Dealers of Lightning (11 page)

Several other possibilities were culled early. These included Webster,
where Goldman feared his new lab would come under the intellectual
domination of the copier bureaucracy still entrenched in Rochester. Also
rejected were Princeton; Stony Brook on Long Island, where the State
University of New York was building a new campus; and several other
East Coast sites that were either too far from an established Xerox facil­ity or lacked the cachet Goldman craved for his would-be Bell Labs.

Pake directed Goldman's attention westward. Teaching at Stanford
in the early 1960s had given him a glimpse of the phenomenon that
would shortly make the Santa Clara peninsula famous as "Silicon Val­ley." A few weeks after signing on, he proposed that Goldman charter
the company plane for a California excursion. Ardent corporate way­farer that he was, Goldman agreed with alacrity. Soon he and Pake
were working their way south from Berkeley to San Diego, stopping at
every major university campus in search of the ideal spot.

But at Berkeley there was no available real estate to support a corpo­rate research facility. At Santa Barbara, where a new state university cam­pus was sprouting on the dazzling coastline, there was real estate but no
major airport. "Oxnard . .. dismal," Pake recalled. "Pasadena . .. Smog
was terrible. Xerox had a division called Electro-Optical Systems there
with a fairly big site but it was not something that could interact with Cal-tech—too industrial. So we didn't see anything very encouraging."

That suited his purposes fine. For the whirlwind tour on which he led
Goldman was mostly window dressing. Pake's primary objective was
Stanford and its vibrant home town, Palo Alto. Goldman had initially
ruled out the site for lack of any nearby Xerox facility, but Pake goaded
him to reconsider. He knew from experience that the university was anx­ious to develop strong relationships with the industrial enterprises
springing up like anthills all over the valley. Then there was the salubri­ous physical and cultural climate—not a trivial consideration if one
hoped to attract gifted researchers to an embryonic lab.

As for Goldman's objection that Palo Alto was too far from any Xerox
property, Pake countered with a neat equivocation: Let proximity
mean being close enough to reach a Xerox facility in time for lunch.
SDS was in Los Angeles, an hour's flight from the Bay Area. Anyone
could leave Palo Alto in the morning, lunch at SDS, and get home in
time for dinner. And was not the original rationale for the lab to be
SDS's research support?

"That's a very interesting thought," Goldman said, bowing to the
inevitable. In early March, Pake invested his first two staff members,
a pair of administrative officials from the Webster research division
named Richard E. Jones and M. Frank Squires, with the task of flying
to Palo Alto and finding a building suitable to rent.

"Nobody at Webster wanted the job," Rick Jones chuckled, remem­bering how he became PARC's first official employee. "I was the admin­istrative manager at research and development in Webster. Everyone
else had kids in school in Rochester and I only had a nine-month-old son.
I had married a Rochester girl in 1966, but when I said, 'How about leav­ing Rochester and moving to California?' she said, 'Sure.' Squires was
similarly unencumbered by a growing family, having only recently mus­tered out of the service, so Jones tapped him as personnel manager.

On their first reconnaissance trip they found that cutbacks in govern­ment and military research spending had left plenty of vacant research
facilities to choose from. In a couple of days they visited thirteen empty
locations before settling on one in a development known as Stanford
Industrial Park. This was a compound of one- and two-story buildings
occupying a parcel of land the cash-strapped university had decided to

"He also acceded to Pake's repudiation of the designation "Advanced Scientific and
Systems Lab," the name the lab bore in Goldman's original proposal, in favor of the
bucolic-sounding "PARC." As Goldman acknowledged later, "The acronym of the for­mer would have invited ridicule."
lease out
to small businesses.
It was
located just beyond
the campus
boundary, in
a dale
surrounded by orchards and horse pastures
where
the
grass
had turned brown in the
dry
peninsular spring.
Its
main
street,
Porter Drive,
meandered in
gentle
curves among the squat industrial
buildings before disappearing
over a
low hill.

About
halfway down Porter
stood a
two-building complex
that had
been
vacant since the Encyclopedia
Britannica
moved out a couple of
years
before. Facing the street
was a cinderblock
building
windowless
on
two
sides and with a concrete
floor sturdy
enough to support
heavy
lab
equipment. Behind it was a somewhat
larger
structure that
presented
an
exterior
of floor-to-ceiling plate
glass to the bright
California sun.
Trailing
behind the
rental agent, they
stepped inside,
disturbing a
layer of dust
and
filth that seemed to have
remained
untrammeled since the
begin­
ning of time.
A
musty stench
pervaded the air. The
floor, littered with
pieces of crumbled ceiling tile,
traced
a
large
square around an interior
courtyard
adorned with one
lonely olive tree.
Squires and
Jones contem­
plated the squalor, which was
illuminated by a
few dim rays of
sunlight
straggling in through streaks
in the windows. The
place needed work.
But every
other site they inspected
would have
needed more.
And at
a
total of
25,000
square feet, the
two buildings
together were the roomiest
they had
seen.
They
gave the
real estate agent a
handshake deal
and flew
home to Rochester to pack up.

In mid-May
Jones returned with
his wife
and infant son
as Pake's
advance guard. He
temporarily
parked his
family a mile
or two from
the site
at Rickey's Hyatt House, a motel
on El Camino
Real
that
would serve
as
a
transitional
home for scores of PARC
recruits
over the
next
dozen years. After picking up the
keys to
his new workplace from
the rental agent, he headed over to
the property. As
he coasted
up
the
long driveway
he could make out a
stranger
peering through one of
the
big
windows.

"Can I help
you?" Jones asked.

"I
must be lost," the man replied.
"Do
you know
where
there's a
Xerox
research facility around here?"

"You're
at it,"
Jones
said.

"Really?" An
expression of grave doubt passed over the stranger's
face. He introduced himself as Frank Galeener, a newly graduated
Ph.D. from Purdue who had been hired as a materials scientist in the
new physics lab.

"Oh, right, I recognize your name," Jones said. "But you're not sup­posed to start for a couple of weeks."

"No ... I was in the area and thought I'd stop by and see what it looked
like." He cast another anxious look through the window at the debris-
strewn interior.

"We're not set up just yet," Jones hastily reassured him. "But don't
worry. It's going to be great."

"Thank goodness," Galeener said. "For a minute there I thought I'd
made a terrible mistake."

Jones, Squires, and Gloria Warner, a senior secretary who relocated
from Webster to work for Pake, spent the next week working like char­women. With brooms, buckets, and mops purchased from the nearest
K Mart, they swept up the accumulated filth themselves and installed a
rickety table and chairs in the clearing. A day or two later a man
showed up from Pacific Bell to install the first telephone and a van
arrived from Webster with a load of surplus oscilloscopes and other
castoff equipment that Jones had redeemed from the Webster storage
sheds. By the time Pake arrived on June 30 a local contractor had been
in to fashion a few office cubicles and a large library space out of the
bare interior. The next day Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center officially
opened for business at 3180 Porter Drive.

Pake had also been busy. While closing out his final semester's teaching
obligations at Washington, he wrestled with the challenge of getting up to
speed on the science of digital computing. He felt like an old dog trying
to learn new tricks. "I was starting from scratch," he said. "I had to ask
around to find out who are the good people, what are the big issues and
so on. But I did wony because I was not a computer scientist."