Dealers of Lightning (86 page)

Levy, Steven.
Insanely Great.
New York: Viking, 1994.

Malone, Michael S.
The Big Score: The Billion-Dollar Story of Silicon
Valley.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1985.

Manes, Stephen, and Paul Andrews.
Gates.
Garden City, N.Y.: Dou­bleday, 1993.

Marsh, Barbara. A
Corporate Tragedy.
Garden City, New York: Dou­bleday & Co., 1985.

McConnell, Steve.
Code Complete:
A
Practical Handbook of Software
Construction.
Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1993.

Metcalfe, Robert M.
Packet Communications.
San Jose, Calif.: Peer to
Peer, 1996.

Moritz, Michael.
The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Com­puter.
New York: Morrow, 1984.

Palfreman, Jon, and Doron Swade.
The Dream Machine.
New York:
BBC/Parkwest Publishers, 1992.

Reid, T. R.
The Chip.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

Rheingold, Howard.
Tools for Thought.
New York: Simon & Schuster,
1988.

Shasta, Dennis E., and Cathy A. Lazere.
Out of Their Minds: The Lives
and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists.
New York: Dub-
Copernicus, 1995.

Smith, Douglas K., and Robert C. Alexander.
Fumbling the Future.
New York: Morrow, 1988.

Strassmann, Paul A.
The Politics of Information Management.
New
Canaan, Conn.: Information Economics Press, 1995.

Stross, Randall E.
Steve Jobs and the NExT Big Thing.
New York:
Atheneum, 1993.

Ullmann, Ellen.
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discon­tents.
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.

Wallace, James, and Jim Erickson.
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the
Making of the Microsoft Empire.
New York: Wiley, 1992.

Oral Histories

Clark, Wesley, interview by Judy O'Neill, New York, N.Y., 3 May 1990.
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minn.

Engelbart, Douglas C., interview by Jon Eklund, Washington, D.C., 4
May 1984. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.

Jobs, Steven P., interview by Daniel Morrow, Palo Alto, Calif., 20 April
1995. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Licklider, J. C. R., interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg,
Cambridge, Mass., 28 October 1988. Charles Babbage Institute,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn.

Ornstein, Severo, interview by Judy O'Neill, Woodside, Cal., 6 March
1990. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Min­neapolis, Minn.

Sutherland, Ivan, interview by William Aspray, Pittsburgh, Penn., 1
May 1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Min­neapolis, Minn.

Taylor, Robert W., interview by William Aspray, Palo Alto, Calif., 28
February 1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, Minn.

Acknowledgments

n a very real sense this book was born one day in September
1996, when Steve Jobs came to lunch at the
Los Angeles
Times.
As a technology reporter for the newspaper I was
invited to join the select company. I vividly remember Jobs attired in an
elegant black turtleneck, a pair of simple wire-rim glasses perched on his
aquiline nose. I remember that he picked at his vegetarian lunch while
flanked by two of his top lieutenants at Pixar Studios, which had recently
scored a resounding success with the release of the movie
Toy Story
and,
further, that he steadfastly turned away all questions about the burning
high-tech industry issues of the day—Microsoft v. Netscape, the long
decline of Apple Computer,
et cetera, et cetera.

"That's my former life," he said when I tested him with one more
query about the ailing Apple (this was well before his return to the
company as interim chief executive). "The great thing about being
involved with Pixar is that I don't have to think about any of that." With
a satisfied grin he spread his arms to take in John Lasseter, the talented
director of
Toy Story,
on his right, and Edwin Catmull, Pixar's chief
technical officer, on his left.

Jobs hewed to his resolve almost to the very end of the meal. The dis­cussion had drifted onto an oddity of computing history: that the science
of computer graphics had virtually been born at the University of Utah.
Catmull was an alumnus of this little-known program, as were—he rat­tled off a hall-of-fame roster: Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics;
John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems; Alan Kay, the renowned
proselytizer of personal computing (then at Apple). Bob Taylor, the Pen­tagon grantmaker who financed the birth of the Internet, had spent a
year there. Several of them, he added, went on to refine their work at
Xerox PARC.

That gave me one last opening. As a technology writer I could not but
have noticed the glancing references to PARC that cropped up repeat­edly in newspaper and magazine articles, usually describing it as the
source of technology exploited by Microsoft and Apple. I had been
unable to find enough written about PARC to fully satisfy my curiosity
about the place. But I had learned enough to know at least one famous
story—the one about Steve Jobs and his legendary demo.

"Tell me," I said. "You saw what was happening at PARC. Why do you
think Xerox never was able to exploit the technology fully?"

Suddenly
Toy Story
and Pixar were forgotten. For the next twenty
minutes Jobs was an unstoppable fount of theory and speculation on
the subject of PARC. When he was through one thing was clear to me:
that much about this story was still waiting to be told.

As I learned over the many months of inquiry and self-education that
followed, any project of this scope is necessarily a collaborative effort. My
closest collaborators were the scores of scientists, engineers, and execu­tives now or previously associated with Xerox PARC who graciously con­tributed their time and memories to the foregoing chronicle. Time and
again I was astonished and gratified at the enthusiasm with which these
busy men and women opened their minds and hearts to help a stranger
reconstruct a cherished part of their own pasts. Even stronger than the
mystique PARC experts on our own world is the one it exerts on the souls
of those who worked there.

They welcomed me into their offices and homes, took time out from
pressing business, provided me with invaluable research materials.
They submitted to my often uninformed questioning, sometimes over
multiple sessions lasting several hours each, followed by further
queries by e-mail or telephone. Finally several consented to read
drafts of portions of this book to correct stray errors, misconceptions,
and injustices. Any that remain are my own.

For their time and recollections I would like to thank William Atkin­son, Robert Belleville, David K. Biegelson, Daniel G. Bobrow, David R.
Boggs, John Seely Brown, Stuart K. Card, Wesley A. Clark, Lynn Con­way, Rigdon Currie, L. Peter Deutsch, Bill Duvall, Jerome I. Elkind,
John Ellenby, William English, Douglas Fairbaim, Edward R. Fiala,
Charles M. Geschke, Adele Goldberg, Marian Goldeen, Jacob E. Gold­man, Laura Gould, William F. Gunning, Harold H. Hall, Daniel H.
Ingalls, Charles Irby, Chris Jeffers, Richard E. Jones, Ted Kaehler, Alan C.
Kay, Roy Lahr, Butler W. Lampson, Charles Lee, David Liddle, Edward
M. McCreight, Carver Mead, Diana Meny-Shapiro, Robert M. Met­calfe, James G. Mitchell, James H. Morris, and Timothy Mott.

Also, Severo Ornstein, George E. Pake, Max Palevsky, Rod Perkins,
Steve Purcell, Jef Raskin, Ron Rider, Jeff Rulifson, John F. Shoch,
Richard Shoup, Charles Simonyi, Alvy Ray Smith, William J. Spencer,
Robert Spinrad, Robert F. Sproull, M. Frank Squires, Gary K. Stark­weather, Paul Strassmann, Bert Sutherland, Robert W. Taylor, Warren
Teitelman, Lawrence G. Tesler, Charles P. Thacker, David Thomburg,
Myron Tribus, John C. Urbach, Smokey Wallace, John Warnock, Barry
Wessler, George M. White, and George R. White.

Geri Thoma, my agent at Elaine Markson Literary Agency in New
York, contributed her confidence in this project before I was sure a proj­ect existed. Laureen Connelly Rowland, my editor at HarperBusiness,
strengdiened my resolve with her enthusiasm and refined the manuscript
immeasurably with her wise and elegant pen. My friends and editors at
the
Los Angeles Times
deserve my gratitude for their forbearance over
the lengthy period needed to bring this work to fruition.

My wife, Deborah, was a loving and steadfast partner in this project
from beginning to end, whether
the
demand was for the heavy labor
of transcribing interviews or for the definitive and lucid insights that
alone can rescue a hopelessly snarled chapter from the hell of a weary
writer's bewilderment. Lastly, I owe more than I can express to my
wonderful sons, Andrew and David, who will inherit the world PARC
made.
Index