"That
alarmed me a lot, how good it was," he remembered.
"They
were using even fewer cycles than the Alto to run it on the Apple
II,
way fewer."
Like Larry Tesler, Simonyi had discovered the power of low-end computing. Until the day he saw VisiCalc on the Apple II he too had dismissed the hobbyist machines as a joke, as absurd in their triviality as the
Star was in its bloat. Now he recognized in them a future that PARC had
missed.
As a guide to the new world Simonyi turned to his former SDD boss,
Bob Metcalfe, who was heading his own startup, an Ethernet equipment maker named 3Com Corporation headquartered in Santa Clara,
a few miles south of Palo Alto.
Metcalfe rather relished the role of trailblazer for his old PARC and
SDD colleagues ("I was the one who had gone out into the world and
didn't the," he observed). He invited Simonyi to lunch, and over appetizers handed him a list of ten young entrepreneurs who he thought
had a chance of propelling the computer industry toward its exciting
future and who might make good use of Simonyi's talents. The first
name on the list was someone Metcalfe described as "a crazy guy,"
which in Simonyi's eyes bathed him with a perverse appeal. His name
was Bill Gates. Simonyi would never meet any of the others.
A few weeks following that lunch, Simonyi happened to be overseeing the installation of an Alto at the Seattle headquarters of Boeing,
one of the VIP customers granted a shipment of ASD machines. On
his last afternoon in town he dropped in on Gates's little company.
Microsoft's thirty or so employees occupied half of the eighth floor of
the Old National Bank building in Bellevue, just across Lake Washington from the city of Seattle.
Carrying
a
portfolio of his work, Simonyi entered Suite 819 relaxed and
confident, thanks to his mistaken impression that Metcalfe had already
called to smooth the way. In fact, he was an unexpected visitor. Bill Gates
being tied up at the moment with a delegation from a Japanese manufacturing company, Simonyi was escorted instead into the office of Steve
Ballmer, a friend of Gates's from Harvard. Unlike Gates, Ballmer had
stayed at Harvard to graduate, after which he signed on to be Microsoft's
maniacal chief salesman and hyper-motivational troop leader.
"I projected supreme confidence and everything," Simonyi recalled.
"I had a great portfolio and so Ballmer was incredibly impressed." This
was an understatement. After a few minutes Ballmer bounced out of
his chair, exclaiming, "Bill has to see this!" He dragged Gates out of his
meeting and badgered him into thumbing through the portfolio until it
was time for Simonyi to catch his flight home. Gates offered him a ride
back to the airport.
"We were going in the car and walking up to the gate together,"
Simonyi said, "and then and there pretty much decided our whole
futures. It was amazing. Bill was like twenty-two, looking seventeen. I
was thirty-two. The bandwidth we had and the energy just flowing from
him was incredible. In a five-minute conversation we could see twenty
years into the future."
First, however, he had to resolve the issue of the corporate job in
Stamford. Simonyi agreed to make the exploratory trip back East more
as a courtesy to Elkind than any other reason. His one visit to Bellevue
had already told him that there was infinitely more opportunity outside
Xerox than in some "technology staff puke job" in Stamford, Connecticut. "I wasn't unhappy to go. I thought it would be a nice trip. Though
I knew there wasn't a chance in hell."
Had he been wavering, his interviews with the staff planning executives
would have decided the issue. "Here's Stamford, they had a wing of the
building just for these six executives and they're sitting like a Politburo
behind two layers of secretaries in their chairs. You could see the bandwidth was minuscule. I was talking to my prospective employer and the
guy didn't know what the hell he was talking about and he didn't even
know that he didn't know. He knew he wanted some advice on technology and he pretty much knew what he wanted to hear and his questions
didn't make sense. It's not that I didn't have the answers, it's that he
didn't know enough to ask the right questions."
The contrast with Microsoft was sobering. "We are talking about a
sunset industry and a sunrise industry. It was like going into the graveyard or retirement home before going into the maternity ward. I could
smell it and feel it. You could see that Microsoft could do things one
hundred times faster, literally, I'm not kidding. Six years from that
point we overtook Xerox in market valuation."
Simonyi paid two more visits to Bellevue before the end of the year and
brought Gates down to PARC once to show him the Alto. Since Gates
had expressed an interest in Microsoft's entering the applications business, Simonyi obliged him by charting out a strategy to exploit every
market: word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, even voice recognition—
everything PARC had worked on and several things it had not. Helpfully
he prepared the document on BravoX and printed it on the SLOT. Form
followed function: Gates could read the program and simultaneously
absorb its tremendous graphic potential, laid out in a dizzying variety of
typefaces and formats. As Simonyi said later, this was his way of becoming "the messenger RNA of the PARC virus."
On Christmas Eve Gates sent Simonyi a job offer by Federal Express.
By February he was in place as Microsoft's director of advanced product
development. Shortly thereafter Gates asked him, "Have you seen the
Chess machine?"
Simonyi waved him off. "Bill, I'm really disappointed. I want to be in
serious business. These chess computers are just a vogue. There's no
money in them. We should be doing applications, serious stuff."
Gates shook his head. "Charles, you don't understand." He led Simonyi
down a hallway toward a small enclosure and opened the door on two
engineers working on a machine that in a few
short months would alter the office computing market forever
and show Xerox the path it had missed.
"Here it is," Gates said. "IBM is making a personal computer. Its code name is Chess."
W
hat the Systems
Development
Department (it
was
no
longer simply a "division")
was
finally able to bring any
product to market, much
less
the triumph of integrated
system
design known as the
Star, must have
struck some
of
its own
employees as nothing short of miraculous.
The Star
programs duration and
complexity,
the personal
tensions
within SDD,
Xerox's ceaseless vacillation, and numerous other agonies
had
driven many engineers off the
project
long before it reached the
promised land. Thacker abandoned
ship to
return to
PARC.
Simonyi
left to
sell Altos with Jerry Elkind.
Bob Metcalfe
quit in
1979
in search
of the
entrepreneurial main chance.
Even
the machine's code name demonstrated
SDD's
need to clamor
for Xerox
management's attention. It
had
been coined
by Bob Spinrad
in the hope of lending the project some luster in the eyes of
Dave
Culbertson, a group executive to whom
SDD
then reported.
"Culbertson was a sailing enthusiast," David Liddle recalled, "so Spinrad
decided to name it after a one-design sailing class."
After
considering
"Lightning"
and "Sunfish" they settled on "Star," which, as Liddle observed,
"was
a decent sailboat and a tolerable name for an office appliance."
Engineers both inside and outside
SDD
expressed frequent doubts
about the department’s course. At
PARC,
many computer engineers
viewed the Star as Xerox's attempt to yoke their inventions to its fading
office monopoly, to the former's disadvantage. Around mid-1980 Butler Lampson predicted to his SDD friends that they would never ship
a product. "They had a system with a million lines of code in it built by
a team of people hired off the street," he said. "The whole thing took
four years, and in my experience any project that had those properties
had another property, which is it wouldn't work.
I
predicted it wouldn't
work and they wouldn't be able to ship it."
He was wrong. On April 27, 1981, at the National Computer Conference trade show in Chicago, SDD formally unveiled the Star as the Xerox
8010 Information System.
With its unique seventeen-inch bitmapped screen and graphical interface, the product was an instant sensation. Its full-dress demos every
hour on the hour "had people overflowing into the aisles," recalled
Charles Irby, a former Engelbart engineer who had been one of
SDD's
first recruits from outside PARC.
Irby was particularly amused to notice among the repeat visitors Larry
Tesler, then at Apple, and his Lisa design team. "They'd watch every
demo, then go off into a corner and talk about what they had seen," he
recalled.
The Star's success attested to the pertinacity of David Liddle, who
had managed to keep his mind and his organization focused through
years of indifferent and even hostile treatment from the Stamford
headquarters. Year by year SDD got kicked around the corporate organizational chart
—
now under the Information Technology Group, now
under Xerox Business Systems—until, as Bob Belleville recalled, "We
just stopped paying any attention to where we were."
In 1979 the division finally fetched up like a beached whale at the
doors of the Office Products Division. This was the Dallas operation
originally managed by the detested Bob Potter. But after Potter had
moved to International Harvester with his patron, Archie McCardell,
the division had come under the charge of an entrepreneurial firebrand.
Don Massaro had joined Xerox when it purchased Shugart Associates,
a disk drive company he had co-founded. Brash, risk-oriented, abrasive,
and persuasive, he seemed a throwback to the glory days of Shelby
Carter. For his divisional symbol he chose the Road Runner from the
Warner Brothers cartoons, the better to taunt the Xerox "coyotes" he
maintained were constantly out for his tail. "I had not spent twenty years
of my life climbing the Xerox ladder rung by rung, playing according to
the rules," he told an interviewer. "I was prepared to fail." When Dave
Liddle flew down to Dallas to show him the Star software, he was jazzed.
"I said, Tuck it! This
is
incredible technology and we're going to bring it
to the marketplace!"
Talk like that was just what the wear)' engineers of SDD needed to
shake off their torpor. Massaro was the first Xerox executive they had
met who displayed any business acumen at all. He made snap decisions, moved fast, and had more confidence in his own judgment than
the rest of the executive roster put together. Rallying behind his drumbeat—"I think we have another 914 on our hands," he crowed to
Business Week
—they redoubled their efforts to get the Star out the door.
Massaro also contributed some desperately needed rationality to
Xerox's treatment of PARC technology, much of which had been kept
under wraps as though by reflex without any consideration given to
how best to exploit it. For example, the company had long insisted that
Ethernet be kept secret in case it chose someday to market the network as a proprietary product.
"But how would the Xerox Corporation make any money by proprietarily pulling coaxial cable?" as Liddle asked rhetorically. He, Massaro,
and Metcalfe proposed an alternative. If other electronics companies
could be persuaded to adopt Ethernet as an industry standard, Xerox
could profit from what was sure to be an exploding market for the
peripherals that were already part of its product line, like laser printers.
This would also break IBM's stranglehold on tire networkable equipment
market, which it maintained by promoting its inferior "token ring" network—a system that, once installed, compelled users to buy only IBM-
made peripherals.
This argument finally prevailed in Stamford, which in 1979 granted
Massaro and Liddle approval to make Ethernet public by enlisting
Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation in the effort to turn it from
an experimental system into one of commercially viable robustness.
The new industrial-strength specifications were published in 1980 as
the joint Xerox-Intel-DEC Ethernet standard. Xerox's liberal licensing
rules, which allowed any company to manufacture Ethernet cards,
cables, transceivers, and peripherals after paying of a one-time $1,000
license fee pledging to support the standard as written, turned Ethernet into the most widely used local networking technology in the
world.
Don Massaro's enthusiasm for the work of SDD was requited by the
ultimate product. The Star workstation he shepherded to launch was an
amazing accomplishment. Enclosed in a squat beige-colored box which,
like its ancestral Alto, slid on casters under a desk, the machine came
packed with features no one had ever seen before and few envisioned in
a commercial office machine. These included a bitmapped screen (in
"muted blue," as Xerox promotional literature described it at the time), a
mouse ("an electronic pointing device"), windowed displays, and "What
You See Is What You Get" document preparation. The bundled functions
included text processing, a drawing program, the first integrated "help"
program, and electronic mail.
By far the system's most striking feature was its graphical user interface, the stylized display that communicated with the user via the
bitmapped screen. This arrangement of icons and folders built around
what the Star designers called the "desktop metaphor" is so familiar
today that it seems to have been a part of computing forever. But its
pioneering implementation on the Star included some capabilities that
had yet to resurface on the market nearly two decades later. Text, formulas, and graphics could all be edited in the same document. (Compare today's "integrated" software, in which a drawing imported into a
text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the
original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.)
Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye
for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use
of "virtual keyboards"—graphic representations of keyboards that
appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal
library of 6,000 Japanese
kanji
characters was added; eventually Star
users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language,
from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian.
As the term implied, the user's view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were
lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral
devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display
image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively
organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by
the user's personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized
by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right
corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket.
Thanks to the system's object-oriented software, the Star's user could
launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the
machine automatically "knew" that a text document required it to launch
a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has
ever equaled the consistency of the Star's set of generic commands, in
which "move," "copy," and "delete" performed similar operations across
the entire spectrum of software applications.