He also realized he might have an answer to a problem computer
science had not yet solved satisfactorily: how to transform a stream of digital bits into something intelligible on paper. A laser could address a photosensitive drum with enough speed to print microscopic dots as fine as
500 to the inch, each one corresponding to a bit of digital data. "I said,
what if instead of scanning the image in, as is done in office xerography, I
actually just created the data on the computer? If I could modulate the
beam to match the digital bits, I could actually print with this thing. I did
some test experiments in Rochester, which my immediate management
felt was probably the most lunatic project they'd ever seen in their lives.
That's when my section manager said, 'Stop, or I'm going to take your
people away.'"
One day in 1970 Starkweather poured out his heart to George White
in White's office high atop Rochester's Xerox Square office tower.
Starkweather complained that he had been caught in a vice. He felt as
though his talents had been wasted and, worse, that they had led his
career at Xerox to a dead end.
He was convinced he could learn to safely manipulate the laser beam
in a way that would give Xerox the opportunity to market an entirely
new kind of imaging machine. Yet no one in the company seemed willing to pay him the slightest heed. He had run out of places to turn.
There had been one glimmer of hope, he told White. During the
summer he had seen an item in the employee newsletter about the
new lab being built out in Palo Alto.
"I think I did the hundred-yard dash to the nearest phone and called
out there," he recounted. "They said, "Well, we won't really transfer people, we're going to hire from the West Coast.' I said, 'Can I come out and
tell you what I'm working on?'"
His persistence won him an interview in California with George Pake,
but he came home feeling like the victim of a Catch-22. The lab was fascinated with his work, but refused to put in for his transfer. Webster was
already aggravated that too many of its top people had been relocated to
PARC, Pake explained. 'We won't ask for you," he said. "We don't want
to start an avalanche. But we'd take you, if you could happen to get a
transfer on your own."
His immediate boss at Webster had not only turned down his transfer
but seemed infuriated at the very idea. "Forget it, Gary," he said, "you're
never going to be moved to the West Coast. And you're to stop playing
around with that laser stuff."
White was Starkweather's superior a couple of levels removed, but
had heard nothing of this before. He listened to the saga with mounting frustration. There was no question that the lab's treatment of Starkweather had been asinine, exactly the sort of parochialism his own
boss, Jack Goldman, was determined to eradicate. White tried to reassure Starkweather that there was an answer.
"Sit tight," he said. "I'll need some time."
"How much time? This guy's threatening to take all my people away."
"Just hang in there," White replied. "If he throws rocks at you, try to
duck."
By lucky chance, George White was one of the few people at Xerox
who shared Starkweather's appreciation for the laser. Having earned
his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Iowa, he had experimented with the new technology himself as a young lab employee at
Sperry Rand in 1962. On the strength of that work he had been
recruited by a small Pasadena company called Electro-Optical Systems
(EOS), which was subsequently sold to Xerox Corporation.
White also empathized with Starkweather because he had personally
experienced the same narrow-mindedness as his younger colleague, at its
source. "At EOS we understood lasers and we'd just been acquired by
Xerox, so we hitched the two together and showed how you could take a
laser beam and expose a xerographic drum," he recalled. The man to
whom White demonstrated this first raw achievement of laser xerography was John Dessauer. "He didn't have the orientation or the context to
understand the hottest new scientific breakthrough of the age," White
recalled. "He just let it drop."
White now perceived that fate had granted Xerox another crack at
the gold ring. Dessauer was gone. His successor, Jack Goldman, had
appointed White head of advanced product development. As one of
Goldman's shock troops, White figured there were two components to
his job: refining existing copier technology to reproduce conventional
images sharper and faster; and perfecting new forms of document imaging that the old technology could not handle.
But these two goals demanded completely different mentalities.
'Webster could spend an infinite amount of money doing their prissy
little chemistry and fine-tuning second-order effects in copiers," he
said. "But they would never find their way to the new world."
There was no point in forcing Gary Starkweather, a creature of that
new world, to live in the old. Like anyone who tried to pursue a radical
new vector at Webster, he was almost certain to get squashed. "Gary's
project at best would have limped along without enough power to
allow his full productivity," White concluded. "At worst it would have
got canceled, and if he wasn't willing to just design lenses and illuminators for classical copiers he'd have had to look for another job."
So White went up the ladder to Goldman. "Starkweather's doing some
amazing things," he told his boss. "But he can't thrive at Webster. Nobody
will listen to him, and even if they did they'll never do anything that far
advanced."
With scarcely a second thought Goldman lifted the hold on Starkweather's transfer. Webster be damned. If they could not use the man's
talents, he was not going to stand by and see them go to waste.
Starkweather arrived in January 1971 as PARC employee number
26, assigned to the optical science lab under his old Webster colleague
John Urbach. Having scratched and clawed for the assignment he was
appalled, as many of his fellow newcomers had been in their turn, by
the sheer barrenness of the facility.
His quarters turned out to be four bare walls and a plug outlet in the
lab building fronting on Porter Drive. Say what you would about Webster, every project there started out with a gleaming, fully equipped
laboratory. By contrast, this place was nothing but vacant spaces partitioned off by cinder block walls. Starkweather's glance fell on a strange
feature of the walls—they all had some sort of curious rectangular
opening down by where they met the floor. "What are those for?" he
asked someone.
The answer was not exactly cheering. The building, it turned out, formerly had been an animal behavior lab. The openings gave its four-
legged inhabitants the freedom to move from room to room. Each room
was known by the name of its former inhabitants; there was a dog room,
a cat room. "You've been assigned the rat room," they told him.
At least everyone else also seemed to be starting from scratch. When
Starkweather asked one of his co-workers how to get his hands on a
few tools, the man flipped him a dog-eared catalog from a scientific
supply house.
"Just order what you need."
That night he was tormented by the thought of having given up his
secure, comfortable existence in Webster in favor of
. . .
the rat room!
Would going back to copier work really have been that bad?
"I was thinking, 'You gave it all up so you could sit alone in this
cement block building. You must be an idiot!'"
Yet PARC's magic did not take long to assert itself. Within a few days he
discovered the upside of its ascetic bareness: Money to furnish the rat
room seemed to flow in a limitless cascade. At Webster the lab management had pissed and moaned about the purchase of a single $2,500 laser.
Here no one so much as blinked at his order for a $15,000 half-watt behemoth (or for the water lines and pump that had to be specially constructed to keep it cooled). Rather than make do with an old surplus
copier for his experiments, Starkweather ordered up a Model 7000 capable of turning out sixty pages a minute. This duly arrived, attended by a
Xerox field technician perplexed at his assignment to set up a top-of-the-line office copier on the bare concrete floor of an unfurnished lab.
He would have been even more surprised to see what Starkweather
was planning to do to it.
Computer printers had existed for years, yet none had ever been
endowed with enough brainpower to take full advantage of the digital bit.
They were huge, awkward affairs, messy mechanical systems of solenoids
driving hammers into carbon strips, rather like electric typewriters as
imagined by a Soviet design team—the epitome of the sort of contraption
engineers dismissed as a "kludge" (pronounced "klooge"). From a functional standpoint they were slow, clumsy, and lacked any graphic flexibility. Most were limited to printing the 128 characters comprising the
so-called ASCII character set (the acronym stood for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange").
ASCII encoded every numeral and English-language letter, along with
a handful of fine-setting characters, as a sequence of seven digital bits—
hence the constraint to 128 characters, the maximum number that can be
expressed in seven binary digits. If you wanted something unusual, like a
German ü or French
ç,
much less lettering of an unconventional size and
a fancy typeface, you were out of luck. Computer designers were happy
enough that the seven-bit code at least allowed them to have upper-
and
lower-case letters.
Starkweather’s assignment was to build a machine that could print on
paper almost any image a computer could create. The first problem he
needed to solve was how to build a machine that could make, as he put it,
"intelligent marks on the sheet at a page a second" to match the 7000’s
capacity. This was essentially a speeded-up version of the task he had
been working on at Webster all those long years. Solving it at PARC took
another eleven months, or until November 1971.
His design was deceptively uncomplicated. At its heart was a spinning
disk about the size and shape of a hockey puck. Milled around the rim
were twenty-four flat mirrored facets, which gave it the appearance of a
cross-sectional slice of a discotheque ball.
As
the disk spun, each mirror
picked up the beam of the laser and redirected it onto the photoreceptor
as a sweeping line of modulated light. (Think of a lighthouse beam
sweeping horizontally across a wall'—thousands of times per second.)
The process produced an image that looked clean and solid to the naked
eye, but was in fact comprised of millions of minute dots etched on the
photoreceptor (and transferred in turn to a blank page) at a resolution of
five hundred horizontal lines to the inch.