Dealers of Lightning (55 page)

"All the computers were happy and everyone could walk around in
their suits—this was Xerox, after all," Ellenby recalled. (After the show
was over Boggs and Sproull tried to see if they could use the truck to pro­duce snow in the ballroom. They turned it up until one of the compres­sors blew out, ending their experiment. "That was another expense we
had to slide through the system as something else," Ellenby recalled.
"Fairly expensive, too.")

Disaster averted, the executives and their wives were encouraged to
spend as much time as they wished familiarizing themselves with the
Altos. They could type and draw on the bitmapped screens, meet a
remarkable pointing device called a "mouse," send their handiwork off to
the networked printers, and store it in electronic file cabinets known as
"file servers." They could prepare documents on computer and send
them by fax anywhere in the world—without generating a single sheet of
printed paper.

The demo room with its thirty Altos stayed open until late in the
evening. "Lots of people came by and they all said how fantastic it was,"
Ellenby remembered. Most of the PARC scientists on the scene seized
the opportunity to witness for the first time how nonengineers would react
to their fabulous technology. The results were mixed. On the one hand, it
was clear they were "very impressed that the stuff all worked, because
they'd heard PARC was sort of a flaky place," Ellenby recalled. "There
was sort of a feeling around that PARC was a luxury, so it was a relief for
them to see some real value and even some things they might want." Yet
clearly they were also perplexed and mistrustful about the effect these
mysteriously overeducated contraptions might have on their careers.

Xerox's top executives were for the most part salesmen of copy
machines. From these leased behemoths the revenue stream was as tan­gible as the "click" of the meters counting off copies, for which the cus­tomer paid Xerox so many cents per page (and from which Xerox paid its
salespersons their commissions). Noticing their eyes narrow, Ellenby
could
almost hear them drinking:
"If there
is no paper
to
be
copied,
where's
the 'click'?" In other words:
"How
will
I
get paid?"

For
Geschke, the most
discomfiting
revelation
was
the
contrast
between the executives' reactions
and
those of their wives.
"The typical
posture and
demeanor of the
Xerox executives,
and all
of
them
were
men, was
this"—arms folded sternly
across
the chest.
"But
their wives
would immediately walk up to the
machines
and say,
'Could I try that
mouse thing?'
That's
because many
of them
had been secretaries
—
users
of the equipment. These guys, maybe
they
punched a button on a copier
one
time in their lives, but they had
someone
else do their typing and
their
filing.
So
we were trying to sell
to people
who really had no concept
of the
work this equipment was actually accomplishing.

"It
didn't register in my mind at
that event,
but that
was
the loudest
and clearest
signal we ever got of
how
much of a problem
we were
going to
have getting Xerox to
understand
what we had."

There
was at least one other
harbinger
of the coming letdown.
Toward
the end of the evening
McColough, Kearns, and a few of
the
executive
staff materialized in the
demo
room. Their appearance had
been prearranged. "They were
there to
have an opportunity
to say,
'Well,
now we're going to do
something,
guys,'" Ellenby recalled.
"But
they
didn't take that opportunity.
They just
said, 'Thank you.'

"I was
expecting a bit more than
that,"
he said.
"We'd
developed a
camaraderie that was quite unusual.
My
people felt pumped
up
and
hyped, like a sporting team. Instead
what
we got
was, 'Thanks,
boys,
the war
is over, and you can take
your
horses back.'
"

Thus
did the doubts surface almost
before
the euphoria of
a
flawless
demonstration had a chance to run
its
course.
Despite
McColough's
ringing re-endorsement of "the architecture of information," his and
Kearns's
equivocal farewell told
Ellenby
and his team that they were naive to think Xerox would exploit this
technology anytime soon.

And in this beleaguered and distracted corporation, Ellenby knew, time was the enemy.

Not all the signals
PARC
received from headquarters after
Futures
Day
were as deflating as the initial one. In fact,
the event did have two promising offshoots.

The first was an unusual visit to Coyote Hill
Road
the following Janu­ary by Peter McColough and his nine top subordinates, including Archie
McCardell, David Kearns, and Jack Goldman. Their purpose was to
attend a two-day crash course in the art and science of software—the
brainchild of Bob Taylor, who managed to get it sold to the executives
while they still felt some gratitude, however begrudging, for PARC's
bravura performance in Boca Raton.

Taylor believed that the unique success of the 914 copier had incul­cated
Xerox
management with the doctrine that good things derived only
from hardware.
He
was determined to show them that this idea was
obsolete.
As PARC
envisioned the office of the future, a single piece of
equipment could be made to serve multiple uses simply by changes in its
software.
As
long as the brass found this idea an alien one
—
and it was
revolutionary to most people in 1977
—
they would remain blind to the
superiority of programmable Altos over narrow-minded electromechan­ical word processors like the 850.

Taylor
asked Alan Kay to help him break
up
what might otherwise be
two
days of lectures in the nasal
drone
of
Computer
Science Lab engi­neers by designing a hands-on
software demo
for the visiting brass.
"You
can have them for one
and
a half
hours
each day," he said.
"See
what
you can do."

Kay
delegated the task in turn
to
his
educational
expert,
Adele Gold­
berg. The deadline was about
the
same as
Ellenby
had faced for Futures
Day,
nine weeks. But the challenge was possibly even more daunting:
Bring ten stuffy male executives
face
to
face with
the unfamiliar rigors of
computer programming, and
make
it fun.
The
strangeness of the experi­ence for these men could not
be
underestimated. Even
Jack
Goldman,
the
paterfamilias
who battled
so tirelessly to get PARC's
technology into
the
Xerox
product stream,
would be
doing
serious
work on a computer
for the first time in his life.

Goldberg figured the attention span
of top
corporate officers with
much on their minds would be about
the same
as that of a classroom of
fidgety adolescents. To hold
their attention,
she developed a demon­stration program called "SimKit" and
loaded it
with plenty of animation
and music (one tune sounded
automatically
when class time was over).
But
underlying the bells and
whistles would be
a sophisticated system
able to
simulate situations the
executives would
recognize from the real
world.
Its
basic format was a generic
workplace
scene populated by
workers and customers. This could
be altered
to suggest
the
copy cen­
ter
of a large office, or a mechanized
production
line, a payroll depart­ment
—
whatever setting the
executive-pupil
might find comfortable
and familiar.

"We
really were teaching them
that while there
are independent pieces
in a program you can build something
out of,
there's also a context in
which different kinds of objects are interacting," Goldberg recalled.
"They'd
have stations with workers they
could
select and specialize to do
one function or another. The animation
would
let them actually
see
the
customers come in and queue up and get service.
We
gave them the abil­ity to draw in their own workers and say what they looked like:
This
one's
frowning, that one's smiling. And we had it all structured so they would
never touch the keyboard. It was all mouse-pointing and mouse-clicking,
because we knew these guys wouldn't type. In those days, that wasn't
macho."

As the event approached a few glitches cropped up, including one that
no one on the youthful LRG team could have anticipated. During a dry
run staged with ten middle-aged secretaries from the third-floor admin­istration offices, it developed that none of their subjects could read the
Alto typefaces. "The small fonts our thirty-something eyes were used to
didn't work for those in their fifties," Kay recalled. Goldberg made a
virtue out of necessity by rewriting the curriculum so each student's first
task would be to select a custom typeface and font size to use for the two-
day session. This enhancement had the dual merits of instantly acclimat­ing the executives to the mouse and impressing them (it was hoped) with
the unprecedented flexibility of the Smalltalk interface.

A more harrowing crisis arose the week before D-Day.

This was a glitch in "Ooze," Smalltalk's intricate memory management
system, which had been designed by Ted Kaehler. Ooze worked by
rapidly shuttling data and objects between the Alto's scanty main mem­ory and its spacious hard disk, based on an algorithm that made the disk
seem merely an extension of the memory. Nowadays this stratagem of
fooling the computer into thinking it has more memory than really exists
is a standard feature of desktop computers known as "virtual memory"; in
1978 implementing the system on such a small computer was a great pro­gramming feat. Ooze had its limits, however. Goldberg had loaded the
system with so much new material that Ooze's capacity was strained to
the breaking point. With five short days left before the seminar, Kaehler
delivered the bad news.

"Adele, the Ooze design is wrong," he said. "We didn't plan for all these
subclasses."

"Yeah?" she replied warily. "What does that mean?"

"It's not clear it'll hold up during the seminar. And if it crashes, we're in
trouble."

"Well, what's the alternative? Should I simplify the curriculum?"

Kaehler had nothing so modest in mind. "It seemed obvious to me," he
said later, "that I should just fix the problem in Ooze."

Goldberg grew fidgety at the very notion. This was no mere bug, she
figured, but a major design change. "Ted," she said, "something tells me
this is
not
a good idea."

He waved his hand. The fix involved rewriting code in about seven
places in the program to double its capacity. Easy enough in principle,
he recalled later—assuming he could be sure of finding every place
that needed fixing. In any event, he figured the team would have five
days for testing. To Goldberg he said, "Don't worry about it."

Easier said than done. Nervous about his tinkering with such an impor­tant component of the system so close to its make-or-break audition,
Goldberg and the other team members put Kaehler on a short leash.
"Adele, Alan, Dan Ingalls, and Larry Tesler each sat down with me sepa­rately to hear what the fix was and impress on me that it had to work," he
recalled. "That was fairly intimidating." Goldberg told him that if it
worked the first time, she would use it. Otherwise, they would restore the
original Ooze and she would pare down her lesson plan.

Kaehler finished his reworking in one evening and demonstrated the
fix to his colleagues. To Goldberg's relief and amazement, it worked
perfectly. "It was like you're building the Taj Mahal," she said later,
"and just as you're about to put the final cap on it you decide that the
foundation brick isn't right and you need to replace it. Just jack it all
up, replace it, and put it back down again. That's what he did. Pretty
remarkable stuff, and also a remarkable guy who could do that."

The executive hands-on, as Kay recalled, proved "a howling success."
To ensure victory, each corporate officer was assigned an LRG tutor to sit
by his side during Goldberg's simulation exercise. Nine out of ten fin­ished their programs before the bell rang. One, who was in charge of a
large Xerox manufacturing arm, even uncovered a flaw in his own real-
life production line by plugging actual figures he carried around in his
head into his computerized model.

But whether the executives took away impressions of lasting value is
another question. Diana Merry, who served as a tutor, doubted they
had a very good idea of what they were looking at—that is, the remark­able engineering achievement underlying the simple and intuitive ani­mations playing over the Alto screen.