Dealers of Lightning (48 page)

"Everyone on that side of the
house was
interested in documents,"
Shoup recalled. "Documents are
pretty
much black marks on white
paper. Color meant TV, and that
was some
other world."

The tension between Shoup and
the rest
of the lab intensified through
the end of the year and into early
1974, as
pressure mounted
on CSL
sci­entists
to
focus their efforts almost
entirely
on Alto-related projects.
It
seemed that the only thing keeping
the
simmering disagreement from
turning into a full-scale break was
the absence
of a catalyst.
Then,
as if on
schedule, a man arrived at
PARC
who really did seem to come from some
other world.

Alvy Ray
Smith was the quintessential 1970s dropout.
A
native of
New
Mexico,
he had been a New York University computer professor until
abandoning his promising academic
career
to drive
a
white
Ford Torino
cross-country in pursuit of the muse of abstract art.
He
and Shoup had
first encountered each other several years earlier
when Smith,
an expert
in the arcane mathematics of massively parallel computers,
was
putting
together a conference panel on modular computers and someone rec­ommended he contact Shoup,
whose
dissertation
at CMU
had covered
the same territory.

They
embarked on a lifelong friendship, based in part on their shared
fascination with the unconventional. "Dick was
always
willing
to
talk
about all kinds of other things than science," Smith recalled.
"Music,
art,
parapsychology, out-on-the-edge stuff."
When Smith
abruptly quit his
professorship in 1974 and headed for California to paint, it seemed only
natural that he would surface at the home of his old friend
Dick,
looking
for a place to spend the night.

PARC then was at a peak of creative ferment. Every day some new feat
of engineering appeared, virtually demanding to be shown off to anyone
with a free moment. And here was Alvy Ray Smith, curious as a cat, at
large with time to spare. Shoup fairly tingled with anticipation as he
drove to the research center the next morning. Seated next to him was
the one man he knew possessed the temperament to "get" Superpaint.
Sure enough, the machine hit Smith like a lightning bolt between the
eyes.

"He came in the door and got completely entranced," Shoup remem­bered. "He just deep-ended right into it." For the next several days and
nights the bewitched artist scarcely left the lab for more than an hour or
two at a time. "I realized this was what I had come to California for,"
Smith recalled. "You could just see it was the future."

The time-honored technique of daubing paint on canvas suddenly
seemed hopelessly antiquated. Smiths new obsession was to get his
hands on Shoup s machine and never let go. Shoup favored the idea, fig­uring he needed someone like Smith on the premises to make up for his
own lack of artistic skill ("I was a visual thinker, but never much of a visual
artist," he said). Attempting to secure Smith a place on PARC's perma­nent staff, Shoup argued that Smith's artistic talent and solid scientific
credentials uniquely qualified him to help develop Superpaint's full
potential, like a test pilot pushing a new fighter plane to the edge of the
envelope.

Among the higher-ups with their hands on the budget, this was a no
sale. No one had thought to provide in PARC's head count for an artist in
residence, much less a rootless hippie like Alvy Ray Smith. Still, one thing
you could say about PARC was that its rank and file was infinitely
resourceful at finding ways to stretch the rules. After the personnel office
refused to hire Smith as a temp or a contractor, Alan Kay came up with
the idea of getting him into the building virtually as a piece of furniture—
executing a purchase order for his services for a couple of thousand dol­lars. "I didn't care how they did it," Smith said. "I didn't want a tide or
salary or anything. I just wanted access to the equipment."

In no time he became a fixture in Building 34. If Dick Shoup was a
maverick who blended in, Alvy Ray Smith was one who was hard to
miss. Big and broad-shouldered, given to loud shirts, with a luxuriant
mane of jet-black hair and a flowing hippie beard, he proclaimed the
genius of Superpaint in a booming voice to anyone who was willing to
listen and many who were not.

Taylor, ominously, viewed him skeptically from the start. Perhaps it was
his claim to superior farsightedness, which Taylor took as a personal
affront. Or perhaps the reason was tiiat Smith seemed to have a singular
talent for pressing his buttons, as he demonstrated on his very first day at
PARC.

Smith was in the video lab, tinkering with Superpaint, when Taylor
came up behind him, evidently intent on making sure the newcomer
understood that this machine was considered to be out of the main­stream. He watched silently as Smith laboriously tuned the color settings,
then asked, "Don't you find this too hard to use?"

Smith wheeled on him, shocked at the veiy idea. One might just as well
ask a painter if he found it too hard to wield his brush. "No, I don't find it
too hard," was his impatient rejoinder. "Don't you get it? This machine is
revolutionary!"

Tayl or walked off with a grunt, unhappy at being lectured in his own lab
about what was and was not revolutionary. He had never before been
reproached as a reactionary, and it stuck in his craw.

Nor was the significance of the exchange lost on Smith. "From that
day on," he said, "I realized my friend Dick was in an unfriendly envi­ronment."

Taylor and Smith, of course, had been speaking at cross-purposes. The
Computer Science Lab was a collection of engineers who weighed every­thing pitilessly against the question: How will this get us closer to our
goal? They had committed themselves to developing Xerox's office of the
future, and anything that diverted their attention or served an alternative
goal had to be discarded or obliterated. To them the glorification of fluke
and luck so cherished by the creative artist seemed intolerably wasteful
of time and effort. Even Alan Kay tested their patience with his penchant
for drifting haphazardly through Ideaspace; but compared to Alvy Ray
Smith, Alan Kay was as sober as a Presbyterian elder.
Smith soon rewarded Shoup's faith that someone rooted in both art
and science would make a powerful contribution to Superpaint's evolu­tion. His most important refinement had to do with the way users
adjusted colors on the screen. As an engineer, Shoup had built a sys­tem with elements only another engineer could love: The controls
were a set of "sliding levers" that could adjust only an image's red,
green, and blue values. The process lacked a certain necessary deli­cacy, almost like forcing composers to do without sharps or flats.

"Artists don't think that way," Smith informed him.

As he explained later, "Dick could get any color he wanted, but he had
to think in terms of how you might get pink out of red, green, and blue."
(How tricky this is can be imagined by anyone who has tried to adjust the
flesh tones on an old color TV using only the three primary color dials.)
Making the system intuitively useful for artists, Smith recognized,
required an additional set of controls. "If I gave you controls for hue,
lightness, and darkness, you would know you could take red and make it
lighter: That's pink." He called the new categories "hue, saturation, and
value" and labeled the system the "HSV transform." (Smith's additional
categories, or similar ones, survive in most video animation systems to
this day.)

But Smith's devotion to Superpaint hastened Shoup's estrangement
from his CSL comrades by making his machine seem little more than a
toy for longhairs. Smith monopolized the device for hours at a stretch,
twisting video images into intricate abstract forms. He would take a
color test pattern and step it through a programmed sequence of the
256 color values so it resembled the skin of a chameleon placed against
a kaleidoscopic background, or bleed the pattern across the screen in a
psychedelic wash. "I took a girlfriend's face and did some tricks with it,
halved it down the middle and reflected it and halved that again so it
was a four-way reflected face that's hardly recognizable anymore, but
still has something organic about it."

Today such manipulation is commonplace to the point of triteness, the
stuff of TV special effects. But in 1974 no one had ever seen anything like
it. Soon Smith was inviting friends from San Francisco's creative demi­monde down for demos that turned into all-night Superpaint "jam ses­sions." One graphics artist, an Iowan named Fritz Fisher, had been
invited out to PARC by Shoup and Smith to give a talk about his work. He
took one look at Superpaint and returned home only long enough to pack
his bags. Back in Palo Alto he enrolled at Stanford and got a job as night
watchman at CSL. For the next few years he would attend class in the
daytime and tend the lab all night. "We'd come in the next morning and
there'd be these elaborate designs on the machine," Shoup said, "and
we'd know Fritz had been at it."

Among PARC scientists, however, the reaction was much less fervent,
except among a handful of empathetic staff members who joined Smith
in the wee hours, some displaying the furtive signs of experimental drug
use. ("That was one of the dividing lines," Smith later remarked jocularly:
"You'd just look at people and know if they were dopers or not. If they
worked all night and had a lot of fun, they were probably doing dope.")
Smith kept careful note of everyone's reaction to Superpaint from his
vantage point in the color graphics lab, which occupied a long narrow
room strategically situated at the nexus of Building 34's traffic flow-
since seven doors opened into it, the passage of personnel rarely ceased.