Dealers of Lightning (16 page)

In a superb buyers' market for research and engineering talent, PARC's
lavish budget and open-ended charter stood alone among corporate enti­ties. Other industrial research centers might enjoy generous funding or
comparably liberal charters, but none had both the open checkbook and
apparent immunity from product development pressures enjoyed by
PARC. From the point of view of the nation's outstanding computer
research scientists, Xerox—outside of a handful of top universities—was
the only game in town. "All the super-bright guys who had swell ideas
were tickled pink to go work for George Pake and Jack Goldman,"
recalled George M. White, the research executive on Goldman's staff.
^*
"Nobody was going to float money and start a company for them, like

*'No relation to George White, the PARC researcher.

they
would today. At
PARC
they
could
get a good budget and a good lab
and independence, all of which
Pake
and Goldman provided.

Adding to
PARC's
charm was
its
premium pay scale. This
was
partially
the
result of shrewd entreaties
to
corporate management by Pake, who
feared that
Xerox
policy
requiring PARC's
salary scale to match
Web­ster's,
dollar for dollar, would
allow the most
prestigious universities to
outbid
PARC
for the best talent.

Pake
urged Jack Goldman
to secure PARC
a dispensation on the
grounds
that computer scientists
were a different
breed from the physi­
cists
and chemists of Webster.
For one thing
they were comparatively
scarce.
In
1970 a mere handful
of academic
institutions offered graduate
programs in computer science.
The
congressional restrictions on
ARPA
grants foretold that the number
would stay
small and the inventory of
first-class graduates thin.
At length Goldman
secured a differential for
computer science Ph.D.s of
15 to 20 percent
over Webster scale.
That
helped
PARC
secure the best
recruits, but
had the predictable side effect
of generating resentment among the General Science
Lab's
physicists
and optical scientists, who
were excluded.

Henceforth
PARC
could
offer people with
advanced computer science
degrees or working experience
in the field
starting salaries between
$30,000
and $35,000—excellent
pay for Ph.D.s
at the time, although the
range remained wide and often depended on a recruit's worldliness and
bargaining skills. Some from Stanford
University,
which was known for its
stinginess -with salaried professionals,
got
low-balled. One recalled accept­ing
a
full-time
PARC
salary of
$24,000, which
was at the low end of pay for
principal researchers in the computer
lab
but a big step up from the
$16,000 he had earned at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
As
though to foreshadow the shoals ahead, it was Taylor's pay that
caused Pake the biggest headache.
Despite
his lack of formal credentials
Pake
had rostered him on the payroll as associate manager of the Com­puter Science Lab and, more formally, as area manager of computer
graphics within
CSL.
The starting salary for an area manager in
PARC's
order of batde was $44,000, off the scale for a non-Ph.D. anywhere at
Xerox.
"I had to fight with Goldman and he had to fight with headquar­ters to get that, because Taylor had only a master's degree in psychology
and it didn't look right," Pake said.
"Of
course,
I
could understand the
bureaucratic problems with that myself."

It was not only Taylor's lack of credentials that made his salary a sore
point. Within months of his arrival
at PARC
his personality started to
grate on the other lab managers, who understandably took exception
to his attitude that
PARC's
sole
raison d'etre
was to pursue computer
research and that anything spent on the hard sciences was by defini­tion money down a rathole.

A
man who would never tolerate personal attacks at his
ARPA
confer­ences, Taylor seemed to tack treacherously close to the
ad hominem
at
PARC management meetings. The other lab managers were particularly
appalled by his treatment of Gunning, a warm and charming individual
who had spent almost as many years in the electronics industry as Taylor
had spent on Earth.
"He
treated Gunning with the utmost condescen­sion," Jones recalled.
"It
really created a lot of strife. Bill would say some­thing and Bob would come out with, 'That's stupid!' or, 'I'm just wasting
my time in here!'
It
was very unprofessional, and not at all the general
atmosphere everyone was used to."

Before the year was out a delegation of several middle managers
marched into Pake's office to demand Taylor be fired for his behavior.
On this occasion, Pake demurred.
He
was no more charmed
by
Taylor
than they, but he was more acutely aware of the man's uncommon
value to the organization. The Taylor who had spun a web of carefully
nurtured loyalties among the nation's best young computer researchers
seemed an entirely different character from the one who so charmlessly provoked his peers and superiors. The bottom line was that no
one could match his ability to lure research talent to
PARC;
virtually
everyone hired thus far into the Computer Science Lab was someone
who knew and respected him personally.
Pake
felt there were many
more gifted scientists yet to be snagged.

He was right about that. Toward the end of 1970 Taylor called in
some of his old chits to stage a pair of dazzling heists.

The first was a raid on the only laboratory on the
West
Coast
—
possibly
the country—whose work on interactive computing met his stern stan­dards. The lab belonged to the legendary engineer Douglas
C.
Engel-
bart,
an adamantine visionary
who held
court out of a small tiiink
tank
called
SRI,
or the Stanford
Research
Institute, a couple of miles north of
Palo
Alto in the community of
Menlo
Park.

There Engelbart had established
his
"Augmentation Research Center."
The
name derived from his
conviction that
the computer was not only
capable
of assisting the human
thought process,
but reinventing
it
on a
higher plane. The "augmentation
of human
intellect," as he defined it,
meant that the computers ability
to store, classify,
and retrieve informa­tion would someday alter the very
way
people thought, wrote, and
figured.

Engelbart
s
vision refined and
expanded a
concept memorably
set
forth
by Dr.
Vannevar Bush, an
MIT engineering
dean and wartime science
advisor to Franklin
D.
Roosevelt.
In 1945 Bush
had turned his attention
to the scientific advances produced in the
name
of war and to how they
might serve the peace. The result was
a small
masterpiece of scientific
augury entitled
"As
We
May
Think,"
which
appeared in the
July
1945
issue of
The Atlantic Monthly.

"As We May
Think" remains one of
the few
genuinely seminal docu­ments of the computer age.
Even today it
stands out as a work of
meticulous scientific and social
analysis. The
contemporary reader is
struck by its pragmatism and farsightedness, expressed without a hint
of platitude or utopianism, those common afflictions of writing about
the
future. Bush was not interested in drawing magical pictures in the
air; he was busy scrutinizing the
new
technologies of the
postwar
world
to see how they might relieve society's pressing burdens.