Dealers of Lightning (32 page)

Taylor's chief gunslinger was Butler Lampson. His combination of a
razor-sharp intellect with peerless debating skills raised the bar for
new ideas to an intimidating height. It was not impossible to win an
argument with Lampson, but it was not at all rare for him to win one
even when he was wrong. Even as practiced a navigator of Ideaspace
as Alan Kay could be backed to the wall when one of his flights of fancy
came up against Lampson's rigorous command of pragmatic engineer­ing. Routed in the battles, Kay sometimes had to retreat and regroup
for another run at the fence. "I can't ever remember winning an argu­ment with Butler on the same day," he said later. "I could win quite a
few on the second day. His mind worked about twice as fast as anyone
else's."

Lampson was fiercely intellectual, an inveterate kibitzer whose finely
realized insights and designs, often recorded on the run on scraps of yel­low paper, became indispensable ingredients of more PARC inventions
than anyone has bothered to count. He could also be ferociously tem­peramental, a fearsome screamer and tantrum-thrower when thwarted
or contradicted. Once Warren Teitelman managed to goad Lampson into
firing a glass ashtray at him. "Butler tended to intimidate people,"
recalled the outspoken Teitelman. "He made it very difficult for those
who didn't think quite as fast as he did or weren't quite as smart."

On this occasion "Butler was doing one of these 'That's ridiculous!'
things, and I just replied, 'Why? Because you say it's ridiculous?' and
he heaved the ashtray at me," Teitelman recalled. The ashtray shat­tered harmlessly on the wall behind him, but Teitelman understood
the lesson. "He was the 400-pound gorilla in that lab. You had to be
real careful." Teitelman's friends suggested he attend future Dealers
wearing a hard hat.

Outside Dealer with its deliberate intellectual gunplay, PARC in this
period was a model of casual collegiality. The place retained the
ambiance of a college campus, which was unsurprising. Most of the staff,
after all, were fresh out of grad school (some were still working toward
their advanced degrees while working full-time at PARC). Unmarried or
with young families, their social spheres would not extend much beyond
their laboratory colleagues until much later, when those families began to
grow and exercised their own gravitational pull. For now, driven by the
thrill of pursuing a common vision, they would work together all day and
late into the night.

To let off steam there were family picnics and a
Softball
team Rick
Jones organized to play in a Palo Alto community league. In the spa­cious open yard behind Building 34, to which the computer and sys­tems science labs relocated in early 1972, was strung a volleyball net
for daily lunch time matches.

For the extended family of the Computer Science Lab, Bob Taylor
served as a sort of social director. On weekends there might be touch
football (quarterback: Bob Taylor) or marathon sessions of "Diplomacy,"
a board game whose framework of negotiation, alliance, and betrayal fed
the host's appetite for intrigue, at his Palo Alto house. "That was great
fun, when you had nothing to do for a whole eight or ten hours on a Sat­urday or Sunday," one participant recalled.

This was the sunny side of Taylor's personality. When he was playing
the role of
paterfamilias
,
as opposed to sneering at the physicists or dis­puting a football ref s call with an opponent's shirt grasped in his fist, one
could appreciate the 95 per cent of the time he could be "an absolutely
charming person," as Jones recalled, without thinking of the other 5 per­ cent when he was a rude and arrogant beast. Even his beleaguered supe­riors could laugh at his foibles and persnickety habits, as they did one
Halloween when half of CSL came dressed as Bob Taylor, in nearly iden­tical plaid slacks, blue blazers, and white turtleneck sweaters, then sat
together at a table in the cafeteria with pipes in one hand and Dr Peppers
in the other.

"There isn't an organization newly begun where you don't find those
honeymoon years where there's a special bond among people,"
reflected Jeffers, who recognized the phenomenon from the Peace
Corps. "It was true there, it was true in PARC. It's true in anything
that's new. It's a great period. Everyone should be a part of something
at the beginning."

This atmosphere of professional and personal fellowship was a power­ful factor behind some of the center's earliest projects, including MAXC.
They called the process of informal collaboration by the name "Tom
Sawyering." Like Tom with his paintbrush and whitewash, someone
would set forth his idea or project—whether it was in a formal meeting
or a hallway bull session was unimportant—to mobilize a few intrigued
colleagues in an attempt to make it happen. If you saw a glimmer of how
to implement a new operation in microcode, you would gather a few
expert coders in a room and have at the problem until every whiteboard
in the place was filled with boxes and arrows and symbols as arcane as
Nordic runes. If you had a big project with a lot of soldering to be done,
everyone who knew how to wield a soldering gun strapped on his holster.

If an idea worked, the team stuck together for the next three or six
months to complete the job; if not, everyone simply dispersed like free
electrons in search of a new creative valence. Thacker viewed this sys­tem as "a continuous form of peer review. Projects that were exciting
and challenging received something much more important than finan­cial and administrative support. They received help and participation
...
As a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to
wither."

In this spirit Systems Science Lab engineers wrote code for
Computer Science Lab hardware, CSL designers helped SSL build
prototypes, and the General Science Lab's physicists chipped in with
valuable insights into material properties and electrical behavior (as
when Dave Biegelsen told Starkweather how to use sound waves to
modulate a light beam and got his offhand suggestion incorporated
into the world's first laser printer).

At one point Tom Sawyering even begot an audacious extracurricular
project. This was the so-called "Bose Conspiracy," which was hatched
at
a poker game at Rick Jones's house. Jones, Kay, Thacker, Dick Shoup,
Chuck Geschke, and a couple of others had fallen into a discussion of the
merits of stereo speakers. Kay was a particular fan of the state-of-the-art
Bose 901s, which came with their own electronic equalizer and cost
$1,100 the set (in the pre-oil shock dollars of the early 1970s). He was
also the only one in the group who owned a pair, having acquired them
on his PARC budget as part of a real-time music synthesizer his group
was developing.

"You know," someone said as cards riffled in the background, "there's
no reason why we couldn't make the electronics work just as well. And
for a lot less money, too."

Appropriating a basement room in Building 34, the group took apart
Kay's speakers and painstakingly analyzed the design. They bought cone
speakers from the same Kentucky factory that supplied them to Bose,
and on a shrieking diamond-toothed radial saw in Jones's garage they cut
and shaped the sound baffles out of high-density particle board. (The
marathon session left Kay covered with an inch-thick coating of sawdust
and Jones with a lifelong case of tinnitus.) Then they apportioned the
assembly tasks—one conspirator handled the soldering, another installed
the speaker cones, and so on—the same way they had distributed the
tasks on MAXC, which happened to be running contentedly in its own
air-conditioned room a few doors away. All told, they manufactured more
than forty pairs at $125 each. The buyers among their PARC colleagues
could customize the units with their choice of grille cloth but were oth­erwise challenged to tell the knockoffs apart from the real thing. No one
could.

"It was so typical of PARC," Kay recalled. "If you didn't know how
something was done, you just rolled your own."

The realization that something extraordinary was germinating on a
Palo Alto hillside soon started permeating the world of computer sci­ence, thanks in part to the researchers' eagerness to give demos to
friends visiting from Stanford, Berkeley, or Carnegie-Mellon. The
names on the employee roster added further luster. Gathering Lampson, Kay, and Deutsch under one roof would have been enough on its
own to make PARC a byword; but the center employed a dozen others
with reputations nearly as luminous. Kay was fond of proclaiming that
of the top hundred computer scientists in the country, fifty-six worked
at PARC.

Or sometimes he was quoted saying fifty-eight, or seventy-eight. Kay's
formulation has appeared in a hundred different versions, none of which
is correct in a mathematical sense (PARC never employed as many as
seventy-eight computer scientists). But all are accurate metaphorically.
PARC had become the premier draw for the country's best computer sci­entists, like Disneyland for seven-year-olds. Under the circumstances it
was easy to imagine that almost every talented young scientist or engi­neer in the land was already inside.

"People were accusing us of monopolizing the field," recalled Jack
Goldman. One day at a formal luncheon he was cornered by Jerome
Wiesner, the president of MIT. "Wiesner accused me of destroying the
ability of universities to teach computing because we were grabbing all
the good people."

Delighted as he was by the complaint, Goldman recognized that the
key to PARC's success was not the head count of researchers but their
exceptional gifts. He found it hard to keep away from his pampered child.
Arriving in Palo Alto in the evening on a company plane, sometimes with
his wife along ("My only inhibition to her coming along was it stifled my
ability to play poker with the guys"), he would drive directly to the lab to
drink in the atmosphere.

"The lights would all be lit and dozens of people around, even it if was
nine or ten at night," he recalled. "Often they were playing computer
games. Now, just remember, in those days computer games were not
what they are today. This was a new thing. These guys were literally
inventing computer games and learning how to use the machine."

Yet there was a downside to the cheery insularity and game-playing that Goldman so enjoyed witnessing at PARC. For one thing, the cen­ter's attitude problem was growing worse. Xerox headquarters discov­ered this to its dismay the day that attitude got laid out for public view in the pages of a rather unsavory magazine.