One day early in December 1972, Rick Jones and Gloria Warner drove to the San Francisco airport to meet George Pake’s plane from New York. Normally they would not have made the effort. The established routine whenever Pake returned from a visit to Xerox headquarters was for Warner to send a car for him. This time she canceled the arrangement. The moment Pake saw his two assistants waiting at the gate, he got a bad feeling.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“George, you better have a look at this,” Jones said. He handed over a tabloid-sized biweekly magazine he had bought that morning at a newsstand across from the Stanford campus. Pake’s glance took in the cover and its unfamiliar banner: Rolling Stone.
“What is this?” Pake asked.
“Start on page fifty,” Jones replied.
Pake opened the magazine to a feature article entitled “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums.” Its language was loose and profane, its attitude toward computer science individualistic and anti-corporate, and among its leading characters were the not particularly presentable scientists of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, shown lounging about in their sandals and T-shirts. The date on the cover was December the seventh. If Pake happened to notice it was Pearl Harbor Day he would have thought it grimly appropriate.
“As we were driving back from the airport,” Jones remembered, “all I could hear was George sitting in the back seat, leafing through the article and going, ‘Oh, no…Oh, no…Oh, no!’”
The piece that was to cause Xerox and PARC so much distress over the following few weeks had in a sense been underwritten by Xerox money. Rolling Stone was then five years old. Its founder, a Berkeley dropout named Jann Wenner who had started the magazine on a shoestring, had recently turned up backing from a decidedly mainstream source: Max Palevsky, who had left the Xerox board that May. Always in search of entrée to the snazzier milieus of countercultural life, Palevsky had placed some of his gains from the sale of SDS at Wenner’s disposal and taken for himself the title of Rolling Stone’s chairman of the board.
By this time, Rolling Stone had matured well beyond its origins as a fresh voice in rock journalism and had turned into a purveyor of offbeat but incisive reporting on a wide range of issues, including presidential politics and economic policy. But its audience was still essentially a college age crowd, as tuned in to the music of Hendrix, Joplin, and the Grateful Dead as to the writing of Hunter S. Thompson.
Rick Jones had never heard of it before that morning, when Gloria Warner knocked on his door to report that a friend had just called her from San Francisco to say PARC had been written up.
“What the hell is Rolling Stone?” he asked.
“It’s some druggie magazine,” she reported.
Jones swallowed hard. “We’d better get a look at it.”
Together they drove to an off-campus newsstand where they found the magazine prominently displayed. Before they had read to the end of “Spacewar” they knew they had a major crisis on their hands.
With Bob Taylor’s apparent permission, but to the complete ignorance of anyone else in PARC management, the writer Stewart Brand had apparently been ranging freely through the Computer Science Lab for weeks. Brand was a technology fancier whose recent sale of the Whole Earth Catalog, his popular offbeat guidebook, had left him with the money and time to conduct a personal grand tour of the Bay Area’s leading computer research facilities. (A few years later he would resurface as a founder of The Well, a pioneering on-line computer service.) At the outset, he said later, some old friends at Doug Engelbart’s lab put him in touch with Bill English at PARC. But it was Taylor, he recalled, who actually arranged for him to walk into the lab past the lone receptionist who counted, for the moment, as PARC’s entire security force.
“Spacewar” was Brand’s travel report. From its dramatic opening scene, an imaginary battle among players of the eponymous interactive spaceship-and-torpedo computer game invented at MIT in 1962, the article captured the adolescent ferment at the heart of the computer culture. Echoing the phantasmagoric tone of hacker favorite E. E. “Doc” Smith’s cosmic swashbucklers (“Beams, rods, and lances of energy flamed and flared…”), “Spacewar” painted its subjects as dashing young figures engaged in dynamic battle with a sinister state.
Conspicuous among those heroes was Alan Kay, who Brand introduced as something of a hacker eminence offering his own definition of “the standard Computer Bum”: “He’s someone about as straight as you’d expect hot-rodders to look. It’s that kind of fanaticism. A true hacker is not a group person. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship…They’re kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals.” Kay’s assessment of the computer scientist’s professional mores could not have been better designed to raise hackles in the Stamford executive suite. “People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all,” he observed, “and you have plenty of time for screwing around.”
There was much in what he said, and much of himself. The hackers he evoked were the kind of independent souls more easily found on the university campuses where he had spent much of his life than in traditional corporate headquarters, which did not figure in “Spacewar” except as the enemy lair.
Kay’s idiosyncratic techno-romanticism colored Brand’s entire piece. His heartfelt view of the computer as a tool for at once simplifying and enriching human life came through unambiguously in his breezy apotheosis of the hacker as gamester-king.
In terms of PARC’s internal and external politics, however, Taylor’s depiction in the article was bound to reverberate even more. He and his happy band of ex-ARPA warriors came across as if they owned the place, or at least as though there was nothing much more to PARC than their work. They talked as if they had won the battle for the computer’s future and were already writing its history.
Brand described PARC’s scientists as aggies in a game of marbles and Taylor as the center’s “chief marble collector” (which was accurate enough, for the moment). Asked about his job title, Taylor got cagey: “It’s not very sharply defined. You could call me a research planner.”
But there was no need for him to be more specific. When Brand described the lab’s “general bent of research” as “soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it,” there was no mistaking whose philosophy was being articulated. As for the duly appointed director of CSL, Jerry Elkind merited not a single mention in “Spacewar,” an ominous token of his tenuous authority.
“Spacewar” delighted PARC’s computer scientists, particularly the younger set fresh out of graduate school. And why not? They had welcomed Brand, fed his notebook with their ambitions, and sat docilely for Rolling Stone’s glamorous photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was taking a sort of sabbatical from her usual fare of movie and rock stars to get the architects of the future down on film.
But their attitude came as a disagreeable shock to the company. Xerox’s enormous bureaucracy served a customer base that was the very definition of huge, centralized, and impersonal. It manufactured big machines whose output got measured by the millions of pages. Stamford’s planners no more anticipated placing computing power in individual hands than they would think of installing a copier at every secretary’s desk.
If the computer scientists of PARC had intended to throw down a challenge to those who paid their salaries, they could scarcely have chosen a more provocative way to do so. Xerox had once been a small, scrappy, risk-taking company, but the long years of monopoly had driven that sort of passion clear out of the corridors of power. What had replaced it by 1972 was the sober mentality of professional finance and sales management. There was no room for the unexpected, especially where the corporate image was concerned. Headquarters employed platoons of professional image-polishers to protect the corporation against exactly this sort of ambush. The rules were explicit: No employee, from the chief executive down to the lowliest mailroom clerk, could talk to the press without a PR minder in tow. The communications department ruthlessly monitored all press coverage, issuing stern correctives to newspapers or magazines that erred on so much as an executive title.
Yet here was its new multi-million-dollar research center spread out for unsupervised public view in a ratty rock music magazine, with actual Xerox scientists photographed in their T-shirts and jeans, barefooted, lounging self-indulgently in beanbag chairs. In the light of the times and in the context of Rolling Stone’s usual fare, corporate executives could only conclude from their insular perch in Stamford that PARC was reeling out of control, shamelessly squandering the research facility’s budget on adolescent techno-fantasy trips rather than solid, marketable scientific pursuits. This was symbolized by Pake’s (inaccurate) recollection years later that the Rolling Stone article “flat out stat[ed] that a lot of these guys were brilliant druggies. [That] wasn’t the kind of publicity the corporation wanted.”
In fact, the article neither stated nor even remotely implied anything about drug use at PARC. Brand was no Ken Kesey chronicling the escapades of a merry band of stoned-out party guys but a self-styled social theorist interpreting the new technologies against the era’s political backdrop. Nevertheless, for the stolid traditionalists who inhabited Xerox headquarters “Spacewar’s” text and pictures inescapably evoked lax morals and California hippiedom.
Pake was anguished about “Spacewar” because more than almost anyone else at the research center, he was intensely aware of PARC’s shaky standing at headquarters. It had been scarcely a year since John Bardeen had saved the center from extinction. PARC had yet to turn out a product of indisputable value; nor had it garnered the Bell Labs-like renown that would have been proof against further attack. (The notoriety of an article in Rolling Stone would hardly fill that void.) But at least he was insulated by distance from the worst of the shock waves. The same could not be said about Jack Goldman, who was stuck on the East Coast to weather the storm. Murmurs of reproach lurked around every corner on the executive floor: For these slobs you cadged a 20 percent pay differential? More ominously, he was getting blamed for a serious breach of security.
At first Goldman tried to deflect the criticism by arguing that on balance the portrait of PARC was a positive one and that Rolling Stone, alien as it was to the indignant mandarins of Stamford, had an undeniable appeal to the population from which PARC drew its best recruits. “It’s probably indicative of the culture that was prevalent at PARC that they looked up to Rolling Stone as a proper vehicle for their community,” he said later. “It was their peer group who would read about what’s going on there.” But this argument, he acknowledged, unsurprisingly failed to sway “the white-shoe legal types, who looked at Rolling Stone as something to be disdained.” There was no use arguing that more than half of “Spacewar” dealt with Bay Area labs other than PARC (where “Spacewar” the game was in fact seldom played). The piece would be forever remembered as the one that introduced PARC to the world in an entirely undignified light.
In the end Goldman had no choice but to make a show of reining in PARC’s free spirits. Accompanied by a corporate lawyer, he flew out to read the riot act to his pet researchers, paying special attention to those unwise enough to have allowed themselves to be directly quoted, Taylor and Kay.
“I recall almost a sadness on Jack Goldman’s part,” recalled David Thornburg. “Here we were operating in a very free environment, and somehow there was a sense that a trust had been violated. It was made crystal clear to us that this was not all right. If it happened again, the lab was going to be shut down.”
Within weeks the consequences became concrete. The inmates-running-the-asylum democracy that had prevailed since the founding, particularly on the computer science side, was ended. All employees were issued identification badges and instructed to keep them displayed at all times. The building entrances were outfitted with security stations, where visitors were stopped and handed a nondisclosure pledge to sign. (Quirkily enough, the pledge attested that the visitor would not “import” any of his or her ideas into PARC, a departure from customary agreements, which bar visitors from carrying proprietary information out of the lab. In any case, the goal was to protect Xerox from a claim that PARC had misappropriated someone else’s ideas, and it was still in use as of this writing.)
Xerox also clamped down hard on PARC’s contacts with the media, especially the popular press. Although publication in peer-reviewed technical journals was allowed to continue, the articles were closely vetted by corporate examiners newly aware that there might be developments at PARC worth safeguarding.
A few people tried to make light of the new arrangements. Badges got blown up into T-shirt imprints, so they could be more fashionably worn. One employee turned his into a belt buckle. If the guards and receptionists noted that the ID photographs on others had been artfully pasted over with the heads of Mickey Mouse or the face of George Washington cut from a dollar bill, they never said so.
But the atmosphere at CSL and SSL subtly and permanently changed. In a sense the Rolling Stone flap catalyzed a process that was bound to take place anyway. With MAXC behind them and the computer labs’ head counts approaching critical mass, it was time to recognize that their work was too innovative and important to be any longer the grist of carefree gossip. It was time for them to abandon the childishness of prodigies. They were engaged in a greater quest.
At the same time, however, “Spacewar” carried the seed of the PARC mystique farther beyond its boundaries than ever before. Before its publication the center’s fame extended only to the limits of an insular circle of computer pros. Then came Alan Kay, sharing with Stewart Brand’s hip and impressionable readers his assessment of his colleagues as “really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity. The people here all are used to dealing lightning with both hands.”
These were bold words when Kay uttered them to Brand in the fall of 1972. Once PARC unveiled its newest machine a few short months later, they would sound like an understatement.