Dealers of Lightning (68 page)

Meanwhile the CSL's programmers plunged into work that had been
stymied by the Alto's limitations of speed and memory. Deutsch, Teitel­man, and several others had already compiled a "wish list" of desirable fea­tures of an ideal programming system. To their delight, Dorado was pow­erful enough to incorporate them all into a system they called "Cedar."

Cedar combined the best features of Mesa and Smalltalk. It offered the
former's industrial strength and clarity, which allowed programs written
by one person to be understood and elaborated on by others, without giv­ing up the latter's graphical flexibility or its nifty features such as "garbage
collection"
—
a sort of housekeeping function that used memory more
efficiently by automatically clearing memoiy space occupied by data a
program no longer needed.

For all its performance enhancements, the Dorado did have a few sig­nificant flaws. For one thing, it could not coexist in an office with a human
being. The machine’s voracious appetite for electricity made it radiate
heat like a barbecue pit, while the fans created an unimaginable din. In
an attempt to make the machine quiet enough for an office, the designer
tried housing it in a case so bulky it was nicknamed the "armored per­sonnel carrier." But the sound-insulating material stuffed inside only
made the system run hotter, which made the fans work harder, which
created more noise and heat in an endless, vicious circle.

"They were such an efficient heater in the office that the guy just about
had to work in his underwear," recalled Charles Sosinski, a PARC techni­cian. Eventually they hit upon the solution of removing the Dorados
from the offices altogether, stowing twenty machines together in a single,
very
well air-conditioned room from which they were linked by cable to
the terminals, keyboards, and mice in individual offices.

But these technical problems never quelled the furious demand for
the swift and robust machines.

"People would say, 'I could get my work done in an hour, and it would
take me all day on an Alto,'" Sosinski remembered. For the first time
since a couple of prototypical Altos nicknamed Bilbo and Gandalf
emerged from CSL's basement shop, there were not enough computers
at PARC to go around. Even after full-scale production began, the
Garage was able to turn out no more than ten or fifteen Dorados a year;
in 1982 there were still only thirty in existence. Some junior scientists,
especially those outside the favored halls of CSL, were reduced to reliv­ing the bad old days of time-sharing. "It was very hard to get Dorados for
quite a long time," recalled Diana Merry. "When we were writing
Smalltalk-80 I would have to come in late at night, because that was the
only way to get one to work on."

Almost simultaneously with the Dorado, the first Notetaker proto­type was completed. Kay immediately termed it a triumph. What it
lacked in the Dorado's overwhelming power it made up for with a sort
of bantam-scale elan.

The Notetaker ran a compact version of Smalltalk-76 and boasted an
ingenious physical design that would be shamelessly mimicked by the
first generation of so-called "luggable" computers six years later. When
closed the computer looked like a plump plastic attache case. One
opened it cross-seetionally, like a cracked-open egg, by flipping two
latches. The screen and disk drive were set in the larger piece, facing the
user when the box was laid flat on a table. The keyboard was part of the
second, smaller section, connected to the first by a flexible cable.

Bolted back into one piece, the Notetaker could be carried, albeit with
great effort. Lifting it by the built-in handle strained the plastic case until
it warped. "We used to say it ran at five herniations per block," Kay joked.
To avoid rupturing the case and dumping ten thousand dollars' worth of
components on the ground like groceries out of a wet paper bag, Tesler
and Fairbairn built a rolling cart that also allowed them to slide it, just
barely, under the seat of an airliner. One day Fairbairn, bringing the pro­totype to Rochester for a show-and-tell, fired it up on its batteries in mid-
flight, therefore becoming the very first person to operate a personal
computer on an airplane—the first of a legion of electronic road warriors
wired to their work at 35,000 feet.

The Dorado and the Notetaker shared one other distinction. They
were the last major projects undertaken at PARC by the scientists of its
first generation. Between 1978 and 1982 the Dorado almost entirely
replaced the Alto as the computer of choice inside PARC, and elicited
numerous expressions of interest from customers on the outside. But
no assembly line other than the low-volume Garage was ever approved
by Xerox. Come 1983, a series of dramatic events would strip the
Dorado of its design team and render it a technological orphan.

The Learning Research Group manufactured ten Notetakers and tried
in vain, as usual, to interest Xerox in the product. Tesler spent the better
part of a year flying around the country displaying the prototype to divi­sion executives. But whatever influence PARC ever had in Stamford or
Rochester had visibly drained away. "Xerox executives made all sorts of
promises," Tesler said. " "We'll buy 20,000, just talk to this executive in
Virginia, then talk to this executive in Connecticut.' After a year I was
ready to give up."

Soon after the last Notetaker was built, Alan Kay announced that he
was taking a long-promised sabbatical. For Kay the project's exhilaration
had already yielded to his familiar feelings of despair. The Notetaker was
enticingly similar to the old cardboard model he had once used to illus­trate the Dynabook. But his unquiet nature was to focus not on how close
it came but on where it fell short. His outward glee at creating a new
machine masked his real disappointment at how its compromises on
weight and size had once again "squeezed out the end-users for whom it
was originally aimed"—that is, the children.

Southern California beckoned. He had a new girlfriend, Bonnie
MacBird, who he had met while she was researching a screenplay about
computer wizards and who lived in Los Angeles. (After endless tinkerings by Hollywood executives this screenplay became the movie
Tron,
which came out in 1982, two years after Kay and MacBird were married.
"We like to say the marriage turned out a lot better than the movie," he
said.) He announced he was temporarily relocating to L.A. to take organ
lessons. He never returned to PARC.

Adele Goldberg took over the group after his departure. She was the
logical choice, like Ingalls a champion implementer, as she proved by
shepherding the next version of Smalltalk to completion—Smalltalk-80.
A few years later with Dave Robson, another team member, she wrote
the definitive Smalltalk textbook.

But the Learning Research Group was a veiy different place without
Kay, its font of ideas. "It was like getting our heart cut out when he left,"
Merry recalled. "It wasn't too long after he left that we had another
Pajaro Dunes offsite. I remember that being veiy sad, the first Pajaro
Dunes when Alan wasn't diere. We missed him very badly. It really was
in many ways the end of a lot of the good stuff."

The rest of them hung on for another couple of years, finishing old
projects. Some started looking for new challenges. Larry Tesler, fed up
by his fruitless quest to interest Xerox in the
Notetaker, was awaiting only a sign of when and where he should go.

That sign appeared one day in 1979, when a Silicon Valley legend in the making walked through PARC's front door.

Thus we come to Steven
P. Jobs.

The Apple Computer co-founders visit to
PARC,
from which he reputedly spirited off the ideas that later
made
the
Apple
Macintosh famous,
is
one of the foundation legends of
personal computing, as replete with drama and consequence as the story
of David
and Goliath or the fable of the mouse and the lion with an
injured
paw.
It
holds enough material to
serve
the mythmaking of not one
corporation but two, Xerox and Apple.
If
one seeks proof of its impor­
tance,
one need look no further than the fact that to this
date
no two peo­
ple
involved in the episode recollect it quite the same way.

For
a chronicler of PARC this presents a unique difficulty.
No
anecdote
from PARC's
history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony.
The
collective memory of the Jobs visit and of its aftermath is
so
vivid that
some former
PARC
scientists are no longer sure whether they were there
themselves, or just heard about it later.
PARC
engineers
and
their guests
from
Apple
disagree with each other (and among dremselves) about who
delivered which portions of the demonstration; on how many demos
there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw
an Alto or a Dorado; and whether Steve Jobs was desperate to get a look
at PARC's technology, or so dubious about anything produced by a big
corporation that he had to be wheedled into going in the first place.

Some of these discrepancies result from the demo's patchwork nature.
"Nobody knows everything that happened, because there's nobody that
was there all the time," says Larry Tesler, who was present for more of it
than most.

Nobody, that is, except Adele Goldberg, who nevertheless agrees with
Tesler that it is difficult for almost anyone to have a lock on the demo's
ultimate truth. She thinks of the Jobs demo in terms of the story about
the eight blind men and the elephant, each one stroking a different part
of the same animal: "It's unbelievable to me the number of eyes on this
elephant in people's memories. It just astounds me. Sometimes I just
have to go, 'I'm right! Because I was the only one there all the time!'"

Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple's mythmaking rather
than PARC's. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a
priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs's peerless per­spicacity as Xerox's obtuseness. The author who wrote, "You can have
your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery
.
. . the slickest trick of
all was Apple s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center"
perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at
what really happened.

Yet it is possible to resolve all these accounts and reconstruct a stoiy
that has never before been told in its entirety. To take the most obvious
questions first: There were two separate demonstrations, not one, and
the second covered all the most secret material. They occurred in
December 1979. The computer was almost surely an Alto and the prin­cipal demonstrators were Goldberg, Tesler, Dan Ingalls, and Diana
Merry. Steve Jobs was initially skeptical of what PARC might have to
offer but allowed his engineers to convince him otherwise. As for Jobs's
acuity, he later admitted that he was shown three mind-bending innova­tions at PARC, but the first one was so dazzling it blinded him to the sig­nificance of the second and third.

Perhaps most important, the Steve Jobs demo was not a random event
or a stroke of luck for Apple, as it has sometimes been portrayed. Apple's
engineers
knew what they were after.
They had
taken great
pains to plan
for the
moment, and they arrived at
PARC fully
prepared
to ask the right
questions
and interpret the answers.
The seed
of the famous
Job’s demo,
in fact,
had
been carefully planted eight
months
earlier.

The
occasion was a meeting on
April 2, 1979,
in an office building
at
9200 Sunset Boulevard in West
Hollywood. The
host was
Xerox Devel­
opment Corporation, a unique
little fiefdom
that operated with great
independence from the headquarters
in Stamford.

Steve Jobs,
the quintessential countercultural entrepreneur, was
there to offer the corporate behemoth
of Xerox
a deal.
He
knew
Xerox
desired to invest in Apple, which
would soon
go public
in
one
of
the
most eagerly anticipated stock offerings
of the
era. Jobs
was
wiling to
let
the company in on the ground
floor in
return for
access to Xerox
technology—just what technology, he
was
not yet quite
sure—and
to
Xerox's
marketing knowledge.

This was the sort of pitch the
principals of Xerox
Development
Corpo­
ration
were
used to hearing.
Formed for the
purpose of making
strategic
investments in small technology
companies, XDC
existed
as a sort of per­
sonal playground for a brilliant but
rather
irksome executive
named
Abraham Zarem. Xerox
had acquired Dr.
Abe
Zarem the same
way it
got
Max
Palevsky: by purchasing his company.
In
his case it
was Pasadena-based
Electro-Optical Systems, which, as its name implied,
did research
in leading-edge optical technologies, including lasers.
When Xerox
bought
EOS
in 1962, Joe Wilson predicted that within a decade most of
the corporation's profits would come from such new technologies.
That
never happened, but the acquisition did turn Zarem into
Xerox's
single
largest shareholder, a distinction he held until dislodged
by Palevsky
seven years later.
By
then Xerox, disenchanted with
Zarem's costly and
fruitless attempts to transform
EOS
into
a
major government
contractor,
was
searching for a way to keep him happy but distracted.
The answer was
to create a venture unit and place him in charge. Thus was
XDC born.

For all his faults, Zarem was an experienced hand
at
the
difficult
process
of
moving technology from the laboratory to
the
commercial
marketplace; that was how he had made
EOS
into an attractive acqui­sition target in the first place. By 1979, seeing that the same familiar
issues had sprung up around PARC's work, he resolved to stick his
nose in. His idea was to turn the technology over to a young, hungry
company with a modest cost structure—one that would not dither
endlessly about whether a promising innovation would fit into its tradi­tion-encrusted product line but would simply march ahead (while pay­ing Xerox royalties). A company, say, like Apple.

The idea was not wholly implausible. Apple was coming on strong.
Started in the proverbial Silicon Valley garage by Jobs and his high school
classmate Steve Wozniak, Apple had successfully negotiated the transi­tion in its product line from kit versions of Woz's little personal computer
to a more versatile version, the Apple II. This machine was unique in the
hobbyist market. It came already assembled, with a keyboard (although it
required a separate monitor). Shortly after Jobs's appearance before
Zarem's group, Apple started bundling it with VisiCalc, a unique software
program known as a financial spreadsheet—a "killer app" that would
single-handedly turn the Apple II into a popular businessman's tool.

With fewer than forty employees in 1978, Apple was already one of the
most sought-after investments among the small community of specula­tive private investors known as venture capitalists. When the company
raised $7 million in "mezzanine" financing during the summer of 1979,
traditionally one of the last private offerings before a company sells stock
to the public, the sixteen buyers included some of the most prominent
institutional investors in the country. Xerox would almost surely have
been shut out, had not one of Jobs's advisors finally won a long-standing
argument.