Dealers of Lightning (37 page)

One
peek into the basement workshop
of
Building
34
told him it
might be
too late to do much about it.
Clearly
the
Alto had
taken on a
life of
its own. But he also thought the
important
issues he had raised
with
Lampson, Thacker, and Kay remained unaddressed.

"Are
we going to invest a major hunk
of the
lab's resources and a lot of
money in developing five or six prototypes
of
something
we're
not sure
will work?" he asked. For all that Thacker
and
Lampson assured him the
finished product would be the epitome
of cool, a
glance at the schemat­ics failed to ease his concerns
—
especially
after
he noticed the huge pro­portion of memory that would be devoted
to
maintaining the display.

"I
don't think
I
had the skills to appreciate what could
be
done with it
without seeing it work," he said later.
"I
certainly had questions about
what the end result was going to cost and how many we could afford."
He
instructed Lampson to give him some answers, in writing.

Lampson's response was a December 19 memo entitled simply
"Why Alto."
In three and a half sharply reasoned pages he furnished
the project all the technical and philosophical justification it would
ever need. While acknowledging that some of the "original motivation"
for
the Alto came from Alan Kay, an SSL engineer, he
also
portrayed it
as
a
machine of tantalizing potential for everyone in
the
Computer
Science Lab. The Alto would be capable of performing almost any
computation a
PDP-10
(that is,
MAXC)
could do.
It would be
more
powerful than the video terminal system Bill English was designing for POLOS, with better graphics. It would run all the office system soft­ware being written in various labs at PARC with power to spare. And it
would render the costly Novas obsolete.

Lampson pointed out that at $10,500 per machine the Altos would cost
barely half what PARC had spent per CSL member in building MAXC.
(With a full complement of memory, as it turned out, the first few Altos
cost closer to $18,000. After the original design was reengineered for effi­ciency and a high-volume manufacturing program was put
in
place, how­ever, that dropped down to about $12,000.) Lampson considered himself
on firm ground in stating that the machine would be cheap enough to
enable PARC to afford one for every member of the lab.

"If our theories about the utility of cheap, powerful personal com­puters are correct," he concluded, "we should be able to demonstrate
them convincingly on Alto. If they are wrong, we can find out why."

By early April the first prototype was ready to start computing.
Thacker and McCreight together had worked out the priority by which
sixteen essential computing tasks would contend for the processor's
attention. This basically involved determining how quickly each task
had to be completed before it failed, and how important it was for the
rest of the machine. Transferring data between the disk and the mem­ory was particularly critical, for instance, because without data in
memory nothing else would work. Therefore disk operations earned
the highest priority. Next came the display (actually three tasks—one
to refresh the horizontal scan, one for the vertical, and a third to trans­fer display data into and out of memory). Any untoward delay here
would mean rendering the screen unintelligible. Farther down the list
came monitoring the local network (the Ethernet, being invented con­currently down the hall by Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs) and run­ning the Alto's basic program, a variant of the Nova's.

Thacker and McCreight were so pleased with their task-switching
scheme they started preparing a patent application, at which point they
discovered to their great embarrassment that someone had got there
first. The bearer of this jarring news was Wes Clark, who was the pioneer
in question. Trim and lantern-jawed as ever, Clark served as senior con­
sultant
to the Computer Science
Lab.
During one of his regular consult­ing visits he had learned of the patent proposal. One day thereafter he
showed up in the Alto workshop.

"This Alto stuff is pretty interesting,"
he
observed, deadpan.
"I
won­der if, in a few words, you could say
what
the relationship is
to
the
TX-2
and in particular to the task structure
of
the
TX-2?"

Neither
Thacker nor McCreight knew
much
about Clark's trailblazing thirteen-year-old machine. They looked
at
each other, perplexed.

"Well,
ah, well, ah," McCreight stammered out, "not very well."

"Well, as it happens
I
have some copies
of the TX-2
documentation
here
I
could leave with you," Clark said.
"Why
don't
I
just come back
and ask
the question later?"

That
night they pored over the papers
in a
state of shock.
Clark's
TX-2,
they recognized, had used almost
exactly
the same task-priority
scheme as
the Alto.

The
next day Clark returned to find
the
two engineers profoundly
ashamed at not having read the literature
earlier.

"Wes,"
said McCreight, "my only
excuse is I
was in the eighth grade
at the time."

The
first two prototype Altos took
shape in
the basement workshop
of
Building 34. They came into the
world
naked and blind, as helpless
as
hatchlings, for the hardware had
been
built so quickly that the soft­ware to run it was still months from completion and its essential pro­grams had to be bootstrapped in from
the
nearest
Nova.

Any
semblance of helplessness
dissolved,
however, the moment the
screen lit up. The sight of black letters,
figures,
and symbols displayed in
sharp relief against its glowing white background burned itself instandy
into one's consciousness. No one
doubted
that the
Alto
marked the
omega to every thread of computer science that had come before and the
alpha of a dazzling new world; and no one ever forgot the pure euphoria
they felt the first time they saw an Alto running.

"It was like watching a baby waving its arms," recalled John Shoch. "Waving its arms as if to say, 'I'm alive! I'm alive!'"

D
avid Boggs was in his usual haunt—the basement work­shop where he uncrated, assembled, and tested
POLOS's
newly ordered
Novas—
when he first laid
eyes on the red-bearded stranger.

Burly and athletic, the man came down into the shop carrying a yel­low reel of coaxial television cable like a fireman toting a length of
hose.
He
sidestepped the piles of wood and particle board the Bose
Conspiracy had piled up in a corner to build their fake 901’s; and man­handled the thousand-foot reel up to a workbench, on which he
deposited an oscilloscope and a pulse generator. Then he started fum­bling around with a soldering iron.

Boggs watched with curiosity. "I knew what he was doing," he said
later. "He was going to be firing pulses down the cable and looking at
the output through the scope."
He
also recognized, the
way
a horse­man does a greenhorn who has never been in a saddle before, that this
individual was no artist with a soldering iron.

Boggs, in contrast, had cut his teeth wiring ham radios while growing
up in Washington, D.C., then had spent his college breaks wielding all
manner of electrical implement to keep the local NBC television trans­mitter on the air. He padded over in his moccasins, his blond ponytail
swinging to and fro, to offer the stranger a helping hand. It was the first
time he and Bob Metcalfe would work together, but not the last. Over the
next two years they would be so inseparable they would become known
throughout PARC as the Bobbsey Twins.

Few would have cast them as plausible partners. Metcalfe hailed, as
though at the top of his lungs, from Brooklyn and Long Island. He had
graduated from Harvard and MIT—bitching every step of the way, to
hear him tell it—with degrees in electrical engineering, business, and
applied mathematics. Boggs was the quintessential introvert, an ascetic
radiohead with an undergraduate degree from Princeton. Metcalfe
was all sharp elbows, opinionated and confrontational, not above giv­ing the caldron a stir if he did not sniff enough conflict in the air. Boggs
kept to himself—in a conversation he spoke slowly and carefully, his
eyes focused on the ground or off into space, as though scrupulously
weighing every word.

Their aspirations appeared to be at odds, too. Metcalfe was embarked
on a determined search for the main chance. (He would eventually leave
PARC to start a multimillion-dollar networking company.) "The first time
I ever heard the term 'venture capital,'" one colleague remembered, "I
heard it from Bob Metcalfe." But Boggs always talked as though he
would be content doing pure research all his life.

In sum, they seemed to have little in common beyond the Brooks
Brothers button-down shirts they both favored (though Boggs pre­ferred yellow and Metcalfe blue). They were the most eccentric part­nership PARC ever knew, and the most productive. Working together
in mysterious harmony they invented a new way for computers to talk
to each other, the great digital party line known as Ethernet.

Brash and outspoken by nature, Metcalfe arrived in Palo Alto in
June 1972 bearing a humiliating burden: Harvard had rejected his doc­toral thesis.

This affront had capped a long and difficult relationship. Metcalfe had
earned his dual bachelors degrees (electrical engineering and business)
down the road at MIT. As a graduate school, he believed, Harvard could
never measure up to Tech. "It's probably an idiosyncratic thing," he
related acerbically years later. "But I hated Harvard. At MIT students got
to do stuff and at Harvard they didn't. At MIT you learn by doing because
you're an engineer. At Harvard they want you to be a scientist, and scien­tists would
never
soil themselves by
doing
things."

The difference had been driven home to him shortly after he started
working part-time on the ARPANET. As an eager new grad student he
offered to help Harvard get on the system by building the necessary
interface between its PDP-10 and the IMP, one of the stand-alone
machines that was every node's portal to the main network. This was
not rocket science; he planned simply to duplicate the unit he had
already built for MIT. But Harvard turned him down.

"They said, 'You're just a grad student, and we're going to have it done
by a company named Bolt, Beranek & Newman,'" he recalled. "And
BBN assigned the job to a part-time employee on their staff named Ben
Barker, who turned out to be a grad student at Harvard, just like me."

But if the snub helped sour him on Harvard, it had no effect on his bur­geoning enchantment with the ARPANET. Metcalfe was every bit as pre­occupied as Bob Taylor with the idea of placing computers in direct dig­ital conjunction. But he engaged in it at a level closer to the machine—he
was less interested in what could be accomplished by linking computers
than
in
how to actually move the bits from node to node. Finding new
ways to make that happen would become his life's work.

While completing his studies at Harvard, he continued to work part-
time on the ARPANET link at MIT. By 1972, when he was ready to take
his doctorate, he was so securely bound into the ARPANET bureaucracy
that he was chosen as a so-called "facilitator"—a sort of technical nurse­maid who escorted IMPs to their new homes around the country to make
sure they got properly hooked in and booted up. His connections made
him a valuable property on the outside. "I was hot stuff because the
ARPANET was hot stuff and ARPA was a major source of funding," he
recalled. He spent that spring getting wined and dined by prospective
employers, eventually landing nine job offers from supplicants that
included BBN, Doug Engelbart, and a number of leading universities.
The best offer—no surprise—came from Jerry Elkind and Bob Taylor at
PARC. Not only was it the most money ($19,000, beating everyone else
by several thousand dollars), "but it was the cleanest, most straightfor­ward deal in the world, a high-paying job in a beautiful place with no
teaching responsibilities. There was no tenure bullshit and no students,
and you got to work with Butler Lampson and Alan Kay and Chuck
Thacker."

Metcalfe returned to Cambridge to pack with his wife and suffer
dirough his one remaining academic obligation, the defense of his doc­toral thesis before a faculty committee. He expected it to be a breeze,
insofar as his diesis was a study of how networks transmitted data in dis­crete digital packets and he had just spent two years with his head buried
in IMP circuitry. The committee, as it happened, was waiting for him
with a sock filled with wet sand. He went into the committee room for his
oral defense and received his answer on the spot: His thesis was "insufficiently theoretical," the committee ruled. All his laborious discussion of
physical systems? Good enough for MIT engineering, but this was Har­vard science. In other words, he should add some formulas with Greek
symbols, and try again later.

Metcalfe was stunned by the rejection. He thought he knew what
the real problem was: Not that his work was "insufficiently theoreti­cal," but that he had spent all those years hanging around the MIT
campus instead of carrying water for some Harvard professor who hap­pened to be on his thesis committee. Bob Metcalfe had thumbed his
nose at Harvard, and it was payback time. "My thesis advisor should
never have let that happen," he said later. "But I wasn't playing ball
with him, so he didn't play ball with me."

In any case no amount of fulmination would solve his immediate
dilemma. He had accepted a job from PARC with the understanding
that he would arrive properly garlanded with a Harvard Ph.D. Appre­hensively he called Taylor from home to deliver the bad news.

"He didn't even hesitate," Metcalfe recalled. "He said, 'Just come on
out and finish your thesis here.' That felt very, very good."

Bob Metcalfe's personality added a tart new ingredient to the CSL
stew. He was a one-man deflation brigade, ever poised to puncture the
bravado of his talented peers. Let someone boast at Dealer of having
implemented some cool program in just two or three hours of strin­gently applied brainpower and Metcalfe was likely to remark, "Really?
Then what were you doing sitting next to me in the lab for ten hours
last night?"

"And by the way," he recalled some twenty-five years later. "I didn't
do it nicely. I was not a nice person."

His favorite target was Chuck Thacker.

It is hard to gauge what produced the bad chemistry between Metcalfe
and Thacker. Some thought it a clash of like egos—except that a similarly
elevated self-esteem characterized pretty much everyone else in the lab
and not everyone paired off like raging mastodons. "It was just random
interpersonal chemistry," Metcalfe said later. "I have a Ph.D.; he doesn't.
He's a world-class processor designer; I'm not. And I'm not an easy-to-
get-along-with person and neither was he, so I was on his case all the time
and he was on my case all the time. It's not that he's not a good guy He
is
a
good guy. But we just didn't get along."

Some even believed the animus might reside mostly in Metcalfe's
imagination, for Thacker never made as much of it as he did. Indeed,
some of their colleagues were unaware that there was any bad blood
between them at all. Yet even Taylor recognized that Metcalfe/Thacker
was the yang to the yin of Metcalfe/Boggs, a relationship whose iciness
would resonate for years. Thacker and Metcalfe, he said later, were
locked in what he called a Class One disagreement.

"That's when two people disagree and neither can explain to the other
person's satisfaction that other persons point of view," he said. "A Class
Two disagreement is when each
can
explain to the other's satisfaction the
other's point of view. Class Two disagreements enable people to work
together even when they disagree. Class One is destructive. Most distur­bances and international crises and most of the pain and suffering and
difficulty in the world are based on Class One disagreements. Thacker
and Metcalfe could never reach a Class Two disagreement, and they've
been enemies ever since."

Metcalfe believed he had earned Thacker's undying enmity within days
of his joining PARC by identifying a memory fault in MAXC long after
Thacker had declared the machine finished. This was the incident of the
so-called "Munger." Metcalfe's inaugural assignment was to connect
MAXC to the ARPANET. This should not have been a hard job for some­one of his experience. But for some reason MAXC was giving him a hell
of a time. Every time he tried to launch the connection, the damn
machine crashed. He checked and rechecked his work until he finally
became convinced that the problem was MAXC itself. The machine, he
decided, was suffering from a memory bug.