During the course of 1977 Peter McColough began to fear that his corporation was coming apart at the seams.
The previous few years had been a skein of disappointments and embarrassments for Xerox. In 1975 had come the unraveling of the SDS purchase—“McColough’s Folly”—and the resulting $84.4 million writeoff. The foreign invasion had turned into a full-scale rout, with a hundred thousand inexpensive Japanese copiers sold in a market segment for which Xerox had no competing product. Then IBM and Kodak took direct aim at the heart of Xerox’s traditional customer base by introducing fast new copiers of their own. There were antitrust lawsuits and patent infringement battles. To top it all off, the U.S. economy was in terrible shape, squeezed by the pincers of high inflation and savage recession—an unprecedented combination known as “stagflation.”
The Xerox chairman knew something had to be done to stem the erosion of morale or his best executives and salespersons would flee. His solution was to throw one huge, historic party.
McColough envisioned the Xerox World Conference of November 1977 as a sort of company-wide revival, a last attempt to restore the passion that had fueled its rise nearly twenty years earlier, when Joe Wilson bet the farm on an untested technology and won the world. The guest list would comprise the top 250 executives of the worldwide organization and their spouses. The setting would be Florida’s exquisite Boca Raton Country Club, where the food, accommodations, and entertainment through four days of celebration, exhortation, and rebirth would be first-class all the way. In McColough’s imagination, the affair would evoke the atmosphere of the previous World Conference, held in 1971 when Xerox’s wealth and hubris were at their very peak.
It is not clear which individual first proposed that PARC play a major role at the World Conference. In any case, once McColough heard the idea of using Boca Raton to introduce the technologies PARC had invented to the sales force, he embraced it whole heartedly. PARC would not only get a chance to show off; McColough decreed that one entire day of the four in Boca Raton would be devoted to PARC alone.
One morning that summer, the SSL’s director, Bert Sutherland invited John Ellenby into his office. Ellenby had worked in the Computer Science Lab for three years, during which time he had gained a well-deserved reputation as a man who Got Things Done—schematics realized, prototypes built, projects completed—not at all an easy proposition amid the clash of egos and the religious wars raging unceasingly over engineering and design at PARC.
“If you had a free hand, John, what would you do to show off our work?” Sutherland began. “You see, there’s this big conference coming up for managers from all over the world, and we’ve been invited.”
Ellenby thought for a moment, then asked, “Just what do you mean by a free hand?”
John Ellenby was a slender, pale Briton with a fringe of brown hair crowning his high forehead. His unusually varied education and work experience had included the study of economic geography at the University of London, a teaching post at the London School of Economics, and, following a course in systems engineering from IBM, a dual appointment as a lecturer in computer science at the University of Edinburgh and consultant in computer architecture and graphics to Ferranti Ltd., the pioneering British computer maker. His first encounter with PARC had occurred back in 1971 thanks to Dan Bobrow, who was passing through Edinburgh on a fellowship. Bobrow described PARC to Ellenby and, when he returned stateside, described Ellenby to PARC. Not long after that Ellenby happened to be passing through the Bay Area; an invitation was issued for him to address a Dealer, and in September 1974 he was hired by Jerry Elkind, who no doubt saw in Ellenby’s ability to shuttle so easily between academia and industry a reflection of his own skill in balancing good science and solid pragmatic judgment.
The terms of Ellenby’s employment amounted to a pay cut. Owing to the good salaries he pulled down from two full-time jobs, he lived in relative luxury in a large old stone house in Edinburgh with his sculptress wife, Gillian, and two young sons. “But that was immaterial,” he said later. “The chance was to work at PARC, which was absolutely the top-notch computer sciences lab in the world. So I joined, and we all moved.”
He had worldliness enough to discern at a single glance the dividing line separating PARC’s virtues from its flaws. The former included the work that had produced the Alto and the Ethernet, which impressed him as marvels of elegant design and superb feats of engineering. The latter included Taylor’s dogmatism, which Ellenby believed discouraged thoughtful dissent in the Computer Science Lab. He was dismayed to find genuinely farsighted projects such as Shoup’s Superpaint and Bobrow’s work in artificial intelligence, both of which challenged CSL orthodoxy, hanging on by their fingernails.
“Computer architecture in those days was a major battleground for religious wars,” he recalled, “and Xerox had them big-time.” His first assignment would have him interceding between two of its contending armies.
The task was somehow to get the Alto manufacturing process jump-started. The machine had been designed and prototyped but as yet there were only five in existence. The construction program, it seemed, had mysteriously stalled somewhere between Palo Alto and El Segundo.
As it happened, Ellenby had distinguished himself as an industrial consultant in Great Britain by transforming dysfunctional programs into operational ones. Turning his experienced eye to the Alto, he recognized instantly that the machines were indeed hostages of a religious war—this one between the Computer Science Lab, which designed them, and SDS, whose downtrodden factory staff was tasked with building them to PARC specifications in El Segundo, five hundred miles away.
“El Segundo was a product organization with a lot of pride,” Ellenby recalled. “It had a lot of good guys from the days when they had built a lot of quite impressive machines. And now they were getting fucked over by this copier company that knew how to put powdered coal onto drums that went whistling around and transferred it to paper but didn’t know shit about electronics. So there was a religious problem right there. Then there was this funny group of weird Northern Californians they had to deal with while they were trying to solve their other problems. Meanwhile there was not a lot of respect at PARC for SDS. And nobody was really assigned at PARC to make it all happen. The Alto was kind of a baby looking for its mother.”
Ellenby stepped in to referee. His first achievement was getting El Segundo to complete twenty Altos stuck in the pipeline. Then he took a radical step. Organizing a small cadre of product engineers into an integrated engineering and manufacturing unit he called the Special Programs Group, he arranged for Chuck Thacker’s time machine to be reengineered into an object that could be efficiently mass-produced. The Special Programs Group replaced all the Thackeresque shortcuts, which looked like virtues when the goal was hastily to turn out a serviceable machine with spare parts, but were now merely the sources of annoying glitches.
“No fault of Chuck’s, but the machine was just flaky,” Ellenby said. “I had come from a pretty rigorous background because the machine for which I had been consulting designer at Ferranti, the Argus 700, was designed for very high-reliability process and communications control. I thought that somehow or other a machine that stops for no reason was not a good machine.”
Ellenby’s group added a memory error-correction system similar to the one Thacker had designed for MAXC (but had left off the Alto). This substantially cut the manufacturing cost of the machine by allowing the SPG to use more error-prone, but cheaper, memory chips without compromising the machine’s reliability. The original Alto was almost unmaintainable (“In order to get to something you had to take a lot of other stuff out,” Ellenby recalled); he ordered the innards redesigned so every component would be easily accessible just by opening the cover, as in today’s desktop PCs. The so-called Alto II was both durable and easy to manufacture on a small production line. “We just popped ’em out,” Ellenby said proudly. This was the machine that proliferated throughout PARC as a springboard for some of the most striking technological innovations the world has ever seen.
Soon after the new machines started rolling off the fabrication line in early 1976, however, Ellenby came face to face with the realities of technology politics at Xerox. Heady from the triumph of the Alto II, he forged ahead with a plan to design and manufacture an Alto III. This would be the Holy Grail: a mass-marketable, programmable computer that would exploit the snowballing manifestations of Moore’s Law (such as faster and cheaper memory chips) by offering user-friendly word processing, professional database programs, and more. The goal was for the Special Programs Group to design the machine for manufacture by Xerox’s Office Systems Division, a Dallas-based unit that turned out electric typewriters and other non-copier office machines under the leadership of a former Webster lab chief named Robert Potter.
That July, Xerox’s Display Word Processing Task Force endorsed the plan. For a few short, glorious weeks, official Xerox policy was to service the growing market for electronic word processing with the Alto III, a programmable personal computer that would bear the same relationship to the competition’s glorified typewriters as a Harley does to a tricycle. Ellenby’s group was on target to engineer an inexpensive computer-cum-word processor and printing system for shipment to customers by mid-1978. Had it done so, Xerox would have beaten the IBM PC to market by three years—with an infinitely more sophisticated machine.
But it was not to happen. Bob Potter was not on board and never would be. Potter had visited PARC in 1973, shortly after taking over the Dallas division. But he and the CSL engineers communicated like creatures of different species. “I went out there and I sat in their beanbags, but I just couldn’t get anything out of them,” he groused later. “They were only interested in their own thing. They thought they were four feet above everybody else.”
PARC’s people returned the sentiment, dismissing Potter rudely as a hopeless technical illiterate whose exalted position owed less to managerial aptitude than to having the ear of Archie McCardell, Xerox’s new president, a “bean-counter” with scarcely any instinct for marketing.*
Potter’s group had brought out a low-performance word processor in 1974 that failed in the marketplace. But instead of accepting the office task force’s recommendation that Xerox throw its weight behind the Alto III, he pushed his own new machine, another nonprogrammable word processor called the Xerox 850—essentially a typewriter with enough memory in it to hold a few pages of a business letter long enough to be proofread.
For the rest of the summer Potter’s and Ellenby’s planners staged a battle of numbers, producing contradictory analyses of the Alto’s manufacturing costs to bolster their arguments—Ellenby trying to prove that the Alto could be mass-produced for less than the five-thousand-dollar manufacturing cost of the 850, and Potter that it could never meet its claimed price target.
Ellenby even enlisted the support of Xerox’s most respected manufacturing engineers, experts from the product cost estimation division in Rochester. “The dispute was over screws and things, all the minor stuff,” he recalled. “And they were the experts in that. As engineers they were most extraordinarily anal—in the right sense. They actually went through and asked me what would be the finish on the screws. Would I be using beryllium plate? Then they’d look it up and tell me how many cents that would cost. They did a very thorough job verifying that our costs were right…And Dallas still didn’t believe it.”
But as Ellenby gradually realized, the numbers were merely cannon fodder in a battle that was political to the core. It was Xerox’s organizational structure, not cost estimates or technological visions, that was driving the two sides apart. The Dallas group knew that if they were forced to add an entirely new product to their customary line of office machines, any hope of meeting their near-term sales and financial quotas for the year would be demolished.
“They had to sandbag the Alto III, because with it they wouldn’t make their numbers and therefore wouldn’t get their bonuses,” Ellenby concluded. “In fact, it would have been an absolutely impossible burden on them to be successful in making typewriters and also introduce the world’s first personal computer. And they should never have been asked to do it that way. So it was shot down like most things that have to do with numbers, based on rumor and wrong data.”
With the power of tradition behind them, Potter and his political allies prevailed. On August 18 the word processing task force, reversing itself under pressure from McCardell and others, declared the 850 the official Xerox word processor. As a Xerox product, the Alto III was dead.
The news landed with a hard thud at PARC. Even Alan Kay, who had always proclaimed the Alto an “interim” machine (he once advised Pake to think of them like Kleenex, to be used briefly and discarded as soon as the next big thing came along), took the decision as a “huge blow.” It was clearer than ever that PARC lacked the necessary juice to seize and hold the attention of anyone who mattered at headquarters. The researchers watched helplessly as Bob Potter and his product development group in Dallas continued to manufacture clunky and obsolescent electromechanical typewriting machines as though PARC had never existed—and got thrashed by the market into the bargain. In its three years of operation, the Dallas division had never had a profitable quarter.
Ellenby spent the next year trying to quell his disappointment by burying himself in another can-do project. This involved reengineering Starkweather’s printer so the laser device could reliably keep pace with Xerox’s fastest copiers, a problem harder to solve than anyone had expected. Thanks to a program called Orbit, a cunning shortcut developed jointly by Bob Sproull, a young graphics researcher, and Severo Ornstein, a journeyman engineer whose distinguished record included working on the LINC with Wes Clark and on Bolt, Beranek & Newman’s original ARPANET proposal with Jerry Elkind, Ellenby produced a machine known as the “Dover” in mid-summer 1977.
He was still waiting for his next assignment when, a few weeks later, Bert Sutherland dragged him into his office and told him about an unprecedented event scheduled for Boca Raton and already nicknamed “Futures Day.”
It soon became clear that Ellenby’s hand at the upcoming Xerox World Conference would be very free indeed. Futures Day, which was scheduled for the world conference’s fourth and closing day on Thursday, November 10, was expected to be the PARC demo to end all demos, in full dress and with top-level production values. As one of his colleagues recalled, Ellenby responded by approaching the job “as though he was invading a foreign country.”
The venture’s scale seemed only to stoke his ambitions. He hired Hollywood producers and scriptwriters to prepare a two-hour multimedia stage show, and commandeered half of PARC’s working Altos to ensure that the entire audience could have a hands-on experience; two DC-10 cargo planes were rented to transport all the equipment to Boca Raton. One day he outlined the program to Chuck Geschke, a CSL researcher who had signed on somewhat casually as logistics officer for the enterprise. Geschke sat through the meeting with a sense of impending catastrophe. “We were basically going to pick up PARC and put it all on an airplane and fly it across the country,” he recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, and we’ve got only two months left?’” Geschke was aware that the group would be fighting not only the calendar, but less than uniform support from their own colleagues. “The range of opinion at PARC,” he recalled, “went all the way from ‘This is the greatest thing we could possibly do,’ to ‘What an incredible waste of time’ and ‘You’ll never pull it off.’”
Fortunately, Geschke himself decided to join the enthusiasts’ camp. For too long, he thought, the prevailing attitude at PARC had been that it was a higher calling for a scientist or engineer to stay in research rather than to follow an idea through to the delivery of product. He concluded that this was no way to build anything people would buy. Hadn’t they learned anything from the scorn of hidebound managers like Bob Potter?
“On the few occasions when we’d have McColough come by it was like getting a state visit,” he said. “You’d get your fifteen minutes to pitch but there’d be no follow-through, no delegation to anyone who could actually understand what we were saying. We just weren’t communicating.” The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that Futures Day would be PARC’s best chance—or only chance—to break down the walls hiding its inventions from the world.
To make Futures Day happen, Ellenby had his pick of PARC’s top engineers. In addition to Geschke as logistics officer, he recruited Tim Mott to supervise the marketing production and Dave Boggs to oversee the installation of equipment, and sent John Shoch to Stamford to work as on-site liaison with headquarters. Dick Shoup and Bob Sproull rounded out the platoon, along with product and manufacturing engineers from El Segundo whose resourceful scrounging had impressed Ellenby during the Alto II and Dover programs. The team grew steadily until it numbered sixty-five persons, all working frenetically against the looming deadline.
By late October they had assembled a dramatic presentation on a Paramount Pictures sound stage in Hollywood and buffed it to a high gloss, right down to an original orchestral score shamelessly evoking the soundtrack of Star Wars. Mott occasionally had to struggle to familiarize his freelance stage producers with a future that was more than a facade and flashing lights, but that actually worked. “Their bread and butter had been multimedia shows for corporate meetings, things like that,” he remembered. “What was unusual for them, as it would have been for anyone, was the level of technology involved as well as the degree of vision that was to be communicated.”
Peter McColough, who viewed PARC as his legacy and the World Conference as his party, took an intense personal interest in all the planning. He insisted that Ellenby deliver regular progress reports and in late October even attended a dress rehearsal at Paramount. From these encounters Ellenby took away an impression of a deeply burdened corporate chairman. McColough had lost the confident bright-eyed glow visible at the PARC dedication seven years earlier. In its stead he displayed the profound weariness of a captain steering a balky ship through a merciless storm.
One afternoon, treated to a private lunch with the chairman at the Stanford Club in Palo Alto, Ellenby took the opportunity to regale him with the full story of the aborted productization of the Alto III. The war over word processing had been waged deep within the corporation at the level of task forces and middle management. The chairman listened raptly, evidently hearing it all for the first time. Then, warming to his subject, Ellenby went too far. He capped the story with an amusing anecdote—at least he thought it was amusing—illustrating the cynicism about Xerox’s costly and fruitless product planning that afflicted the company’s own staff.
One day during the Alto III campaign, he said, he had a conversation with a friend from the corporate office. “John,” the friend said, “you really think you’ve got a product program there, don’t you?”
“Well,” Ellenby said, “I think it certainly could be.”
“You’re wrong,” came the rejoinder. “I’ll tell you when you’ll know you’ve got a product program at Xerox Corporation. You’ll start seeing people turn up and make a couple of big bottomless pits outside your lab. Then trucks will drive up night and day loaded with hundred-dollar bills, and just pour them into those pits. Your only job, John, will be traffic control—and that’s how you’ll know you’ve got a product program at Xerox.”
Instead of appreciating the wry yarn, McColough suddenly looked stricken. He changed the subject and brought the encounter to a close without giving Ellenby any clue to what had gone wrong.
He soon found out. McColough had recently been wrestling with the dire harvest of that same dysfunctional process. For the previous five years, 1,000 Xerox engineers and technicians had been working on a project code-named Moses, which aimed to develop the company’s next great copier. Moses would be the vanguard of the Xerox counterattack against Kodak and its other big rivals. Fast and innovative, it was to offer such pioneering features as a high-speed document handler that could copy multiple pages by cycling them through the machine, wedged between two layers of clear plastic.
But by 1977, after the expenditure of $90 million—more than Boeing Corporation had spent in designing the 747—Xerox had not yet produced a machine that could credibly compete in the marketplace. Worse, Kodak had just introduced a superior product, with a document handler so fast that the Moses version still on the drawing board was already obsolete. Only a few days after his lunch with Ellenby, on the very eve of the World Conference, McColough made one of the most painful decisions of his career: He killed Moses outright.
The edict sent a shock wave through the entire company—not only because of the horrific financial toll, but also because it meant Xerox would have nothing but aging, derivative products in the market for at least the next two years. “Moses was supposed to lead us into the promised land,” said one executive. “Instead the Red Sea came crashing down on us.”
Back at PARC, Ellenby recognized that McColough had been girding himself to make the Moses decision at the very moment he was telling his tactless joke. “He made a very tough call,” he recalled later. “And that was bloody stupid of me.”
With the Moses debacle still painfully fresh, the Xerox World Conference convened on November 7 at the Boca Raton Country Club. As McColough hoped, the gaiety of the affair helped at least temporarily to dispel the gloom. The company spared no expense to keep its 500 guests entertained. There was deep-sea fishing and lavish dining. At one formal luncheon the keynote speaker was Henry Kissinger, only lately retired as secretary of state. A circus-sized tent was erected on the club grounds for a casino night at which everyone received an allotment of scrip, which winners could redeem for a motor scooter and other fancy prizes.
Meanwhile, Ellenby’s team worked like fiends to prepare for the final day, which PARC would have all to itself. Willing to brook no hindrance from Xerox policy or personnel, Ellenby kept in his possession a signed letter from McColough ordering the organization to provide anything he required in the event he found himself thwarted by a recalcitrant bureaucrat. He never had to use it, which is not to say he did not on occasion sail rather close to the wind.
“We broke Xerox rules when we needed to get things done,” Ellenby recalled. “Certain things were expensed that probably never should have been.” And not, to be truthful, only for conventional business. “Some of the guys decided I needed to have an alligator in my bathtub. So they went off in one of these airboats to where the pilot said he’d show them some alligators. Two very hefty engineers jumped in and wrestled this alligator into the boat, tied it up much against the protests of the pilot, brought it back, and stuck it in my bathtub. I expensed the floatplane for them, as ‘special transportation’ or some such thing.”
The group’s exuberance reached its climax on the conference’s final night, when Ellenby threw a party for the entire Futures Day team, from engineers to truck drivers, at the Blue Bayou, a somewhat less than four-star Boca restaurant. The event was so festive it even attracted a few senior executives from the more demure official dinner a few blocks away—one of whom chose to drive his rented Lincoln Continental from the restaurant back to the country club by the shortest possible route, leaving tire marks all the way across the golf course.
Despite their week of conviviality, Xerox’s guests might have been forgiven if they greeted the dawn of November 10 thirsting for good news. McColough’s opening speech Monday morning had painted a dark picture of the company’s performance. “We are being out-marketed, out-engineered, outwitted in major segments of our market,” he lectured. “We simply have not been prepared for this…We are now faced with the urgent need for change within this company!” McCardell and David Kearns, an up-and-coming ex-IBMer who would shortly succeed McCardell as Xerox President, had followed over the next two days with downbeat assessments of their own.
Finally, on the last day, Peter McColough again took to the podium, this time in an attempt to revive the optimism with which he had tried to lead his company into the digital age. His instrument was the same vacuous phrase which had caused so much confusion from the start, but now it carried much more urgency.
“‘The architecture of information,’” he proclaimed, “is still the basic purpose of Xerox, except that it’s no longer just a concept.”
PARC’s turn had finally come.
The Futures Day presentation that morning was like Doug Engelbart’s famous San Francisco demo on steroids. The club’s vast ballroom boomed with portentous music. “The problem is paper,” intoned a professional narrator, while actors and PARC engineers piled onstage to demonstrate Altos, the Ethernet, even a prototypical color printer, all working in perfect harmony to establish Xerox’s rightful place atop the world of office automation.
The audience watched people send and receive real e-mail, collaborate on joint projects, write memos in Japanese characters, and conjure up engineering schematics on the Alto’s arresting black-on-white display—all live. Secretaries typed letters and shot them over the network to a laser printer, while engineers designed buildings on a video screen and software developers debugged code. If there had been any doubt that PARC could develop a marketable product, it was dispelled by the debut of the Xerox 9700—a two-page-per-second laser printer based on Starkweather’s machine that would anchor the company’s lucrative franchise in that developing market for years to come. But even the 9700 was trumped by the Pimlico, a prototype color laser printer built by Sproull and Ron Rider as a rush job for the Boca demo.
Adding to the thrill was the element of pure surprise. Determined to keep the demo shrouded not only from the prying eyes of IBM, which maintained a research lab nearby in Boca Raton, but from Xerox’s own executives, Ellenby had taken the precaution of hiring his own security force (provided by a company conveniently owned by the Dade County sheriff’s son-in-law).
“So Futures Day came as a complete shock,” Ellenby recalled. “Not only the breadth and comprehensiveness of the products but that they all worked flawlessly was quite astonishing to the senior management.”
Finally the wowed audience trooped off to a catered lunch while a platoon of forklift trucks moved the equipment off the stage and into a capacious demonstration room, where they would be accessible for hands-on demos for the rest of the day. Unbeknownst to the guests, this part of the demonstration almost failed before it started, for Florida’s humidity and the club’s meager air conditioning made the room so hot it threatened to blow the computers’ delicate circuits. (The Altos always behaved flakily in hot weather, even at home in Palo Alto.) Ellenby averted catastrophe by renting one of the refrigeration trucks Eastern Airlines employed to keep its planes cool on the ground at the Miami airport. Since the vehicle was not licensed to drive on public thoroughfares, it was provided with a state police escort to Boca Raton, where Boggs and Sproull managed to run a ventilation pipe through the kitchen and into the meeting center.
“All the computers were happy and everyone could walk around in their suits—this was Xerox, after all,” Ellenby recalled. (After the show was over Boggs and Sproull tried to see if they could use the truck to produce snow in the ballroom. They turned it up until one of the compressors blew out, ending their experiment. “That was another expense we had to slide through the system as something else,” Ellenby recalled. “Fairly expensive, too.”)
Disaster averted, the executives and their wives were encouraged to spend as much time as they wished familiarizing themselves with the Altos. They could type and draw on the bitmapped screens, meet a remarkable pointing device called a “mouse,” send their handiwork off to the networked printers, and store it in electronic file cabinets known as “file servers.” They could prepare documents on computer and send them by fax anywhere in the world—without generating a single sheet of printed paper.
The demo room with its thirty Altos stayed open until late in the evening. “Lots of people came by and they all said how fantastic it was,” Ellenby remembered. Most of the PARC scientists on the scene seized the opportunity to witness for the first time how nonengineers would react to their fabulous technology. The results were mixed. On the one hand, it was clear they were “very impressed that the stuff all worked, because they’d heard PARC was sort of a flaky place,” Ellenby recalled. “There was sort of a feeling around that PARC was a luxury, so it was a relief for them to see some real value and even some things they might want.” Yet clearly they were also perplexed and mistrustful about the effect these mysteriously overeducated contraptions might have on their careers.
Xerox’s top executives were for the most part salesmen of copy machines. From these leased behemoths the revenue stream was as tangible as the “click” of the meters counting off copies, for which the customer paid Xerox so many cents per page (and from which Xerox paid its salespersons their commissions). Noticing their eyes narrow, Ellenby could almost hear them thinking: “If there is no paper to be copied, where’s the ‘click’?” In other words: “How will I get paid?”
For Geschke, the most discomfiting revelation was the contrast between the executives’ reactions and those of their wives. “The typical posture and demeanor of the Xerox executives, and all of them were men, was this”—arms folded sternly across the chest. “But their wives would immediately walk up to the machines and say, ‘Could I try that mouse thing?’ That’s because many of them had been secretaries—users of the equipment. These guys, maybe they punched a button on a copier one time in their lives, but they had someone else do their typing and their filing. So we were trying to sell to people who really had no concept of the work this equipment was actually accomplishing.
“It didn’t register in my mind at that event, but that was the loudest and clearest signal we ever got of how much of a problem we were going to have getting Xerox to understand what we had.”
There was at least one other harbinger of the coming letdown. Toward the end of the evening McColough, Kearns, and a few of the executive staff materialized in the demo room. Their appearance had been prearranged. “They were there to have an opportunity to say, ‘Well, now we’re going to do something, guys,’” Ellenby recalled. “But they didn’t take that opportunity. They just said, ‘Thank you.’
“I was expecting a bit more than that,” he said. “We’d developed a camaraderie that was quite unusual. My people felt pumped up and hyped, like a sporting team. Instead what we got was, ‘Thanks, boys, the war is over, and you can take your horses back.’”
Thus did the doubts surface almost before the euphoria of a flawless demonstration had a chance to run its course. Despite McColough’s ringing re-endorsement of “the architecture of information,” his and Kearns’s equivocal farewell told Ellenby and his team that they were naïve to think Xerox would exploit this technology anytime soon.
And in this beleaguered and distracted corporation, Ellenby knew, time was the enemy.
*McCardell’s intoxication with figures would weigh on the company until his departure in 1977. He was named chief executive of International Harvester, over whose drift into bankruptcy and near extinction he presided, joined by Potter.