Dealers of Lightning (62 page)

"Apparently they're all jealous of
Arthur
Clarke," Shoch reflected.
"Brunner wrote that his editor
had
sent
him
my paper.
He
said
he was
'really delighted to learn, that
like
Arthur
C.
Clarke,
I
predicted
an
event
of the future.'" Shoch briefly
considered replying
that he had only bor­rowed the tapeworm's name but
that
the
concept
was his own and that,
unfortunately, Brunner did not really invent
the
worm.

But
he let it pass.

Years later Lynn Conway could still remember the
moment she first laid eyes on the chip that would launch
a new science. It was a week or two after Christmas 1979.
She was seated before her second-floor window at PARC, which looked
down on a lovely expanse of valley in its coat of lush winter green, sloping
down toward Page Mill Road just out of view to the south. But her eyes
were fixed on a wafer of silicon that had just come back from a commer­cial fabrication shop.

There were dozens of chip designs on the wafer, mostly student efforts
from a Stanford course being taught under PARC's technical supervision.
They all strived toward an intricate machine elegance, comprising as they
did tens of thousands of microscopic transistors packed into rectangular
spaces the size of a cuticle, all arranged on a wafer that could fit comfort­ably in the palm of one's hand. A few years earlier the same computing
power could not have fit on an acre of real estate.

One design stood out, and not only because it bore along its edge the
assertive hand-etched legend: "Geometry Engine © 1979 James Clark."
Where the others looked to be simple arrays of devices that formed sim
ple digital
clocks and arithmetic
search
engines and the like,
Clark's was
obviously something more—larger,
deeper,
more complex than the oth­
ers, even
when viewed with the naked
eye.

Clark's
got something really amazing
going
on in
there,
Conway
thought to herself.
But who knows what
?

What Clark
had going on, as it would
turn
out, was the cornerstone of
an
entirely original technology. The
"Geometry
Engine," which he
designed with the help of several of his
Stanford
students, was unique in
compressing into a single integrated
circuit
the huge computing
resources needed to render
three-dimensional
images in real time.
After
the
appearance of Clark's chip,
the
art and science of computer graphics
would never be the same:
The computer-aided
design of cars
and
air­craft, the "virtual reality" toys and games
of the
modern midway,
the
lum­bering dinosaurs of the movie
Jurassic Park
—
they all sprang from the
tiny chip Lynn Conway held
by its edges that
winter day.

With
the Geometry Engine as
its
kernel,
Clark
founded Silicon
Graph­
ics Incorporated and developed
it into the
multibillion-dollar company it
is
today. But
without Lynn
Conway
and
PARC,
he could not have built
the Geometry Engine. The irony
is
that
when
Conway first proposed that
PARC
step into the vanguard
of the science of
designing such extraordi­narily complex integrated circuits,
many of her
colleagues doubted it was
worth doing at all.

Conway's
program would
never even have
gotten started had not
Bert
Sutherland decided that
PARC needed a
shot of "havoc."

Sutherland had taken over
management of the
Systems Science
Lab
in
1975 after leaving Bolt, Beranek
& Newman,
the Boston consulting firm
that had
earlier given
PARC Jerry Elkind, Bob Metcalfe, Dan Bobrow,
and Warren
Teitelman. Like
them, he held
strong views about research
methods
which did not always conform
to PARC
orthodoxy, especially
as
it
was
practiced in
Bob
Taylor's
Computer
Science
Lab.
Sutherland
believed that research conducted in a closed environment was doomed
to
suffocate,
like an animal trapped in an airtight cage.
He
admired the
Computer Science
Lab's
work but regarded Taylor and some of his engi­neers as overly prone to facile prejudices and snap judgments—condi­tions, he thought, that deprived CSL of the necessary aeration. The har­vest was its self-destructive elitism.

"They were the best and the brightest," he said later. "That was the
good news. The bad news was that they knew it."

Sutherland did not allow SSL to become so sequestered. His policy was
to keep its atmosphere enriched via continual contact with the outside
world. One of his first acts upon succeeding Hall, for example, had been
to send the engineers Tim Mott and Bill Newman on an "archeological
dig" to Xerox's copier sales office in Santa Clara, a few miles south of Palo
Alto. The idea was for them to study how real office workers performed
their daily routines, the better to design the equipment they would use in
the future. This effort yielded OfficeTalk, a sophisticated and integrated
system of office automation that heavily influenced the later design of the
Star. Sutherland also recruited to SSL experts in cognitive science such as
Stuart Card, Tom Moran, and John Seely Brown, whose research into
how real people actually used computers, step by step and motion by
motion, led to groundbreaking insights into man-machine ergonomics—
insights that not even J. C. R. Licklider had anticipated when he wrote his
own pioneering treatise on the subject in 1962.

At CSL, unsurprisingly, Sutherland's democratic instincts provoked
grumbling—wasting precious resources on anthropology, of all things!—
even before he brought Carver Mead into the SSL tent. Then all hell
broke loose.

Mead was one of the most popular and influential professors in the
computer science department at California Institute of Technology, where
Sutherland's brother Ivan had recently become department chairman.
Mead instantly struck him as the right person "to wander in and create
some havoc" within PARC's insulating walls. For sheer intellectual brio,
Sutherland knew, Carver Mead could stand toe to toe with Butler Lampson and the rest of Taylor's gunslingers any day. A compact, energetic
man with a black mustache and goatee and lively, searching eyes, Mead
possessed a confident mastery of electrical engineering, particularly at
the extremes of the infinitely complex and the infinitesimally small—
regions where ordinary engineers hesitated to venture but which he con­sidered his personal preserve. He filled out that expertise with a breadth
of interests that encompassed subjects as diverse as walnut farming and
particle physics.

At the time of his first visit to PARC, he and Ivan Sutherland were
deeply engaged in studying what happened to electronic systems at the
edges of the physical scale—in other words, how minuscule a transistor
could be without its becoming non-functional, and how large and complex
a system one could build without its becoming unmanageable. At their
core these questions were identical, for as transistors got smaller and
more densely crowded on the silicon surface of an integrated circuit, the
chip became more complex. The implications of this dual phenomenon
were only just becoming understood when Bert Sutherland invited Mead
to give a technical address at the Systems Science Lab in 1976. Mead's
formal topic was the design-of silicon-based integrated circuits, but his
real purpose was to propose a new way of thinking about computer
design—one that threatened to make much of PARC's work obsolete.

As Moore's Law predicted, the technology of integrated circuits had
been surging ahead ever since Intel—the company Moore co-founded—
introduced its first microprocessor in 1971. The 4004 chip was funda­mentally an arrangement of microscopic transistors that packed into the
space of a matchbook cover the computing power of a mainframe—circa
1946. That was hardly an achievement to prompt a major reconsideration
of computer architectures; but a year later came the 8008, which had
twice the power, and in 1974 another doubling again.

There was no reason to think the trend would not continue well into
the next millennium. From his academic aerie on Caltech's Pasadena
campus, Mead imagined the curve of shrinking transistor size and mush­rooming density extending almost limitlessly into the distance. He
believed that the traditional principles of computer design, of which
MAXC and the Alto represented the intellectual pinnacle, were fated to
fall off this curve well before it disappeared over the horizon. Both
machines employed integrated circuits to help control their slowest
peripheral devices, like the keyboard and mouse, but even those chips
were of the passing generation known as MSI, or "medium-scale integra­tion." Mead had pioneered research into the next step—LSI, or "large-
scale integration"—and he was still thinking ahead. In partnership with
Ivan Sudierland, he began exploring the difficulties and possibilities pre­sented by the coming quantum leap in miniaturization, which would
bring them to VLSI, or "very large-scale integration." This was the gospel
he came to preach at PARC.