Dealers of Lightning (35 page)

Kay took the advice to heart. Over the next few months he drafted a
detailed plan for a music, drawing, and animation system to teach kids
creative programming on Novas. He did not abandon his cherished
miniCom, but recognized that he would have to reach the grail via a
series of smaller steps and commit himself to a program of several years.
The effort bore fruit. By summers end he had acquired a $230,000
appropriation to equip a bank of Novas with character generators that
produced text and simple graphics for display on a high-quality screen.
His small group of learning software specialists had been about to begin
developing the programming environment for this jury-rigged system
when Lampson and Thacker knocked at his door with a different idea.

Elkind, not for the last time, had been following a different vector
from that of his principal research scientists. As it happened, many CSL
engineers were convinced that time-sharing's potential
was
thoroughly
exhausted. Lampson and Thacker had thought hard about how to redis­tribute computer power so no one would have to share processing
cycles with anyone else. They agreed with Kay that this meant building
dozens of individual machines, not just one. This would take money.
Not that funds were scarce at PARC; but they were scattered too widely
for any single group to have enough to finance the massive engineering
program they envisioned. What was required was a fiscal version of
"Tom Sawyering," in which they would collect contributions from every
interested researcher and rake them together in one great pile.

Thacker and Lampson regarded Kay as a prime donor. For one
thing, the architecture of his cherished Dynabook, or miniCom, or
Kiddicomp—whatever he was calling the thing in its latest incarna­tion—corresponded neatly with their own visions of the ideal personal
computer—for Lampson a suitcase-sized MAXC with a component
cost of about $500; and for Thacker a computer with the Nova 800’s
capabilities and ten times its speed.

The notions of all three intersected at one common goal: a fast, com­pact machine with a high-resolution display. "The thing had to fit in a rea­sonable sized box and it couldn't cost too much," said Lampson. "Small
and simple was critical, because the whole point of it was to have one for
everybody." By combining the latest electronic components coming into
the market with their own powerful intellects, they might just pull it off.
Not the Dynabook in all its interactive glory, perhaps, but a giant leap in
the right direction—in Kay's words, an "interim Dynabook."

Hearing their offer, Kay could barely contain his excitement—until
he realized they might still face one important obstacle.

"What are you going to do about Jerry?" he asked glumly. Elkind still
controlled the CSL budget. Lampson and Thacker had both been
present the day he shot down the miniCom. Was there really any hope
that he would see this new project any differently?

"Jerry's out of the office for a few months on a corporate task force,"
Lampson replied. "Maybe we can sneak it in before he gets back."

"Can you get it done that quickly?"

'We'll have to. Anyway, there's another reason to move fast."

"What is it?"

That was when they told him about Thacker's bet.

"Bill Vitek was a vice president at SDS," Thacker recalled later. "I
had been down in El Segundo visiting SDS for some reason I don't
remember. We didn't make a lot of friends there when we built
MAXC, and the fact it took only eighteen months led them to think
that somehow we had cheated, although they couldn't quite figure out
how.

"So I was arguing about that with Bill Vitek, and being a cocky and
fairly arrogant guy I said, 'You know, you can build a computer in three
months if it's small enough.' And Vitek said, 'Aw, bullshit!' And I said,
'Not bullshit at all!' And we ended up betting a bottle of wine or a din­ner, I don't even remember which.

"But I do remember that I won that bet."

Chuck Thacker started designing the Alto on November 22, 1972.
He enlisted Ed McCreight to help with the engineering and com­pleted the design before the end of February, beating Vitek's deadline.

The original plan was to manufacture up to thirty Altos for distribu­tion to the engineers in the Computer Science Lab and to Kay's Learn­ing Research Group (his seed money was allocated to finance the first
ten). But from the moment of its birth the Alto created a sensation. As
Taylor had long anticipated, the power of the interactive display spoke
for itself. The Alto's screen, whose dimensions and alignment repli­cated that of an
8½
-by-ll-inch sheet of paper, produced such a vivid
impression that the lab's modest construction plan was soon expanded.
In the end Xerox would build not thirty Altos, but nearly two thousand.

The Alto was by no means the fastest or most powerful computer of
its time. MAXC could blow it away on any performance measure in
existence and for a considerable time remained the machine of choice
at PARC for heavy-duty computation. Even without the burden of illu­minating the full-screen display, the Alto ran relatively slowly, with a
processor rate of less than 6 megahertz (the ordinary desktop personal
computer as of this writing runs at a rate of 400 MHz or faster); the
display slowed it further by a factor of three.

But the Alto's great popularity derived from other characteristics. To
computer scientists who had spent too much of their lives working between
midnight and dawn to avoid the sluggishness of mainframes burdened by
prime-time crowds, the Alto's principal virtue was not its speed but its pre­dictability. No one said it better than the CSL engineer Jim Morris: "The
great thing about the Alto is that it doesn't run faster at night."

Then there was the marvelous sleekness of its engineering. To some
extent this was an artifact of Thacker's haste, for his tight deadline
erased any impulse he might have felt to create a second system varia­tion on MAXC. There was simply no opportunity for biggerism.

Instead, to save time and money Thacker and his team went entirely
the other way. Alto was like a fine timepiece somehow assembled from
pieces of stray hardware lying around the lab. Rather than design new
memory components, they ingeniously reused boards that had already
been built for MAXC. Ed McCreight revisited his own design of the
MAXC disk controller and managed to strip out a few more circuits for
the Alto. Even the display monitors were appropriated from POLOS,
which had fallen so far behind schedule that its specially ordered video
display terminals were still sitting around in boxes.

In almost every respect the Alto design was so compact and uncom­plicated that during the first months, while prototypes were still
scarce, engineers desperate to get their hands on one were invited to
come into the lab and assemble their own. Ron Rider, who had joined
PARC only a few months earlier upon graduating from Washington
University, "had an Alto when Altos were impossible to get," recalled
one of the lab managers. "When I asked him how he got one, he told
me that he went around to the various laboratories, collected parts that
people owed him, and put it together himself."

Of course Thacker did not really design the Alto from scratch in three
short months. His wager with Bill Vitek was something of a sucker bet.
Several basic elements of Alto's design had been known to computer sci­ence for years, and others had been kicking around CSL ever since the
completion of MAXC. During the summer of 1972 Thacker had even
outlined for CSL the design points for a small machine in a ten-page
memo entitled "A Personal Computer with Microparallel Processing."

The philosophical core of the design came from Bob Taylor, who also
supplied the machine's name (Alan Kay never entirely ceased calling it
the "interim Dynabook"). As Taylor constantly informed his top engi­neers, time-sharing's success in making computing more accessible to
the user quantitatively was only part of the equation: Nothing had yet
been accomplished in terms of improving "the
quality
of man-machine
interaction." Finishing the job involved three steps: placing computing
power in individual hands, delivering information directly to the eye­ball via a high-performance display, and linking the computers together
on a high-speed network.

As
late as 1971, all three steps still
seemed
technically unfeasible.
Com­
puting power and memory were plainly
too
expensive
to
hand out
in
indi­
vidual
parcels, especially since they
were
consumed insatiably
by
the
so-called "calligraphic" display tubes
then in
use with graphics-oriented
computers.
Moreover,
because these
displays
laboriously constructed
their images stroke by stroke, rather than
by
scanning a phosphor beam
across a luminous surface thousands
of times
a second like television
tubes, they were prone to annoying
flicker. These
were not qualities that
would lend themselves to relaxed
communication
between man and
machine.
As
for existing network
technologies,
they were
either
complex
and slow or, like the
ARPANET,
required
the
installation of hundreds of
thousands of dollars in specialized
hardware.

Then
there was Taylor’s habit of speaking in parables when he could
not articulate his ideas in the
precise argot of
engineering.
"When we
were
building
MAXC,
Taylor
told Chuck and
me a bunch
of stuff
we
couldn't understand at all at the
time,"
Lampson recalled in
amuse­
ment.
"We
dismissed it as the ravings
of a
technically illiterate man­ager. But looking back on it two years later, it was crystal clear what he
was trying to tell us to do:
Build the
Alto."