"It
was very much a here's-a-word-processor-theres-a-drawing-tool
demo of what was working at
the time,"
Goldberg recalled years later.
"No
harm done, no problem.
What they saw,
everyone
had seen. The
conversation they had with us,
everyone had.
There was no reason not
to do it, it was fine."
Jobs
left, apparently content
with his sanitized
tour.
He
quickly discovered, however, how much information
had been
denied him.
Two
days
later he and his entourage returned,
primed for
a second demonstration.
Bemused, Hall
ushered them
into a conference
room to get
a better
idea
of what
they
hoped to learn.
Goldberg had not
yet arrived for work, so
Tesler
and
Diana
Merry from
the
Learning Research Group sat in.
The
parley was a rocky one. Jobs
sat fidgeting while
Apple's hard-nosed president,
Mike
Scott, engaged in
a round of
executive-speak
with Hall.
"We
were having this veiy beat-around-the-bush conversation that
went on for about four or five
minutes, which
for Steve
Jobs is
like
seven
eternities," Tesler recalled.
Suddenly the hyperactive
Jobs blew his top.
"Let's
stop this bullshit!" he
cried, leaping
from his chair.
"There's
no
point trying to keep all these
secrets. We'll never
accomplish anything if
we don't
talk to each other."
Turning to Scott,
he ordered, "Scotty,
tell
them what we want!"
Scott
gave an exasperated gesture, as
if he
knew that any attempt now
to
settle Jobs down would be pointless.
He
took
a
deep breath, but before
he could get a word out Jobs interrupted, 'We need to tell them about
the
Lisa!"
The Apple
group looked stricken. 'Well, tell me why
we
can't!"
Jobs
exclaimed. "These guys think we're going to make the Xerox computer,
which would cost ten thousand bucks to build. But we all know we want
them to help us with the Lisa!"
The PARC team listened in astonishment. Lisa was a name that had
never come up before. Even Lalir seemed perplexed. Finally someone
asked, "What's Lisa?"
After an uncomfortable silence, an Apple engineer explained with resignation, "Lisa is an office computer we've designed with a bitmapped
screen and a simple user interface. We think some of your technology
would be useful in helping make the machine easier to use."
Tesler was fascinated, and not only because his own daughter's name
was Lisa. Apple had obviously developed this project in great secrecy—
so great that it had come as a bolt from the blue to its own babysitter, Roy
Lalir. "It completely threw in the air Lahr's idea of what this meeting was
all about," he recalled with great amusement. Tesler also knew the Apple
team was correct: The Smalltalk interface, parts of which they had not yet
seen,
would
make computers easier to use. He was even a little pleased
that Apple had now forced the issue. Why not show them Smalltalk? If
Xerox was not going to market a personal computer, why should all the
Learning Research Group's work simply go to waste?
While this drama was still playing out, Adele Goldberg arrived for
work, only to learn that Steve Jobs was back on the premises. She was
neither amused nor intrigued, but incensed.
"I come in to work and diere was Steve Jobs and the entire Lisa programming team, ten of them or so, in the conference room. No warning.
Two days later. Then Harold Hall came out in the hallway with Roy Lalir
to explain to me that I'm supposed to give them a second demo."
"Look, Adele, it's no sweat," Hall said. He reminded her that PARC
could show Jobs more than he had already seen without necessarily
showing him everything. There were two grades of Smalltalk demo at
PARC—classified (for corporate bigwigs and other specially cleared
VIPs) and unclassified. "Tell Tesler to just give Jobs the regular unclassified briefing," Hall said. "It'll dazzle him and he'll never know he didn't
get the confidential disclosure."
Goldberg was mollified, but just barely Begrudgingly, she admitted
that if
the demo kept to Hall's
specifications,
there would be little harm
done—
if.
But
who knew what else the
savvy Apple
engineers
might
pick
up
during another hour or two on the
premises,
and how much more
they
might insist on being shown? Deep
down
she was frustrated that
Apple had been permitted to
wheedle
its
way
into the building in the first
place. She blamed Hall and
Lahr equally for
lacking the technical savvy
to understand the risks of showing
Apple—especially
its professional programmers—anything at all.
"We
had never, ever given
a private
programming lesson to another
company's engineering team,"
she
said
later.
"And no one informed me
of any reason to do so."
As
she feared, however,
the unclassified demo
was still not enough.
Almost
as soon as Hall returned
to his office,
his phone rang.
On
the
line direcdy from Stamford
was a livid Bill
Souders, the head of
Xerox's
business planning group. Souders
informed
Hall bluntly that
Jobs
was
to be shown whatever he
wanted
to
see, up
to and including all of
Smalltalk. "You
will
give
Mr. Jobs the confidential
briefing!" he
barked.
Hall
was mystified. Bill
Souders, who knew even
less than he did about
software and programming
environments, could
not possibly understand
the importance of
PARC's proprietary
technology.
Hall
could only
assume that Jobs had somehow
discovered on
the spot that he had been
conned
—
possibly Tesler or
someone else on the
team had unwisely let
drop that he was receiving
another subpar
briefing
—
and taken
a
piece
out of
Roy Lahr.
Lahr presumably
blitzed his
complaint directly
to Abe
Zarem,
who fired up the big
guns in Connecticut
to shell
PARC
into
capitulation. Whatever the process,
it had occurred
with lightning speed.
Hall
marveled at how high up
in the Xerox
hierarchy Apple's influence
seemed to reach.
Still,
Hall
was nothing if not
a faithful follower
of the corporate chain
of
command, no matter how many
of the links
were time-servers and
idiots.
The
important thing, he recalled, was that Souders's "authority
was unmistakable and he used the military imperative language.
It
was
exactly as in 1943 in basic training when
I
was told, 'You
will
pick up
that cigarette butt!'
"
Obligingly, he passed word to the demo team that they were
to
give
Jobs and his engineers the full-dress treatment. Goldberg was stunned.
Her worst nightmare was unfolding: The hard-won understanding about
what Apple could and could not see was about to be breached. Turning
red and teary with rage, she told Hall, "That's nuts! It's the stupidest thing
I've ever heard."
That was for starters. Hall and Lahr escorted her into Hall's office to
try to calm her down. It was an uphill struggle that lasted, by her estimation, about three hours.