frightfully when trying to communicate an abstruse technical point, yet still managed to impart a vision of computing that reigns today on millions of desktops. Many moved on to more splendid achievements and some to astounding wealth. But none ever forgot how profoundly their professional lives were changed when Bob Taylor fixed them with his discerning eye and invited them to enlist in his tiny company of believers.
“As a leader of engineers and scientists he had no equal,” said Chuck Thacker, who worked beside him longer than almost anyone else. “If you’re looking for the magic, it was him.”
Thacker served as the afternoon’s master of ceremonies. Under his deft supervision the familiar old Bob Taylor stories got dusted off to be howled over anew. Bob arranging for Dr Pepper, the Texas state drink, to be imported into PARC “by the pallet load and stored in a special locked vault.” Bob bombing through the streets of Washington in his Corvette Stingray as though saddled on a wild stallion. Or rigging his Alto to beep out “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” whenever he received an e-mail message on PARC’s unique internal network. Taylor listened to it all in great good humor from the table of honor, way in the back, dressed in a short-sleeved striped shirt and resplendent cherry-red slacks. But then, nothing ever pleased him more than functioning as the lodestar of the proceedings while pretending to be nothing but an unassuming bystander.
Charles Simonyi, who was a naïve young Hungarian immigrant without a green card when Taylor brought him to PARC in 1972, flew down from Seattle in his own Learjet, one of the perquisites that accrue to a man who moved from PARC to become employee number forty of a small company named Microsoft.
“I remember Bob preparing me to deal with the three most powerful forces of the twentieth century,” he said. “One of these was personal distributed computing. The second was the Internet. And the third very powerful force is football.”
Appreciative laughter rippled across the floor. Everyone present understood football as an emblem of the darker currents driving Bob Taylor’s personality and career. They knew that as a competitor he was an absolutely ruthless creature and that to protect and glorify the work of his group he would blindly trample anyone in the way like a fullback scenting the goal line—be they rivals, superiors, or members of his own circle judged to have fallen prey to heretical thoughts.
Over the years these habits left a trail of roasted relationships. Most of the guests at the retirement lunch were polite enough not to remark openly that the company giving Taylor the gold watch was Digital Equipment Corporation, not Xerox. Or that among the party’s conspicuous absentees were George Pake, who had hired him to establish and oversee the computer science laboratory at PARC, and Pake’s successor, Bill Spencer, who evicted Taylor from PARC more than a decade later. The common knowledge was that for every guest who owed a career to the guest of honor there existed not a few individuals who had felt the sting of Taylor’s rivalry and damned him as one of the most arrogant, elitist, and unprincipled persons on the planet.
The allusions to this discomfiting truth were mostly indirect. At his touch football games, it was recalled, he was always the quarterback. The former PARC engineer Dick Shoup recalled how at softball Taylor would invariably wave all the other infielders off a pop-up. One day Shoup complained, “Bob, the other people came to play, too!”
“But they might miss it!” Taylor snapped. “Don’t you want to win?”
Others dropped hints about Bob’s genius at “managing down and in,” meaning pampering and defending his own team, without explicitly stating the corollary: At managing up and out he was often a disaster. Finally one old colleague put into words what everyone always knew. “It’s a lot better to work for Bob,” he observed, “than to have Bob working for you.”
Most of the pioneers of personal computing in attendance that day had worked for Bob, not the reverse. At PARC for thirteen years he managed a world-class collection of technical virtuosi with the same uncompromising passion as Diaghilev, that impresario of an earlier age, guiding his own troupe of temperamental artists—soothing ruffled feathers here, mediating egotistical outbursts there, sheltering them from enemies, and clearing a psychic space so their talents could reinforce each other to build a whole immeasurably greater than the dazzling parts. No doubt there were times when the task demanded all the reserves of psychological discernment Taylor owned. That is to be expected when one is surrounded by thirty prodigies who are all measurably smarter than oneself (and know it). Yet seldom would any of them think of challenging his ultimate authority. In Bob Taylor’s lab you accepted his management, or you cleared out.
How and where Taylor acquired his gift for finding and cultivating the most talented researchers in his field no one ever quite figured out. Part of it was instinct. He might not be able to articulate or even understand all the technical details, but somehow he always knew when a researcher or a project would lead to something important, and how to prepare the ground for that person or project to ripen.
This mysterious quality of leadership was most aptly summed up by Butler Lampson, the only person on the floor who could match Thacker’s record of playing time with Bob Taylor. Lampson’s intellectual power was such a dominating feature of the Taylor lab that people joked about how it sometimes seemed that Bob Taylor worked for Butler Lampson rather than the other way around. Lampson disabused them of the notion by repeating the great old story about what occurred when he and Thacker were building the first PARC computer. This was a time-sharing machine called MAXC, which was cloned in the astoundingly short span of eighteen months from a leading minicomputer that had taken a major company years to develop (by coincidence, it was Digital Equipment). Taylor kept telling them they ought to be considering an alternative architecture without actually explaining just what alternative he had in mind. It was not until a couple of years later, when they completed work on the Alto, that they realized they had built what he meant them to from the very beginning.
“The master often speaks in somewhat inscrutable fashion,” Lampson said to peals of knowing laughter, “with a deeper and more profound interpretation than his humble disciples are able to provide. In retrospect you can really see that the path has been plotted years in advance, and you’ve been following his footsteps all along.”
Not long after that retirement party Taylor invited me to visit him at his home in Woodside, a bedroom community for high-tech executives and entrepreneurs that overlooks Silicon Valley from atop a thickly forested ridge. “Leave plenty of time,” he said. “It’ll take you a good hour to get here from where you are.”
One reaches his home via a steep climb up a hillside to the west of Palo Alto, past the ridgetop thoroughfare known as Skyline Drive. It was terrifying to imagine him careening around those hairpins in his new BMW, the one with the license plate reading THE UDM (for “The Ultimate Driving Machine”). At the front door of a house densely hemmed in by oaks and Douglas firs, Taylor greeted me in slippers. Around us bounded his hyperactive giant poodle, Max. “Down, boy! Go lay down!” Taylor commanded. The dog humored his master for about five seconds before getting up to rampage again, about as tractable as Taylor must have been when confronted with a distasteful injunction from his own bosses.
From his comfortable living room one can peer down through the windows on either side of a pale stone fireplace toward the Hoover Tower of Stanford University, six miles away as the crow flies and eleven by road. PARC is invisible from this vantage point, except perhaps in Taylor’s imagination. Divorced, his three sons grown and employed, he lives alone in this aerie and spends a certain amount of time fighting the last war. For him the world is easily divided between the geniuses he employed and those from whom he struggled to protect them.
I asked him to articulate the common theme lurking behind the great innovations achieved under his leadership. These included the ARPANET, the embryonic Internet he conceived and financed as a Pentagon grantmeister before joining PARC, and the idea of the personal computer, linked into a local network and equipped with a high-quality interactive display.
He settled back, slippers on the coffee table. “I was never interested in the computer as a mathematical device, but as a communications device,” he said, then paused meaningfully, as if to suggest that I would almost have had to live within the military-industrial complex of the 1960s to understand how revolutionary a worldview that was. The history of the digital computer up to then was that of a glorified calculator. A mainframe taking up half the floor of a large office building could run a payroll, balance the books of a billion-dollar corporation, calculate in split seconds the optimum trajectory of an artillery shell or a manned spacecraft aimed at the moon. But it was a mute self-contained machine that received its questions via teletype or stacks of punch cards and delivered its answers in the same way.
“The notion of a human being having to punch holes in lots of cards, keep these cards straight, and then take this deck of what might be hundreds and hundreds of cards to a computer…You come back the next day and find out that your program executed up until card 433 and then stopped because you left out a comma. You fix that and this time the program gets to card 4006 and stops because you forgot to punch an O instead of a zero or some other stupid reason. It was bleak.”
Taylor perceived the need for something entirely new. “I started talking functionally,” he said. He asked himself: Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain? Obviously, the eyeball. If one then contemplated how the computer could best communicate with its human operator, the answer suggested itself. “I thought the machine should concentrate its resources on the display.”
The computer traditionalists goggled at him. Most were mathematicians or physicists and thus perfectly content to employ calculators the size of cement trucks in quest of the next prime number. In 1968, when he and his mentor, the eminent psychologist J.C.R. Licklider, published an article entitled “The Computer as a Communications Device,” the kind of interactive display he was talking about would have consumed memory and processing power worth a million dollars even if limited to the size of a small television screen.
“It took me a couple of years to get them to come around. The designers said, the display? That’s crazy, the display is peripheral! I said, No, the display is the entire point!”
The rest of his career would be devoted to making sure they never forgot it.
Bob Taylor was born in 1932. If one quarries his early life for keys to his temperament, two things stand out. One is his family’s itinerant lifestyle. His father, the Reverend Raymond Taylor, was a Methodist minister in the West Texas of the Depression at a time when church policy was to relocate its ministers every couple of years. There would be two or three years in Uvalde a couple of hours north of the Mexican border, followed by a few in Victoria, Ozona, or Mercedes, none of these places notable for much except the wrenching poverty of field and ranch hands. Even today this is a region where one out of three residents lives below the poverty line.
This went on until almost the onset of war, when his father took a job teaching philosophy and religion at the Methodist University of San Antonio. The frequent relocations had already left their mark on the boy. “You’ve got to make a new set of friends and interact with a new set of prejudices every time,” he recalled. Living under the spotlight that falls on the local minister’s son scarcely made things any easier. “There’s the usual number of fights you have to go through to find out where you stand in the pecking order.” By the time he was ten Bob Taylor had mastered the skill of establishing his place in the local hierarchy and holding it against all comers.
The second element was something his mother, Audrey, revealed to him at a very early age. He had been adopted as a twenty-eight-day-old infant.
“The first bedtime story I remember being told was about how I had been chosen. Picked out by my mother and father. All the other parents had to take what they got, but I was chosen. That probably gave me an undeserved sense of confidence.” He chuckled in a rare moment of self-deprecation. But throughout his adult life few things would be as sacred to Bob Taylor as the process of selection. For him it was almost an anointing. He would be the one doing the choosing, but he expected the select to feel invested with the same confidence he had felt, and the same profound gratitude.
After the war he was ready for college—or rather, not ready at all. There was a short stint at Southern Methodist University (“I majored in campusology”) followed by a break for the Korean War, which he spent as a naval reserve officer landlocked at the Dallas Naval Air Station. The G.I. Bill paid for a berth at The University of Texas, where he followed an eccentric course of study for another two years. “One day in 1956 I realized I’d been in school an awfully long time. I walked into the Dean’s office to find out what it would take to graduate. They checked and said, ‘If you take these two courses you can graduate next semester. Your major will be psychology and you’ll have minors in mathematics, English, philosophy, and religion.’” In truth it was not quite as haphazard as that. He stayed long enough to earn a master’s in sensory psychology, the study of how the brain receives input from the senses.
The year 1961 found Bob Taylor in Washington, D.C., which he had reached by a circuitous route. After leaving UT he had briefly taught at an experimental boarding school run by a friend outside Orlando, Florida. But the arrival of his second and third children, twin boys, quickly put an end to life as a dormitory housemaster on $3,600 a year. He found a job at Martin Aircraft, which was building the mobile missile system known as Pershing at a nearby plant. A year later he jumped to a better-paying post with a Maryland company designing flight simulators for the military. What caught his attention here was the tremendous power of information delivered interactively. This was a principle everyone understood in the abstract, but got driven home only when they witnessed it in action: You could teach pilots from books and theory until your voice gave out, but find a way to place their hands on a joystick and their eyes on a simulated landscape and it was as though they were learning everything for the first time.
This job also led directly to his next stop. President Kennedy’s exhortation to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade had the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration scrounging for management talent wherever it might surface. Taylor, by lucky coincidence, had tried to sell NASA on a research program using one of his simulators to explore a wide variety of sensory inputs. NASA was intrigued by the idea, but even more by its proponent. The agency agreed to fund further work by his company, but only if he joined NASA as the project manager.
Not yet out of his twenties, the rural preacher’s son was in the thick of the most important government crash program since the Manhattan Project. He met with the original seven Mercury astronauts, the era’s reigning national heroes, and witnessed space shots first-hand. But such thrills soon paled. NASA and the Mercury program might appear the apogee of scientific glamour to a public devouring the polished hagiographies of the seven astronauts in Life Magazine, but the truth was less splendid.
“We said we were going to the moon, but we were a hell of a long way from getting there,” Taylor recalled. “It was mostl...

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