Dealers of Lightning (14 page)

Taylor beheld the emasculation of government research with frank
alarm.
"Most
of the time
I
was there
ARPA
was going for projects with
an order-of-magnitude impact on the
state of
the science," he
reflected.
"We
had made a decision that we would not go for incre­mental things. But as soon as you get mission orientation you're focus­ing on very narrow objectives."

He felt it was the right time to leave.
He
had held his job longer than
both his predecessors combined. The
ARPANET
was securely launched
under Larry Roberts's unwavering eye. In September the network's first
four nodes
—
at
UCLA,
Stanford Research Institute, the University of
California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah
—
went opera­tional. Taylor accepted an invitation from
Dave
Evans to help Utah
undertake a research coordination effort of conveniently vague scope. In
late 1969 he left Washington for good and headed for Salt Lake City.
He
was still there a year later when George Pake tracked him down.

"I heard through the grapevine that he wasn't altogether happy at
Utah," Pake recalled. This was certainly the prevailing opinion among
Taylor's friends, who found it hard to imagine him careening through
the stolid precincts of Salt Lake in his blue Corvette.
On
campus his
recommendations to cancel some programs and merge others together
caused, he freely admitted, "some dissatisfaction." Clearly Dave Evans
had done him a favor by facilitating his departure from Washington.
But beyond that, Bob Taylor was marking time.

Pake's purpose in inviting Taylor to Palo
Alto
was to pick his brains
rather than offer him a job (although he did not rule out the latter pos­sibility).
He
had been unable to solve his most pressing administrative
problem: identifying the best researchers in the computing field.
It
was one thing to compile a list of the country's best computer science
programs
—
the same few names kept coming up, including Berkeley,
MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and
Stanford
—
but quite another to appraise
the individual talents within, or
to
know which projects pointed toward
progress and which were intellectual cul-de-sacs. Pake recognized that
Taylor's job for five productive years had involved making exactly those
sorts of judgments.

A few days later Taylor was ushered into Pake's office on Porter
Drive. There were two men in the room other than his host—Frank
Squires, the personnel chief, and Bill Gunning, a pleasant and unas­suming engineer with twenty years' experience in analog and digital
electronics who had been appointed manager of PARC's Systems Sci­ence Lab.

"They sat me down and Pake said, "We bought a computer company,'"
Taylor recalled. "I said, 'Yeah, that's too bad. You bought the wrong one.'
I told them that SDS wasn't interested in interactive computing, and
that's what I'd be doing." Without humility he proceeded to summarize
how he believed SDS and Max Palevsky had gone astray, the memory of
his bitter encounter with the computer magnate (then still a Xerox director) apparently still fresh. As his hosts listened patiently, he outlined his
vision of a future in which interactive computers harnessed to nationwide
networks enhanced the communication of human to human.

Pake, for one, took his caustic critique of SDS in stride. He had
already encountered the people in El Segundo and largely agreed with
Taylor's assessment. The lecture on distributed personal computing
was a different matter. No one in the room valued Bob Taylor as an
important theoretician and his digression elicited only their mental
shrugs. "We were interested in him not because of any vision he had of
distributed computing," recalled Squires, "but because of the people
he knew—and that meant every significant computer scientist in the
United States."

When the meeting ended they were sure they needed him on board.
He was equally certain his plain talk had ensured he would never hear
from them again. "I left thinking, 'I don't want them and they don't
want me,'" he said. Therefore he was all the more surprised when
Pake called him a few days later in Salt Lake.

"I want you to come help build the computer lab," he said.

Pake's offer sounded straightforward enough, but there were oddly
ambivalent feelings on both sides. Taylor understood that the titular
head of the PARC computer lab would have to spend most of his time
"attending to matters with corporate types and educating Pake," rather
than directly supervising research. This was a job he considered out of
his competence and disinclined to learn. Fortunately enough, it was
not exactly what Pake had in mind, either.

The job, he told Taylor, would involve recruiting an entire laboratory
staff—including his own boss. Taylor would be hired in an associate
management position, but Pake took pains to warn him that on paper
he was underqualified even for that and would have to prove himself
before advancing.

"I didn't exactly say to him, 'You don't have the right research cre­dentials for the job I'm about to offer you,'" Pake recalled. "What I did
say was: 'Bob, it seems to me that what you need to do is to develop
real research credentials if you want to go on. Why don't you come into
this laboratory as associate manager and help me recruit its manager,
your boss, and undertake a research program that would develop these
credentials for you?'"

What he meant, of course, was chiefly that Taylor lacked a respectable
Ph.D. In Pake's hard science universe, where researchers laid their bricks
upon foundations that had been built as long as three centuries earlier, a
doctorate was a certificate of genuine originality and achievement. That
was not true in the fledgling science of computing, which was erecting its
own academic foundation as it went along. Nor did Pake's viewpoint
apply very well to Taylor's unique abilities as a master motivator of top
research talent, which could never be encompassed within the rubric of
any advanced university degree. In the coming years this absurd yet
unspoken issue of Taylor's non-existent Ph.D. would help poison the two
men's relationship. It would never cease to color Pake's assessment of
Taylor's abilities, which only added to Taylor's belligerence toward the
Ph.D.-laden physicists who he viewed as sucking down half of the PARC
budget as members of the "General Science Lab." He was determined to
prove that his ragtag bunch of engineering gunslingers could out-research any credentialed physicist in town, and he would never let an
opportunity pass without reiterating the challenge.

For the moment, however, enraptured by the chance to finally real­ize his own vision of computing with a hand-picked team, he tried to
ignore Pake's condescension. He and his proteges had encountered
these quaint prejudices of "hard science" bureaucrats on every univer­sity campus. All he asked to be spelled out was Pake's understanding
that Xerox's cherished "office of the future" would embrace network­ing and interactive computers. Pake agreed without devoting much
thought to what those terms implied.

Shortly after arriving in Palo Alto to take up his new responsibilities,
Taylor found a more direct way to explain himself. Walking down the
hall one day he noticed Pake's secretary, Gloria Warner, showing off
her new IBM Selectric typewriter. With its distinctive golf ball-shaped
striking mechanism, this machine was the most elegant and popular
piece of office equipment of the time. Taylor stepped up and tapped it
with his finger.

"You know," he said, "we're going to make this thing obsolete."

David Biegelsen s first impression of PARC almost made
him sick to his stomach.

A
freshly minted physics Ph.D. from Washington

University,  Biegelsen had been personally recruited by George Pake in
March 1970, when the Porter Drive building was still a littered and
empty shell. It had been cleaned up but not filled up by September,
when he and his wife arrived to lay eyes on California for the first time.
The remodelers had been in, partitioning off the space in the big
building so that both sides of the square corridor were lined with
(mostly vacant) offices, but the first thing Biegelsen noticed when he
walked into the building was its sunlit interior courtyard.

"The atrium had an olive tree in it and not much else," he remem­bered. "But the ground underneath was just covered with olives. I
thought, 'Wow, this is California, the food is just lying there on the
ground!' I picked one up and put it in my mouth and just about died
from the acidity in it. Later
I
spent hours in the library trying to find
out how to cure the things."

That was a fair enough introduction to the virtues and challenges of
this mysterious place, so new that everyone's first task was deciding what to do with their freedom. For Biegelsen there was a bittersweet
and slightly frightening aspect to the empty offices and the clean slate.
It was the trepidation sensed by any pioneer in the split second before
he takes his very first step into the unknown.

"Here I was fresh out of graduate school and I didn't have the
vaguest idea of what I was to do. I was groping through the insecurity
of trying to find something really worthy of this job. But the area was
so beautiful, so lush and green, and there was this mixture of wonder­ful good luck of this really great job and the need to make something
happen."

Over the next few months the arrival of more young scientists like him­self lent the glass-walled building on Porter a deceptively bustling air. In
fact, the staffing proceeded slowly by design. Although the announce­ment of PARC's founding had brought in more than 900 resumes in the
first few weeks, Pake and Squires took their time making offers. Govern­ment funding cuts and the dire economics of the aerospace and defense
industries, they figured, were sure to produce a robust supply of gifted
candidates. Pake was especially cautious, his ambitions fixed on assem­bling a cadre of exceptional scientists capable of winning Xerox a Nobel
Prize, as Bell Labs had already won two for AT&T.* At its six-month
anniversary on New Year's Day 1971, PARC's staff, including administra­tors and secretaries, still numbered only twenty-three.

The languid pace of recruitment left plenty of time for the cere­monies that often accompany the launch of new corporate ventures.
PARC was formally dedicated at a dinner in October by none other
than Peter McColough, who happened to be in California peddling an
issue of Xerox bonds to West Coast investors.

Pake was delighted to show off his fledgling research center and its
minuscule staff. Jack Goldman flew in for the occasion and invitations
were dispatched to such Silicon Valley luminaries as Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, and Stanford President Richard Lyman.
Rick Jones ordered a catered dinner and rented extra tables and chairs.

*As of 1970. In the subsequent decade Bell Labs scientists won two more.

Then a freak heat wave struck and the temperature settled at a humid 95
degrees.

This meant trouble. The one system not yet operational on Porter
Drive was the air conditioning. Envisioning a hundred guests dozing
through the ritual speeches and keeling over into their fancy hors
d'oeuvres, Jones hastily equipped a couple of workmen with ladders and
water hoses and instructed them to cool off the roof while he sped down
to San Jose to rent a few big floor fans.

By the time the guests arrived that evening, the building was cool
enough for Silicon Valleys founding generation of high-tech entrepre­neurs to mingle comfortably with the freshman class of PARC scientists
in the harmony of shared knowledge and ambition. But as the guests
moved to the buffet, something made Jones glance up at the ceiling,
where a dark stain was spreading among the tiles directly over the buffet
table. "My God," he said to himself, "they forgot to turn off the hoses!"
He bolted upstairs to stanch the flow of water while several intrepid
guests bore the tables, laden with expensive delicacies, to safety—just
before the compromised ceiling started to drip.

Finally the groaning boards were relocated under a dry area and, dis­aster averted, Goldman and Pake made their welcoming speeches. A
beaming Peter McColough basked in his newfound reputation as an
enlightened technological leader. For the rest of his administration he
would think fondly of PARC as one of his finest achievements and
Xerox's crown jewel. It was not an opinion all his successors would
share. By the end of 1970, long before PARC reached its full complement
of staff, Pake established its long-term organizational structure by sub­dividing the center into three distinct units. The Computer Science
Laboratory had Taylor as acting manager over five scientists, including
Jim Curry and Robert Flegal, a pair of graphics specialists he brought
along from Utah. The Systems Science Laboratory (SSL), also with five
professionals, had been placed temporarily under the management of
a reluctant Bill Gunning, who had accepted the job as a stopgap but
was anxious to return to hands-on research (a more willing research
manager
would not be recruited
for
another two years).
The
third leg
of the structure was the General Science Lab
(GSL),
the solid-state
physics branch nominally headed
by Pake. GSL
employed four scien­
tists, one
of whom, an ex-Webster
physicist
named
Gerald
Lucovsky,
served
under
Pake
as
GSL's
associate
manager.

This
structure mirrored Pake's
determination
to set the new science
of
computing and the classical science
of
physics on equal footings,
which he believed would encourage the
two
sides to intermingle.
Even
if this
dream would never be realized,
the
optimistic structure endured
through the
next decade with only
minor
changes, as when Pake sev­
ered
the
Optical
Science Lab from
SSL to give
its work on laser print­
ing
and optical memory technology
greater
status.

Pake
also established by the close of
1970 a
full research agenda.
In
a
corporate memo dated January 4, 1971,
he
outlined an ambitious pro­
gram
for his group of twenty-three,
augmented
by another eight or ten
professionals due to start work over the
following
few months.
The Sys­
tems Science Lab was to take over
development
of a laser-driven com­puter printer whose inventor, a Webster
engineer,
had come
west
after
failing to interest his bosses in its potential.
SSL
researchers would also
investigate optical memories, a technology
that
would eventually
give
rise
to today's
compact disc and CD-ROM,
and
speech recognition
by
com­
puter. Taylors
Computer Science
Lab was to
pursue his pet interest in
graphics while developing specifications
for
a basic center-wide com­puter system. And
GSL
was assigned
studies
in solid-state technologies,
including the electrical and optical qualities of crystals.

Pake
warned his superiors that under
the
projected growth curve the
Porter Drive
complex, which at the
time housed
everyone comfortably,
would certainly burst its seams by
the
close of 1971.
He
was too
upbeat. In
the first weeks of the
year Xerox
headquarters knocked the
staffing projections flat by imposing a company-wide hiring freeze.

Xerox
at that moment was a company in siege mode.
Its
pattern of
consistently rising earnings, virtually unbroken since the introduction
of the 914, was cracking. The year just ended had brought a general
economic slowdown and, consequently cutbacks in capital spending
by its biggest customers. More troubling, 1970 had also marked the
end of Xerox's monopoly over the copier market. In April IBM had
brought out its first office copier.
It
was a slow, clunky machine that
could scarcely match the Xerox line for speed and reliability. But with
one of the great names of American industrial muscle behind it, the
new entry cast a very menacing shadow.

Meanwhile, Xerox's patent was about to expire on its selenium-alloy
photoreceptor, the material that lined a revolving drum inside every
copier. The selenium was a critical element of xerography. Its electro­static charge was neutralized by light and preserved by shadow in a
way that mirrored the image of a page to be copied. Particles of toner
stuck to the charged regions of the drum, which corresponded to dark
marks on the original, and could then be transferred to a fresh page to
reproduce the image. Although numerous other parts of the process—
notably the composition of the toner itself
—
were still protected by
patents or by corporate secrecy, the expiration of the selenium patent
demolished one key barrier preventing interlopers from playing in
Xerox's private preserve. IBM used a different process, but others
were sure to take advantage of this technological bonus. Eastman
Kodak, the company's Rochester-based big brother, was already known
to be working on a rival machine. More ominously, halfway around the
world, teams of American, German, and Japanese engineers were
developing a small tabletop copier, ultimately to be marketed in the
United States as the Savin 750.
By
offering high-speed office duplica­tion to the millions of mid-sized and small customers Xerox had always
ignored, the Savin would threaten the company's very survival.