Dealers of Lightning (65 page)

What he proposed would become standard operating procedure in
American business twenty years later under the label "intrapreneuring"—a way to nurture innovation outside the dead hand of a corpora­tion's entrenched bureaucracy. In 1979, however, Xerox management
regarded the concept as too elaborate to take seriously. That day over
lunch Kearns confided to Mead that tradition's hold on Xerox was almost
too powerful even for him, its president and heir apparent to the chair­manship.

"Let me tell you a story about big companies," Kearns said. Xerox
employed a group of engineers to tear apart every new machine coming
off the production line. Their goal was to figure out the most likely prob­lems that would crop up under the stress and strain of daily operation,
develop routines to fix them, and warn the design engineers of their mis­takes. Yet every new model incorporated the same design blunders as the
last. Finally the service engineers took matters into their own hands by
designing their own machine. This was the Model 3100, a proposed desk­top copier which, with its high reliability and decent resolution, was the
closest thing Xerox could offer to compete with the Japanese models
devouring its customer base. Yet instead of winning praise and rewards
from the company, the bootlegging research engineers were widely vili­fied for interfering in the design process.

"You know what?" Kearns told Mead. "I spend most of my time try­ing to keep the rest of the company from killing those guys."

Mead shook his head. No company so riven by tribal conflicts would ever bring itself to welcome the exceptional gifts of PARC. He returned to California with a mixed message, if a prescient one, about the likely fate of the powerful technologies he had himself used to such wonderful effect. He was sure they would sooner or later be developed and mar­keted for the world. But he was almost equally sure that when this hap­pened, Xerox Corporation would be standing glumly on the sidelines.

One day Alan Kay sat alone in the conference room of the
Systems Science Lab, feeling a powerful urge to trash
Smalltalk and start over from scratch.

For some time he had watched uneasily as his own group succumbed to the software equivalent of biggerism. With every iteration
of Smalltalk—they were now on the fourth version, Smalltalk-76—he
felt the language had become more elaborate, more sophisticated—
and farther removed from his original vision of a system easy enough
for children to learn.

But Smalltalk-76 was only the latest blow to Kay's dream of a trans­parently simple programming language. The first, sadly, had been
delivered by the children themselves. They had stopped learning.

The flush of triumph Kay and Adele Goldberg felt from teaching the
Jordan kids how to program had barely worn off before they realized
they had accomplished far less than they thought. While ten or a dozen
kids had shown genuine aptitude and creativity in programming, these
turned out to be the cream of an exceptional subset, pupils from the
gifted track of one of the best school systems in the country. Most of
the
Jordan kids still struggled
with
the most rudimentary concepts as
though they were programming
in
Greek.

Kay
realized he had expected
too
much
from
the start.
No
matter how
lucid the software interface or
natural
the commands, programming still
presented difficulties to children—not
to mention
to many of the non­professional adults at PARC
he
had
tried
teaching as well
—
that could
only be surmounted in one of
two ways: by
intuition (a gift granted
to a
precious few), or by being told
the answer. He
finally capitulated
to
real­ity that day in the
SSL
conference
room, as he
sat pondering
a
white­board on which he had scribbled out the
code
for a simple problem that
had left his subjects confounded.
With
a
shock
he realized it
was
full
of
ideas obvious only to diose who
were,
like
himself,
already steeped
in
the
techniques and culture of computing.
"I counted
the number of non-obvious ideas in this little program. They came
to
17," he recollected.
"And
some of them were
like
the concept of the arch in building design: very
hard to discover, if you don't already know them."

He
was disheartened to discover that
what
had seemed
at
first
to
be a
spectacular breakthrough with
a
group
of
preadolescents was nothing
more than the "hacker phenomenon"
at work: "For
any given pursuit, a
particular five per cent of the
population will
jump into it naturally, while
the
eighty per cent or so who
can learn it in time
do not find it at all nat­ural."
It
was also painfully
evident
that maintaining the learning curve of
even the most talented kids
demanded a
tremendous effort
by
teacher
and
student—even here in
Palo Alto, an ideal
setting
that would
be
impossible to reproduce on a large
scale.

Perhaps
the instinctively
understandable
programming system
he
sought
was
a chimera after all.
As Adele kept
reminding him,
"It's
hard
to
claim success if only
some
of the
children
are successful."

He
was forced to wonder whether
his very
approach had been mis­guided.
He
had been convinced that
teaching
lads to program
at
an
early age would permanently shape their thought processes.
His
real
ambition had been to provide them with a singular window on human
enlightenment. Yet his experiments led him to a contradictory conclu­sion. Programming did not teach people how to think
—
he realized he
knew too many narrow-minded programmers for that to be so, now
that he considered the question in depth. The truth was the converse:
Every individual's ingrained way of thinking affected how he or she
programmed.

And was it not the same in every other field of human creativity? "A
remarkable number of artists, scientists, philosophers are quite dull out­side of their specialty (and one suspects within it as well)," he said later.
"The first siren's song we need to be wary of is the one that promises a
connection between an interesting pursuit and interesting thoughts. The
music is not in the piano, and it is possible to graduate Juilliard without
finding or feeling it."

Suddenly he felt a powerful desire to throw out all the old tools and
start afresh. Scarcely four years after he had first outlined his ideas to the
Learning Research Group, he was ready to make another run at the grail
of simplicity. Drawn toward a new vision of Ideaspace, he brought the
entire group to Pajaro Dunes for a three-day offsite in January 1976 to
chart the new journey. Re-infused with enthusiasm, he even gave the
retreat a theme-—"Let's burn our disk packs," an allusion to the big yel­low Alto storage disks on which they kept Smalltalk's master code.

Then he discovered that they were no longer willing to follow him
blindly.

The revelation was staggering. He spent most of the retreat trying to
inveigle them into a fresh start on a hardware and software system rad­ically different from Alto/Smalltalk. "No biological organism can live in
its own waste products," he exclaimed one evening. In earlier days that
would have started them off on a thematic tour of Ideaspace and an
exploration of the multifarious purposes of death and renewal. This
time they took it as a threat to their own investment in a growing body
of work, and turned him down.

"When Alan said to burn our disk packs it was Dan Ingalls who would
have had to do it," recalled Diana Merry. "And Dan couldn't do it. There
were too many bits on those disks he would have to recreate again, which
made it very, very hard to let go. We lost the will to break it all apart. Alan
finally had to realize it wasn't going to happen."

Smalltalk was no longer his system. He had started it, but once he
turned it over to the "completers" like
Ingalls
and Adele Goldberg it
had morphed into their own
property. Ingalls
was particularly deter­mined to transform Smalltalk
into
a
full-service
programming lan­guage, the last thing Kay desired.
Were it
anyone else, he might have
been able to keep control
of the
effort.
But
he could not fight Dan
Ingalls, one of the few people
in
the
world
whose skill in his chosen
field awed even Alan Kay.
He
had to let
it go
and admire the system for
what it was, not what he wished
it
to be.

"Pajaro led to Smalltalk-76, which
was
two hundred times faster
than Smalltalk-72," Kay said
later, unable to
avoid expressing admira­tion for Ingalls's finely crafted
code, no matter
how far it departed
from his own goal. "But," he
added wistfully,
"no kid ever wrote any
code for Smalltalk-76."

The
1976 offsite permanently
changed the
human ecology of Kays
group.
It
was not a disaster,
exactly, as he
acknowledged later. There were
no shouting matches or overt recriminations. They returned to
PARC
still friends and colleagues.
"But
the absolute cohesiveness of the first
four years never rejelled," he recalled.
There
might still be bicycle runs
to Rosatis in town for beer and
brainstorming,
but the dirill of biking
back to
PARC
and implementing
some
unprecedented new idea on the
spot had evaporated. To Kay the
team had lost
its balance. The idea of a
Dynabook for Children had
"dimmed out,"
overwhelmed by everyone's
professional imperatives and their
desire to
elaborate on what were now,
to him, old ideas.