O
ne day early in
December 1972,
Rick Jones and Gloria
Warner drove
to the San
Francisco airport to meet
George Pake's
plane from New
York.
Normally
they
would not have made the effort.
The
established routine whenever
Pake
returned from a visit to
Xerox headquarters
was
for Warner
to
send
a car for him. This time
she canceled
the arrangement.
The
moment Pake
saw his two assistants
waiting
at the gate, he got a bad
feeling.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"George, you better have a
look at this," Jones
said.
He
handed over
a tabloid-sized biweekly magazine
he had
bought that morning at a
newsstand across from the Stanford
campus.
Pake's glance took
in
the
cover and its unfamiliar banner:
Rolling
Stone.
"What
is this?" Pake asked.
"Start on page fifty," Jones replied.
Pake opened the magazine to a feature article entitled "Spacewar:
Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums."
Its
language was loose and profane, its attitude toward computer science
individualistic and anti-corporate, and among its leading characters
were the not particularly presentable scientists of Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, shown lounging about in their sandals and T-shirts.
The date on the cover was December the seventh. If Pake happened
to notice it was Pearl Harbor Day he would have thought it grimly
appropriate.
"As we were driving back from the airport," Jones remembered, "all
I could hear was George sitting in the back seat, leafing through the
article and going, 'Oh, no
. . .
Oh, no
. . .
Oh,
no!'"
The piece that was to cause Xerox and PARC so much distress over
the following few weeks had in a sense been underwritten by Xerox
money.
Rolling Stone
was then five years old. Its founder, a Berkeley
dropout named Jann Wenner who had started the magazine on a shoestring, had recently turned up backing from a decidedly mainstream
source: Max Palevsky, who had left the Xerox board that May. Always
in search of entree to the snazzier milieus of countercultural life,
Palevsky had placed some of his gains from the sale of SDS at Wenner's disposal and taken for himself the title of
Rolling Stone's
chairman of the board.
By this time,
Rolling Stone
had matured well beyond its origins as a
fresh voice in rock journalism and had turned into a purveyor of offbeat but incisive reporting on a wide range of issues, including presidential politics and economic policy. But its audience was still essentially a college age crowd, as tuned in to the music of Hendrix, Joplin,
and the Grateful Dead as to the writing of Hunter S. Thompson.
Rick Jones had never heard of it before that morning, when Gloria
Warner knocked on his door to report that a friend had just called her
from San Francisco to say PARC had been written up.
"What the hell is
Rolling Stone?"
he asked.
"Its some druggie magazine," she reported.
Jones swallowed hard. "We'd better get a look at it."
Together they drove to an off-campus newsstand where they found
the magazine prominently displayed. Before they had read to the end
of "Spacewar" they knew they had a major crisis on their hands.
With Bob
Taylor's apparent permission, but to the complete igno
rance
of anyone else in
PARC
management, the writer Stewart Brand
had apparently been ranging freely
through
the Computer Science
Lab for weeks. Brand was a technology
fancier
whose recent sale of
the
Whole Earth Catalog,
his popular
offbeat
guidebook, had left him
with the money and time to conduct a
personal
grand tour of the
Bay
Area's
leading computer research facilities.
(A
few years later he would
resurface as a founder of The
Well, a pioneering
on-line computer service.)
At
the outset, he said later,
some old friends
at Doug Engelbart's
lab put him in touch with Bill
English at PARC.
But it was
Taylor,
he
recalled, who actually arranged
for him to
walk into the lab past the
lone receptionist who counted,
for the moment,
as
PARC's
entire security force.
"Spacewar" was Brand's travel
report. From
its dramatic opening
scene, an imaginary battle among
players of the
eponymous interactive
spaceship-and-torpedo computer game invented at
MIT
in 1962, the
article captured the adolescent ferment at
the
heart of the computer culture. Echoing the phantasmagoric
tone of hacker
favorite
E. E. "Doc"
Smiths cosmic swashbucklers
("Beams, rods,
and lances of energy
flamed and flared . . ."), "Spacewar"
painted its
subjects as dashing young
figures engaged in dynamic battle
with a sinister
state.
Conspicuous among those
heroes was Alan
Kay, who Brand intro
duced
as something of a hacker
eminence
offering his own definition
of "the standard Computer Bum":
"He's
someone about as straight as
you'd expect hot-rodders to look.
It's that
kind of fanaticism.
A
true
hacker is not a group person.
He's
a
person
who loves to stay up all
night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship. . . . They're kids
who tended to be brilliant but not
very
interested in conventional
goals."
Kay's
assessment of the computer scientist's professional mores
could not have been better designed to
raise
hackles in the Stamford
executive suite. "People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all,"
he observed, "and you have plenty of time for screwing around."
There was much in what he said, and much of himself. The hackers
he evoked were the kind of independent souls more easily found on
the university campuses where he had spent much of his life than in
traditional corporate headquarters, which did not figure in "Spacewar"
except as the enemy lair.
Kays idiosyncratic techno-romanticism colored Brand's entire piece.
His heartfelt view of the computer as a tool for at once simplifying and
enriching human life came through unambiguously in his breezy
apotheosis of the hacker as gamester-king.
In terms of PARC's internal and external politics, however, Taylor's
depiction in the article was bound to reverberate even more. He and
his happy band of ex-ARPA warriors came across as if they owned the
place, or at least as though there was nothing much more to PARC
than their work. They talked as if they had won the battle for the computer's future and were already writing its history.
Brand described PARC's scientists as aggies in a game of marbles
and Taylor as the center's "chief marble collector" (which was accurate
enough, for the moment). Asked about his job title, Taylor got cagey:
"It's not very sharply defined. You could call me a research planner."
But there was no need for him to be more specific. When Brand
described the lab's "general bent of research" as "soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting
maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants
it," there was no mistaking whose philosophy was being articulated. As
for the duly appointed director of CSL, Jerry Elkind merited not a single mention in "Spacewar," an ominous token of his tenuous authority.
"Spacewar" delighted PARC's computer scientists, particularly the
younger set fresh out of graduate school. And why not? They had welcomed Brand, fed his notebook with their ambitions, and sat docilely
for
Rolling Stone's
glamorous photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was
taking a sort of sabbatical from her usual fare of movie and rock stars
to get the architects of the future down on film.
But their attitude came as a disagreeable shock to the company. Xerox's
enormous bureaucracy served a customer base that was the very definition of huge, centralized, and impersonal. It manufactured big machines
whose output got measured by the millions of pages. Stamford's planners
no more anticipated placing computing power in individual hands than
they would think of installing
a
copier at every secretary's desk.
If the computer scientists of PARC had intended to throw down a
challenge to those who paid their salaries, they could scarcely have
chosen a more provocative way to do so. Xerox had once been a small,
scrappy, risk-taking company, but the long years of monopoly had
driven that sort of passion clear out of the corridors of power. What
had replaced it by 1972 was the sober mentality of professional finance
and sales management. There was no room for the unexpected, especially where the corporate image was concerned. Headquarters
employed platoons of professional image-polishers to protect the corporation against exactly this sort of ambush. The rules were explicit:
No employee, from the chief executive down to the lowliest mailroom
clerk, could talk to the press without a PR minder in tow. The communications department ruthlessly monitored all press coverage, issuing
stern correctives to newspapers or magazines that erred on so much as
an executive title.