That July, Xerox's Display Word Processing Task Force endorsed the
plan. For a few short, glorious weeks, official Xerox policy was to service the growing market for electronic word processing with the Alto
III, a programmable personal computer that would bear the same relationship to the competition's glorified typewriters as a Harley does to a
tricycle. Ellenby's group was on target to engineer an inexpensive computer-cum-word processor and printing system for shipment to customers by mid-1978. Had it done so, Xerox would have beaten the
IBM PC to market by three years—with an infinitely more sophisticated machine.
But it was not to happen. Bob Potter was not on board and never
would be. Potter had visited PARC in 1973, shortly after taking over
the Dallas division. But he and the CSL engineers communicated like
creatures of different species. "I went out there and I sat in their bean-bags, but I just couldn't get anything out of them," he groused later.
"They were only interested in their own thing. They thought they were
four feet above everybody else."
PARC's people returned the sentiment, dismissing Potter rudely as a
hopeless technical illiterate whose exalted position owed less to managerial aptitude than to having the ear of Archie McCardell, Xerox's new
president, a "bean-counter" with scarcely any instinct for marketing.*
Potter’s group had brought out a low-performance word processor in
1974 that failed in the marketplace. But instead of accepting the office
task force's recommendation that Xerox throw its weight behind the
Alto III, he pushed his own new machine, another nonprogrammable
word processor called the Xerox 850
—
essentially a typewriter with
enough memory in it to hold a few pages of a business letter long
enough to be proofread.
For the rest of the summer Potter's and Ellenby’s planners staged a
battle of numbers, producing contradictory analyses of the Alto's manufacturing costs to bolster their arguments—Ellenby trying to prove
that the Alto could be mass-produced for less than the five-thousand-
dollar manufacturing cost of the 850, and Potter that it could never
meet its claimed price target.
Ellenby even enlisted the support of Xerox's most respected manufacturing engineers, experts from the product cost estimation division in
Rochester. "The dispute was over screws and things, all the minor stuff,"
he recalled. "And they were the experts in that. As engineers they were
most extraordinarily anal—in the right sense. They actually went through
and asked me what would be the finish on the screws. Would I be using
beryllium plate? Then they'd look it up and tell me how many cents that
would cost. They did a very thorough job verifying that our costs were
right. . . And Dallas still didn't believe it."
But as Ellenby gradually realized, the numbers were merely cannon
fodder in a battle that was political to the core. It was Xerox's organizational structure, not cost estimates or technological visions, that was driving the two sides apart. The Dallas group knew that if they were forced
*McCardell s intoxication with figures would weigh on the company until his departure
in 1977. He was named chief executive of International Harvester, over whose drift
into bankruptcy and near extinction he presided, joined by Potter.
to add an entirely new product to their customary line of office machines,
any hope of meeting their near-term sales and financial quotas for the
year would be demolished.
"They had to sandbag the Alto III, because with it they wouldn't make
their numbers and therefore wouldn't get their bonuses," Ellenby concluded. "In fact, it would have been an absolutely impossible burden on
them to be successful in making typewriters and also introduce the
world's first personal computer. And they should never have been asked
to do it that way. So it was shot down like most things that have to do with
numbers, based on rumor and wrong data."
With the power of tradition behind them, Potter and his political allies
prevailed. On August 18 the word processing task force, reversing itself
under pressure from McCardell and others, declared the 850 the official
Xerox word processor. As a Xerox product, the Alto III was dead.
The news landed with a hard thud at PARC. Even Alan Kay, who had
always proclaimed the Alto an "interim" machine (he once advised Pake
to think of them like Kleenex, to be used briefly and discarded as soon as
the next big thing came along), took the decision as a "huge blow." It was
clearer than ever that PARC lacked the necessary juice to seize and hold
the attention of anyone who mattered at headquarters. The researchers
watched helplessly as Bob Potter and his product development group in
Dallas continued to manufacture clunky and obsolescent electromechanical typewriting machines as though PARC had never existed—and got
thrashed by the market into the bargain. In its three years of operation,
the Dallas division had never had a profitable quarter.
Ellenby spent the next year trying to quell his disappointment by burying himself in another can-do project. This involved reengineering Starkweather's printer so the laser device could reliably keep pace with Xerox's
fastest copiers, a problem harder to solve than anyone had expected.
Thanks to a program called Orbit, a cunning shortcut developed jointly
by Bob Sproull, a young graphics researcher, and Severo Omstein, a journeyman engineer whose distinguished record included working on the
LINC with Wes Clark and on Bolt, Beranek & Newman's original
ARPANET proposal with Jerry Elkind, Ellenby produced a machine
known as the "Dover" in mid-summer 1977.
He was still waiting for his next assignment when, a few weeks later,
Bert Sutherland dragged him into his office and told him about an
unprecedented event scheduled for Boca Raton and already nicknamed "Futures Day."
It soon became clear that Ellenby's hand at the upcoming Xerox
World Conference would be very free indeed. Futures Day, which was
scheduled for the world conference s fourth and closing day on Thursday, November 10, was expected to be the PARC demo to end all
demos, in full dress and with top-level production values. As one of his
colleagues recalled, Ellenby responded by approaching the job "as
though he was invading a foreign country."
The venture's scale seemed only to stoke his ambitions. He hired Hollywood producers and scriptwriters to prepare a two-hour multimedia stage
show, and commandeered half of PARC's working Altos to ensure that the
entire audience could have a hands-on experience; two DC-10 cargo
planes were rented to transport all the equipment to Boca Raton. One day
he outlined the program to Chuck Geschke, a CSL researcher who had
signed on somewhat casually as logistics officer for the enterprise.
Geschke sat through the meeting with a sense of impending catastrophe.
"We were basically going to pick up PARC and put it all on an airplane and
fly it across the country," he recalled. "I was thinking, 'Oh, my God, and
we've got only two months left?'" Geschke was aware that the group
would be fighting not only the calendar, but less than uniform support
from their own colleagues. "The range of opinion at PARC," he recalled,
"went all the way from 'This is the greatest thing we could possibly do,' to
'What an incredible waste of time' and 'You'll never pull it off.'"
Fortunately, Geschke himself decided to join the enthusiasts' camp.
For too long, he thought, the prevailing attitude at PARC had been that
it was a higher calling for a scientist or engineer to stay in research rather
than to follow an idea through to the delivery of product. He concluded
that this was no way to build anything people would buy. Hadn't they
learned anything from the scorn of hidebound managers like Bob Potter?
"On the few occasions when we'd have McColough come by it was like
getting a state visit," he said. "You'd get your fifteen minutes to pitch but
there'd be no follow-through, no delegation to anyone who could actually
understand what we were saying.
We just
weren't communicating."
The
more
he
thought about it, the
more he
was convinced that
Futures Day
would
be PARC's
best chance
—or only
chance
—
to break down the walls
hiding
its inventions from the
world.
To
make Futures
Day
happen,
Ellenby had
his pick of
PARC's
top
engineers.
In
addition to
Geschke as logistics
officer, he recruited
Tim
Mott
to supervise the marketing
production
and
Dave Boggs
to oversee
the installation of equipment,
and sent John Shoch
to Stamford
to
work
as on-site liaison with headquarters.
Dick
Shoup and
Bob
Sproull
rounded out the platoon, along
with product
and manufacturing engineers from El Segundo whose
resourceful
scrounging had impressed
Ellenby during the Alto
II
and
Dover programs.
The team
grew
steadily
until it numbered sixty-five
persons, all working
frenetically against the
looming deadline.
By
late October they had
assembled a
dramatic presentation on
a
Paramount Pictures sound stage in
Hollywood
and buffed it to a high
gloss, right down to an original
orchestral
score shamelessly
evoking
the
soundtrack of
Star Wars.
Mott
occasionally had
to
struggle to
familiarize his freelance stage
producers with
a future
that
was
more
than
a facade and flashing lights,
but that
actually
worked.
"Their
bread and butter had been multimedia
shows
for corporate meetings,
things
like that," he remembered.
"What was
unusual
for
them,
as it
would have been for anyone, was the level of technology involved as
well as
the degree of vision that was to
be
communicated."