Dealers of Lightning (4 page)

Another great myth is that Xerox never earned any money from
PARC. The truth is that its revenues from one invention alone, the
laser printer, have come to billions of dollars—returning its investment
in PARC many times over.

Xerox could certainly have better exploited the manifold new tech­nologies issuing from PARC in its first fifteen years, the period covered
in this book. The reasons it failed to do so will be examined in the
chronicle ahead. But whether one company, no matter how wise and
visionary, could ever have dominated, much less monopolized, tech­nologies as amorphous and Protean as those of digital computing is a
wide-open question. What is indisputable is that Xerox did bring
together a group of superlatively creative minds at the very moment
when they could exert maximal influence on a burgeoning technology,
and financed their work with unexampled generosity.

This book is largely an oral history, drawn from the words and recol­lections of people who were there. Many have moved on to other
work, some of it based on their discoveries at PARC and some of it
spectacularly lucrative. Almost to a person, however, they remember
their years at PARC as the most exciting and fulfilling of their lives.

It should be emphasized that PARC in this period was an exception­ally multifarious place, embracing not only computer technologies but
solid-state physics and materials science. Most of the work accom­plished at the research center in those latter disciplines lies outside the
scope of this book for several reasons. For one thing, the more tradi­tional physical sciences did not offer the same opportunities for extrav­agant and revolutionary results as computing, at least not at that
moment. Nor did the physicists test Xerox's corporate strategy, internal
politics, or, indeed, standards of employee behavior with quite the
same zest as the computer people. This is not to say the physicists
should be wholly deprived of their place in the limelight; in truth,
some of the most exhilarating work of PARC's second fifteen years has
occurred in the center's physics labs—another testament to its
founders' patience and foresight. But because the intellectual ferment
of PARC's formative years was concentrated so powerfully in the Com­puter and Systems Science Labs, I have chosen to focus on them.

In doing so I have strived to give the reader as close to a hallway-
level view of PARC as could reasonably be attempted, starting with its
birth pangs as a collection of youthful prodigies, through the rapturous
years of exploration and discovery, and ending as the members of its
first generation disperse to bring their discoveries to the rest of the
world. It would be impossible for anyone who did not live through it to
paint a truly comprehensive portrait of this period at PARC; even
those who were there emerged with conflicting—sometimes wildly
conflicting—recollections of the same events. My goal has been to
assemble these recollections into a coherent history, and through it to
shed light on how a unique convergence of events, personalities, and
technologies happened to beget one of the most productive and inven­tive research centers ever known.

PART I
_______

Prodigies

 T
he 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
unlik
ely
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 func­
tioning as the lodestar of the proceedings while pretending to be noth­ing but an unassuming bystander.

Charles Simonyi, who was a naive 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 diose 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.