Chris Jeffers took a deep breath before walking into the big corner conference room on Porter Drive. Alan Kay, who had recruited his childhood friend to join PARC as a sort of amanuensis and chief of staff, had guided him through the rigorous interview process and as far as this last hurdle, the delivering of a technical presentation to his future colleagues sitting in a sort of plenary session. Waiting for Jeffers inside the room were about twenty scientists and engineers, all lounging improbably on beanbag chairs upholstered in a ghastly mustard-yellow fabric. The weekly meeting about to convene had come to be known simply as “Dealer.” It was already a PARC institution.
Bob Taylor liked to tell people that his style of managing CSL combined the best features of all the research labs he had ever known. But its structure sprouted largely from a small kernel: the management principles developed at ARPA. Taylor’s predecessors had bequeathed him the axiom that the best way to manage research was to select the best people in a given field and set them loose. Scientists with the lofty skills ARPA demanded, Ivan Sutherland said, “are people who have ideas you can either back or not, but they are quite difficult to influence. You can maybe convince them that something’s of interest and importance, but you cannot tell them what to do.”
On the other hand, you can find a way for them to tell each other. The uncompromising give-and-take of Taylor’s ARPA contractor meetings lent itself to reproduction at PARC in the form of “Dealer.”
The name derived from the book Beat the Dealer, by Edward O. Thorp, an MIT math professor who had developed a surefire system for winning at blackjack—“beating the dealer”—by counting the high- and low-value cards dealt out in hands. (This truly effective system would make the unassuming Ed Thorp the godfather of professional blackjack card-counting.)
Taylor was not much of a blackjack buff. What interested him about Beat the Dealer was its compelling metaphor of a doughty individual fielding the challenge of a group of trained and determined adversaries. In casino blackjack the dealer plays against everyone at the table. In Taylor’s variant a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it against dissection by his peers.
Dealer was soon institutionalized as the beating heart of CSL’s professional organism, a time when the entire lab would gather in a room furnished with the beanbag chairs that Peter Deutsch and his wife, Barbara, had discovered at a friend’s shop in Berkeley. The meetings, which were usually on a Tuesday (although the designated day changed from time to time), were scheduled more or less at lunchtime and generally lasted an hour. Attendance was mandatory for all of Taylor’s subordinates, the only lab rule he rigidly enforced, and the other labs were welcome to attend, at least at first. Later, as PARC expanded and the crowd at Dealer threatened to become unmanageable, non-CSL personnel became welcome only upon invitation or special dispensation. (Kay, though an SSL member, owned a permanent pass.)
Taylor would open each session with ten to fifteen minutes of housekeeping items before yielding the floor to that week’s designated dealer. At that point the game transmuted into something more like poker. It was the dealer’s prerogative to set not only the topic of discussion, but the rules of debate.
“I wanted to have conditions where someone could get up to the table and set rules as czar,” Taylor recalled. “You could say, no interruptions; or interrupt whenever you want. Or I’ll only debate x, y, or z; or only righthanders can argue.” The discussion topics were similarly unconstrained. Certainly they tended toward issues of importance to the lab, but that category was broadly defined. Bob Flegal, a CSL graphics expert, once demonstrated for his colleagues how to take a bicycle apart and lubricate the parts, and Ed Fiala was famous for a memorable presentation on how programming algorithms resemble kitchen recipes.
Outsiders arriving with influential backing got extra latitude, as happened when Kay surprised Jeffers with the news that he would be making a speech at the next Dealer. Jeffers, the farthest thing from a trained computer scientist, had spent the previous few years first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and then as an official in the agency’s Washington office. He told Kay there was no way he could cook up an appropriate presentation to the digital elect of PARC.
Kay advised, “Just talk about something you know.”
“So I gave a speech about the sociolinguistics of Nepalese language and culture, and we had a good time with that,” Jeffers recalled with relief. “Actually, I felt quite at home.”
This was also part of Taylor’s scheme. Once accepted into the lab, you were immune to the petty harassments common to university departments. “You were part of the extended family,” related John Shoch, a member of Kay’s lab. “No one ever asked, ‘Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?’” The alternative, Taylor believed, was for one-upmanship to hobble the unfettered exchange of ideas. “If someone tried to push their personality rather than their argument, they’d find that it wouldn’t work.”
But the argument had best be carefully thought out. Anyone trying to slip an unsound concept past this group was sure to be stopped short by an explosive “Bullshit!” from Thacker or “Nonsense!” from the beetle-browed ARPANET veteran Severe Ornstein. Then would follow a cascade of angry denunciations: “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” “That’ll never work!” “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard!” Lampson might add a warp-speed chapter-and-verse deconstruction of the speaker’s sorry reasoning. If the chastened dealer was lucky (and still standing), the discussion might finally turn to how he might improve on his poor first effort.
The criticisms could be particularly ruthless when Dealer turned to the qualifications of a job candidate. Scientific prodigies who had spent half their lives defending abstruse research before hostile faculty committees were easily unnerved by this small group slouched in their beanbags, rudely firing off comments of annihilating incisiveness. Newcomers almost always came away from Dealer profoundly unsettled.
But even the most experienced lecturers could get themselves man-handled. The featured speaker at one memorable Dealer was Alan Newell, a distinguished professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, or CMU, who was not only friend but mentor to a good half-dozen of the engineers in the room. Newell literally had written the textbook on computer architectures. On this occasion the agenda called for him to solve a tricky programming problem in front of a video camera so his students back in Pittsburgh would be able to study his thought process step by step, as though debugging lines of code. Within the first few steps, however, he unwittingly committed a rudimentary mistake. What the students got on tape instead was a roomful of smartassed engineers peppering the increasingly flustered Newell with bluntly phrased suggestions about how to recover from his blunder.
Only once could anyone recall the group’s being specifically ordered to go easy on a guest. In early 1973 Pake decided to hire Harold Hall, an avuncular research executive who had worked at ARPA and Ford, to be the long-awaited replacement for Bill Gunning as SSL chief. Hall was not exempt from the ritual of the mass interview, but Pake did not want him roughhoused, either.
“Taylor obviously had been told that he had to make sure Harold got a nice respectful reception,” recalled the CSL engineer Chuck Geschke. “So rather than have him come in right at the beginning of Dealer, Bob first gave us a little lecture on appropriate modes of behavior and how most executives in the Xerox Corporation wouldn’t be accustomed to what normally went on in Dealer.” Jim Morris, an acid-tongued transplant from CMU, was sitting in the back. “Suddenly,” Geschke recalled, “Morris said, ‘Wait a minute! I get it! You’re trying to tell us that you’re just about to send a piece of china into the bull shop!’”
But such special handling was rare. The pitiless judgments dispensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught that an answer can be right or wrong, “one” or “zero,” but not anything in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half-right, or had made a decent try. “There was nothing personal about it,” said Ornstein. “We didn’t want to be coddled or have our time wasted.”
That is not to say that the system was entirely objective. One who thought the lab occasionally used the brutish spirit of Dealer to enforce its own prejudgments was Bob Metcalfe, who arrived at CSL in 1972 with the reassuring credentials of a Harvard and MIT education. Metcalfe was acerbic and free-speaking, a man who never met an ego he couldn’t pierce. At Dealer his radar often detected the unmistakable “ping” of people pulling rank.
“I’m being cynical now, but if you were from Berkeley or MIT or, especially, CMU, you’d give your talk, you’d get some questions, you’d get congratulated, and you’d get a job offer,” he said. “But if you were some poor schmuck from the University of Arizona, they’d grill you and it was all over. In other words, if the department head at CMU said you were cool, that was good enough for them.”
Others did not overlook the converse of Taylor’s effort to promote a group sensibility at CSL. If there were no walls within the lab, there were certainly barriers erected against the outside. “It was almost a cult-like thing,” remembered Lynn Conway, an SSL engineer whose background included work on an IBM supercomputer. “I’m not easily attracted to cults and it always made me a little uncomfortable. Taylor’s a very powerful personality. Here he was in the background with these gunslingers out front and the groupies in back.”
Taylor’s chief gunslinger was Butler Lampson. His combination of a razor-sharp intellect with peerless debating skills raised the bar for new ideas to an intimidating height. It was not impossible to win an argument with Lampson, but it was not at all rare for him to win one even when he was wrong. Even as practiced a navigator of Ideaspace as Alan Kay could be backed to the wall when one of his flights of fancy came up against Lampson’s rigorous command of pragmatic engineering. Routed in the battles, Kay sometimes had to retreat and regroup for another run at the fence. “I can’t ever remember winning an argument with Butler on the same day,” he said later. “I could win quite a few on the second day. His mind worked about twice as fast as anyone else’s.”
Lampson was fiercely intellectual, an inveterate kibitzer whose finely realized insights and designs, often recorded on the run on scraps of yellow paper, became indispensable ingredients of more PARC inventions than anyone has bothered to count. He could also be ferociously temperamental, a fearsome screamer and tantrum-thrower when thwarted or contradicted. Once Warren Teitelman managed to goad Lampson into firing a glass ashtray at him. “Butler tended to intimidate people,” recalled the outspoken Teitelman. “He made it very difficult for those who didn’t think quite as fast as he did or weren’t quite as smart.”
On this occasion “Butler was doing one of these ‘That’s ridiculous!’ things, and I just replied, ‘Why? Because you say it’s ridiculous?’ and he heaved the ashtray at me,” Teitelman recalled. The ashtray shattered harmlessly on the wall behind him, but Teitelman understood the lesson, “He was the 400-pound gorilla in that lab. You had to be real careful.” Teitelman’s friends suggested he attend future Dealers wearing a hard hat.
Outside Dealer with its deliberate intellectual gunplay, PARC in this period was a model of casual collegiality. The place retained the ambiance of a college campus, which was unsurprising. Most of the staff, after all, were fresh out of grad school (some were still working toward their advanced degrees while working full-time at PARC). Unmarried or with young families, their social spheres would not extend much beyond their laboratory colleagues until much later, when those families began to grow and exercised their own gravitational pull. For now, driven by the thrill of pursuing a common vision, they would work together all day and late into the night.
To let off steam there were family picnics and a softball team Rick Jones organized to play in a Palo Alto community league. In the spacious open yard behind Building 34, to which the computer and systems science labs relocated in early 1972, was strung a volleyball net for daily lunchtime matches.
For the extended family of the Computer Science Lab, Bob Taylor served as a sort of social director. On weekends there might be touch football (quarterback: Bob Taylor) or marathon sessions of “Diplomacy,” a board game whose framework of negotiation, alliance, and betrayal fed the host’s appetite for intrigue, at his Palo Alto house. “That was great fun, when you had nothing to do for a whole eight or ten hours on a Saturday or Sunday,” one participant recalled.
This was the sunny side of Taylor’s personality. When he was playing the role of paterfamilias, as opposed to sneering at the physicists or disputing a football ref’s call with an opponent’s shirt grasped in his fist, one could appreciate the 95 percent of the time he could be “an absolutely charming person,” as Jones recalled, without thinking of the other 5 percent when he was a rude and arrogant beast. Even his beleaguered superiors could laugh at his foibles and persnickety habits, as they did one Halloween when half of CSL came dressed as Bob Taylor, in nearly identical plaid slacks, blue blazers, and white turtleneck sweaters, then sat together at a table in the cafeteria with pipes in one hand and Dr Peppers in the other.
“There isn’t an organization newly begun where you don’t find those honeymoon years where there’s a special bond among people,” reflected Jeffers, who recognized the phenomenon from the Peace Corps. “It was true there, it was true in PARC. It’s true in anything that’s new. It’s a great period. Everyone should be a part of something at the beginning.”
This atmosphere of professional and personal fellowship was a powerful factor behind some of the center’s earliest projects, including MAXC. They called the process of informal collaboration by the name “Tom Sawyering.” Like Tom with his paintbrush and whitewash, someone would set forth his idea or project—whether it was in a formal meeting or a hallway bull session was unimportant—to mobilize a few intrigued colleagues in an attempt to make it happen. If you saw a glimmer of how to implement a new operation in microcode, you would gather a few expert coders in a room and have at the problem until every whiteboard in the place was filled with boxes and arrows and symbols as arcane as Nordic runes. If you had a big project with a lot of soldering to be done, everyone who knew how to wield a soldering gun strapped on his holster.
If an idea worked, the team stuck together for the next three or six months to complete the job; if not, everyone simply dispersed like free electrons in search of a new creative valence. Thacker viewed this system as “a continuous form of peer review. Projects that were exciting and challenging received something much more important than financial and administrative support. They received help and participation…As a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to wither.”
In this spirit Systems Science Lab engineers wrote code for Computer Science Lab hardware, CSL designers helped SSL build prototypes, and the General Science Lab’s physicists chipped in with valuable insights into material properties and electrical behavior (as when Dave Biegelsen told Starkweather how to use sound waves to modulate a light beam and got his offhand suggestion incorporated into the world’s first laser printer).
At one point Tom Sawyering even begot an audacious extracurricular project. This was the so-called “Bose Conspiracy,” which was hatched at a poker game at Rick Jones’s house. Jones, Kay, Thacker, Dick Shoup, Chuck Geschke, and a couple of others had fallen into a discussion of the merits of stereo speakers. Kay was a particular fan of the state-of-the-art Bose 901s, which came with their own electronic equalizer and cost $1,100 the set (in the pre-oil shock dollars of the early 1970s). He was also the only one in the group who owned a pair, having acquired them on his PARC budget as part of a real-time music synthesizer his group was developing.
“You know,” someone said as cards riffled in the background, “there’s no reason why we couldn’t make the electronics work just as well. And for a lot less money, too.”
Appropriating a basement room in Building 34, the group took apart Kay’s speakers and painstakingly analyzed the design. They bought cone speakers from the same Kentucky factory that supplied them to Bose, and on a shrieking diamond-toothed radial saw in Jones’s garage they cut and shaped the sound baffles out of high-density particle board. (The marathon session left Kay covered with an inch-thick coating of sawdust and Jones with a lifelong case of tinnitus.) Then they apportioned the assembly tasks—one conspirator handled the soldering, another installed the speaker cones, and so on—the same way they had distributed the tasks on MAXC, which happened to be running contentedly in its own air-conditioned room a few doors away. All told, they manufactured more than forty pairs at $125 each. The buyers among their PARC colleagues could customize the units with their choice of grille cloth but were otherwise challenged to tell the knockoffs apart from the real thing. No one could.
“It was so typical of PARC,” Kay recalled. “If you didn’t know how something was done, you just rolled your own.”
The realization that something extraordinary was germinating on a Palo Alto hillside soon started permeating the world of computer science, thanks in part to the researchers’ eagerness to give demos to friends visiting from Stanford, Berkeley, or Carnegie-Mellon. The names on the employee roster added further luster. Gathering Lampson, Kay, and Deutsch under one roof would have been enough on its own to make PARC a byword; but the center employed a dozen others with reputations nearly as luminous. Kay was fond of proclaiming that of the top hundred computer scientists in the country, fifty-six worked at PARC.
Or sometimes he was quoted saying fifty-eight, or seventy-eight. Kay’s formulation has appeared in a hundred different versions, none of which is correct in a mathematical sense (PARC never employed as many as seventy-eight computer scientists). But all are accurate metaphorically PARC had become the premier draw for the country’s best computer scientists, like Disneyland for seven-year-olds. Under the circumstances it was easy to imagine that almost every talented young scientist or engineer in the land was already inside.
“People were accusing us of monopolizing the field,” recalled Jack Goldman. One day at a formal luncheon he was cornered by Jerome Wiesner, the president of MIT. “Wiesner accused me of destroying the ability of universities to teach computing because we were grabbing all the good people.”
Delighted as he was by the complaint, Goldman recognized that the key to PARC’s success was not the head count of researchers but their exceptional gifts. He found it hard to keep away from his pampered child. Arriving in Palo Alto in the evening on a company plane, sometimes with his wife along (“My only inhibition to her coming along was it stifled my ability to play poker with the guys”), he would drive directly to the lab to drink in the atmosphere.
“The lights would all be lit and dozens of people around, even it if was nine or ten at night,” he recalled. “Often they were playing computer games. Now, just remember, in those days computer games were not what they are today. This was a new thing. These guys were literally inventing computer games and learning how to use the machine.”
Yet there was a downside to the cheery insularity and game-playing that Goldman so enjoyed witnessing at PARC. For one thing, the center’s attitude problem was growing worse. Xerox headquarters discovered this to its dismay the day that attitude got laid out for public view in the pages of a rather unsavory magazine.