Not all the signals PARC received from headquarters after Futures Day were as deflating as the initial one. In fact, the event did have two promising offshoots.
The first was an unusual visit to Coyote Hill Road the following January by Peter McColough and his nine top subordinates, including Archie McCardell, David Kearns, and Jack Goldman. Their purpose was to attend a two-day crash course in the art and science of software—the brainchild of Bob Taylor, who managed to get it sold to the executives while they still felt some gratitude, however begrudging, for PARC’s bravura performance in Boca Raton.
Taylor believed that the unique success of the 914 copier had inculcated Xerox management with the doctrine that good things derived only from hardware. He was determined to show them that this idea was obsolete. As PARC envisioned the office of the future, a single piece of equipment could be made to serve multiple uses simply by changes in its software. As long as the brass found this idea an alien one—and it was revolutionary to most people in 1977—they would remain blind to the superiority of programmable Altos over narrow-minded electromechanical word processors like the 850.
Taylor asked Alan Kay to help him break up what might otherwise be two days of lectures in the nasal drone of Computer Science Lab engineers by designing a hands-on software demo for the visiting brass. “You can have them for one and a half hours each day,” he said. “See what you can do.”
Kay delegated the task in turn to his educational expert, Adele Goldberg. The deadline was about the same as Ellenby had faced for Futures Day, nine weeks. But the challenge was possibly even more daunting: Bring ten stuffy male executives face to face with the unfamiliar rigors of computer programming, and make it fun. The strangeness of the experience for these men could not be underestimated. Even Jack Goldman, the paterfamilias who battled so tirelessly to get PARC’s technology into the Xerox product stream, would be doing serious work on a computer for the first time in his life.
Goldberg figured the attention span of top corporate officers with much on their minds would be about the same as that of a classroom of fidgety adolescents. To hold their attention, she developed a demonstration program called “SimKit” and loaded it with plenty of animation and music (one tune sounded automatically when class time was over). But underlying the bells and whistles would be a sophisticated system able to simulate situations the executives would recognize from the real world. Its basic format was a generic workplace scene populated by workers and customers. This could be altered to suggest the copy center of a large office, or a mechanized production line, a payroll department—whatever setting the executive-pupil might find comfortable and familiar.
“We really were teaching them that while there are independent pieces in a program you can build something out of, there’s also a context in which different kinds of objects are interacting,” Goldberg recalled. “They’d have stations with workers they could select and specialize to do one function or another. The animation would let them actually see the customers come in and queue up and get service. We gave them the ability to draw in their own workers and say what they looked like: This one’s frowning, that one’s smiling. And we had it all structured so they would never touch the keyboard. It was all mouse-pointing and mouse-clicking, because we knew these guys wouldn’t type. In those days, that wasn’t macho.”
As the event approached a few glitches cropped up, including one that no one on the youthful LRG team could have anticipated. During a dry run staged with ten middle-aged secretaries from the third-floor administration offices, it developed that none of their subjects could read the Alto typefaces. “The small fonts our thirtysomething eyes were used to didn’t work for those in their fifties,” Kay recalled. Goldberg made a virtue out of necessity by rewriting the curriculum so each student’s first task would be to select a custom typeface and font size to use for the two-day session. This enhancement had the dual merits of instantly acclimating the executives to the mouse and impressing them (it was hoped) with the unprecedented flexibility of the Smalltalk interface.
A more harrowing crisis arose the week before D-Day.
This was a glitch in “Ooze,” Smalltalk’s intricate memory management system, which had been designed by Ted Kaehler. Ooze worked by rapidly shuttling data and objects between the Alto’s scanty main memory and its spacious hard disk, based on an algorithm that made the disk seem merely an extension of the memory. Nowadays this stratagem of fooling the computer into thinking it has more memory than really exists is a standard feature of desktop computers known as “virtual memory”; in 1978 implementing the system on such a small computer was a great programming feat. Ooze had its limits, however. Goldberg had loaded the system with so much new material that Ooze’s capacity was strained to the breaking point. With five short days left before the seminar, Kaehler delivered the bad news.
“Adele, the Ooze design is wrong,” he said. “We didn’t plan for all these subclasses.”
“Yeah?” she replied warily. “What does that mean?”
“It’s not clear it’ll hold up during the seminar. And if it crashes, we’re in trouble.”
“Well, what’s the alternative? Should I simplify the curriculum?”
Kaehler had nothing so modest in mind. “It seemed obvious to me,” he said later, “that I should just fix the problem in Ooze.”
Goldberg grew fidgety at the very notion. This was no mere bug, she figured, but a major design change. “Ted,” she said, “something tells me this is not a good idea.”
He waved his hand. The fix involved rewriting code in about seven places in the program to double its capacity. Easy enough in principle, he recalled later—assuming he could be sure of finding every place that needed fixing. In any event, he figured the team would have five days for testing. To Goldberg he said, “Don’t worry about it.”
Easier said than done. Nervous about his tinkering with such an important component of the system so close to its make-or-break audition, Goldberg and the other team members put Kaehler on a short leash. “Adele, Alan, Dan Ingalls, and Larry Tesler each sat down with me separately to hear what the fix was and impress on me that it had to work,” he recalled. “That was fairly intimidating.” Goldberg told him that if it worked the first time, she would use it. Otherwise; they would restore the original Ooze and she would pare down her lesson plan.
Kaehler finished his reworking in one evening and demonstrated the fix to his colleagues. To Goldberg’s relief and amazement, it worked perfectly. “It was like you’re building the Taj Mahal,” she said later, “and just as you’re about to put the final cap on it you decide that the foundation brick isn’t right and you need to replace it. Just jack it all up, replace it, and put it back down again. That’s what he did. Pretty remarkable stuff, and also a remarkable guy who could do that.”
The executive hands-on, as Kay recalled, proved “a howling success.” To ensure victory, each corporate officer was assigned an LRG tutor to sit by his side during Goldberg’s simulation exercise. Nine out of ten finished their programs before the bell rang. One, who was in charge of a large Xerox manufacturing arm, even uncovered a flaw in his own real-life production line by plugging actual figures he carried around in his head into his computerized model.
But whether the executives took away impressions of lasting value is another question. Diana Merry, who served as a tutor, doubted they had a very good idea of what they were looking at—that is, the remarkable engineering achievement underlying the simple and intuitive animations playing over the Alto screen.
Some may have been struck more by PARC’s unstuffy ambiance. At one point Jack Goldman barged into an office on the first floor and almost tripped over Adele Goldberg, nursing her infant daughter inside. In 1978 such informality was unheard-of in a corporate setting and entirely unexpected. Goldman backed away, embarrassed, never to forget the moment. Goldberg’s reaction was sharper: “It served him right. The door was closed and he shouldn’t have walked in without knocking.”
As for David Kearns, Xerox’s future chairman and chief executive officer, his most vivid impression was of PARC’s unkempt and self-indulgent culture, perpetuated by its isolated and tranquil campus. “The place,” he said later, “just sort of drifted along on its own course.” This impression would not work to PARC’s advantage when Kearns’s help and understanding would be needed in a crisis.
The second important consequence of Futures Day was, oddly enough, the creation of a formal program to commercialize the Alto. Led by Jerry Elkind, who chose John Ellenby as one of his top lieutenants, the new venture was empowered to dribble Altos into the marketplace by offering them to select customers on stringent terms.
As crafted by Jack Goldman, the charter of the Advanced Systems Division, or ASD, would be the mirror image of that of the SDD unit building the Star. Where David Liddle’s team was assembling an arsenal of maximum firepower to deploy in the market only after everything was in place—quite similar to the bottomless money pit Ellenby had so tactlessly described to Peter McColough—ASD could weave and dart like a PT boat, using whatever ammunition it found handy to keep a few key buyers intrigued. Ellenby liked to compare the arrangement to the Normandy invasion, with Liddle as a General Eisenhower tolerating an experimental foray or two to reconnoiter the beaches. Liddle implicitly acknowledged the metaphor: “We were very deliberately strategic,” he said. “ASD was tactical.”
The new division solved two of PARC’s most pressing problems. First, it indulged the veterans of Futures Day by giving them a chance to prove the Alto’s commercial viability. Perhaps more important, it gave Jerry Elkind a place to go.
Elkind had only recently returned to PARC from a temporary assignment to the corporate engineering staff. It was not a joyful homecoming. His absence had not only distanced him further from the daily routine of the computer science lab, but also underscored the gulf between his management style and Taylor’s.
For a long time it had been evident he could not hope to compete with Taylor for the affection of most of the lab personnel. One problem was that he comported himself as their equal in technical ability, something which Taylor would never presume and which was bound to annoy the egotistical staff even if it were true. Moreover, he continually reminded the Computer Science Lab that for all its independence and arrogance, it belonged to a larger organization, PARC, which was in turn beholden to yet a greater entity, Xerox. Taylor, by comparison, behaved as though CSL was the sun around which PARC, Xerox, and indeed all known computer science revolved.
“I took a much less aggressive stance with respect to the resource issues, and I would hope a less antagonizing stance, than Bob did,” Elkind said later. “In times when you’re competing for resources I always had to make the argument with Bob that there was such a thing as a fair share.”
Perhaps the greatest friction point was Elkind’s frequently blunt and condescending temperament. One could argue that in this he scarcely differed from Butler Lampson or, indeed, Taylor himself. But as long as Elkind lacked the former’s intellectual charisma and the latter’s sympathetic paternalism, many at PARC would not consider him authoritative, just officious.
“Jerry had a shorthand in his management style I never could appreciate,” said Ed McCreight, as mild and complaisant a person as anyone who ever walked CSL’s hallways. “He’d come into my office and say, in effect, ‘I don’t think you’re doing anything important.’ It was his way of saying, ‘Explain how this fits into the grander scheme,’ but it made you get down on yourself.”
Some of McCreight’s colleagues like Jim Mitchell did not feel demeaned, just infuriated. “Jerry would always say, ‘Let me play devil’s advocate,’” he said. “But that was all he goddam did! Every time you went to him he was always telling you what was wrong with your ideas, so most of us stopped going to him. I told him once, ‘Jerry, when that’s all you do it’s kind of a downer. You need to be going “rah, rah” sometimes, too, not just being a devil’s advocate.’ He was technical but he wasn’t as smart as any of us, and we knew it. He should have, too.”
Elkind’s manner would not have polarized the lab as much if he had not had his fans, too. Several CSL staff members were quite comfortable with Elkind’s style. This group included Dan Bobrow and Warren Teitelman, both recruits from Elkind’s old firm, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, as well as Peter Deutsch and Bob Metcalfe, the last of whom had known Elkind at MIT and considered him “a fine man, a gentleman, and an intellectual.”
But they were a minority. Considered strictly as the laboratory’s chief, Jerry Elkind was an increasingly isolated figure. While he was away for an extended assignment to a corporate task force in 1977, the notion arose that the lab might function just as well without him. One day after Taylor had been running CSL unhampered for several months, McCreight remembered, Bob Sproull walked into his office.
“Ed, have you noticed anything different in the atmosphere recently?” he asked.
“You know,” McCreight replied, “I sort of enjoy having Bob run the place.”
“You’re not the only one who feels that way.”
As Mitchell recalled, “Every one of us noticed the difference in feeling in the lab. We all felt more productive, and we sure as hell liked the atmosphere a lot better.”
With the end of Elkind’s assignment nearing, several CSL engineers visited Pake to ask him to find Elkind a new home. Taylor, wisely, laid low. But Pake was convinced he knew who was behind the move. “While Jerry was gone, Taylor really did settle in,” he recalled. “And he did definitely consolidate his position.”
The situation confronted Pake with an unappetizing prospect. He had come to rely on Elkind as a buffer between Taylor and the other lab chiefs. Sure enough, during Elkind’s absence the tensions between the physicists and computer scientists had increased, aggravated by Taylor’s oft-expressed view that only the computer labs (and specifically CSL) did any work worth financing at PARC. The surge of petty antagonism had all but destroyed Pake’s dream of a multidisciplinary utopia on Coyote Hill.
(The CSL engineer Jim Morris recalled being cornered at a party in town one night by a GSL physicist. “How does it feel to be working for a boss who doesn’t have a Ph.D.?” the physicist gibed. “At the time I thought that was an asinine remark to make,” Morris said, “but it did reflect the interdisciplinary pissing match that was going on at PARC.”)
Pake himself had reached the point where he could barely stand the sight of Taylor, much less engage him in conversation. He disliked Taylor’s individualistic management technique and was even more appalled by the feral dynamics of Dealer. On the whole, he was unpersuaded by the argument that good researchers should be able to take criticism in the same spirit in which they dished it out. The white-suited physicists and optical scientists on the ground floor of the building—his people—were every bit as uncompromising in their scientific standards as Taylor’s, but they did not feel constrained to abandon all civility as CSL did.
The thought of dealing directly with Taylor as one of his laboratory directors made him blanch. Yet inserting someone new as Elkind’s replacement as CSL chief might be taken as an intolerable insult by Taylor’s coterie. Pake chose to buy time by sticking to the status quo, informing the lab that he had promised Elkind his old job back and owed it to the man to be true to his word.
Meanwhile the anti-Elkind talk left loyalists like Dan Bobrow deeply perturbed. Thoughtful, a bit naïve, but optimistic that by bringing well-meaning people together in good faith he could find a middle ground satisfying everyone, Bobrow arranged for a group of CSL engineers to pay a formal visit to Elkind’s task force quarters a short distance down the hill from PARC.
“I was trying to smooth things out,” he recalled. “To me, Jerry was a superb manager who always asked good hard questions and was very supportive. I didn’t see why he couldn’t continue in his role, and Bob in his. I didn’t realize how much of a power struggle there was behind the scenes or how deep the division was, in the sense that some people thought Bob was a listener and a pusher of their vision and that Jerry had his own views.”
He was about to find out. Most of the other participants viewed the meeting not as an effort at reconciliation, but as the vehicle for an ouster.
The meeting opened in a strained atmosphere. Elkind was facing the most powerful members of his laboratory, including Lampson, Thacker, Mitchell, McCreight, Chuck Geschke, and Severo Ornstein. Their message, as McCreight recalled, was: “How about finding something else to do?”
“I’m pretty sure he’d been warned about why we were there to see him,” Mitchell recalled. “I don’t think this was completely out of the blue. He tried his best to be very calm. He didn’t get mad and rail at us or anything. He tried to start it off with some bonhomie, trying to say, ‘Gee, I’m glad to see you,’ and everything. But man, you could see him shaking in his boots just under the surface, because he was being rejected. It was very hard for him.”
Elkind listened, but did not capitulate. As the meeting broke up, he said: “It’s up to George Pake to decide what should be done, and he invited me to come back to CSL.”
Taylor’s role in this challenge to Elkind’s authority is hard to establish. He has always contended he had nothing to do with dispatching the delegation, and Elkind declines to hazard an opinion. “I don’t have any idea whether Taylor encouraged those people to come,” he said. On the other hand, Lampson, Thacker, McCreight, Geschke, and Ornstein were all among Taylor’s “Greybeards,” a sort of kitchen cabinet he relied on for technical and administrative advice. And it is far from implausible that after seven years as associate director—especially following Elkind’s yearlong absence—Taylor might think he deserved to be de jure, not de facto, director of CSL.
Bobrow speculates that Taylor had finally recognized the limitations of being the power behind the throne. “When Jerry went off for a year,” he said, “Bob got a sense of what it meant to actually have a throne.”
In any case, Elkind did return to CSL as its director for a brief, uneasy period. “It was apparent that Bob had won the battle,” Bobrow recalled. All that remained was to find Elkind some face-saving retreat. Finally, when Jack Goldman parlayed the success of Futures Day into a chance to deploy the Alto as a “market probe” of the commercial acceptability of small computers, the path was clear. With Jerry Elkind appointed as its chief, the new Advanced Systems Division was authorized to put the Alto out into the world.
Elkind’s transformation from the skeptic who vetoed Alan Kay’s proposal for a small computer into proselytizer-in-chief of the Alto actually dated back to the first time he had seen Bravo running on an Alto screen, long before ASD’s creation in January 1978. “I thought to myself, seeing the machines work and seeing the Bravo stuff, that it was just smashing.”
The Taylor group’s distaste for his management style notwithstanding, he had turned into one of the machine’s hardiest champions. Now his enthusiasm was fired even more by the computer’s commercial potential. Like Ellenby, Elkind was a bruised veteran of the 1976 battle between the Alto III and the Dallas-built 850 word processor. “A lot of us were feeling very frustrated,” he said. “Like everyone, I was very anxious to get this stuff out.”
The group he attracted to his new venture was a remarkable collection of talented malcontents. There were Ellenby and Tim Mott, who had felt the sting of headquarters indifference after Futures Day as well as the taste of power that comes from pulling off a hit performance on a lavish $1-million-plus budget. Another recruit was Charles Simonyi, who had made himself an undesirable at SDD by openly denigrating the biggerism of the Star. At ASD he found an entirely different culture and worked with renewed vigor, incorporating the Gypsy interface in a rewritten Bravo specifically tailored for the commercial Altos and known as BravoX.
Elkind took seriously ASD’s mandate to develop outside markets by selective sales and leases of “pre-products.” Taking over Ellenby’s El Segundo—based Special Programs Group, he commandeered several projects they had already started, including one to produce word processors for Sweden’s government-owned telephone company. The Swedes got Altos instead.
So, too, did the Carter White House, which awarded ASD a contract to create a document and file system for its information office. Altos running BravoX were installed in 1978, giving the otherwise ineffectual Carter Administration the distinction of being the first in history to use personal computers for word processing. The Senate and House of Representatives followed suit. “It turned out that if the White House was going to do it, then the House of Representatives and the Senate had to do it,” Elkind remembered. “That was politics: As long as they all did it, they could all get the funding. If the White House tried to do it without the House and Senate, then they wouldn’t get the money.”
Other customers included the Atlantic Richfield Company in Los Angeles and the Seattle headquarters of Boeing Corporation. More machines went to Xerox divisions outside PARC, where demand was so fierce that Elkind, Pake, and a research executive from Rochester sat as a committee of three to allocate the scarce machines to employees of their own corporation.
For a short time Elkind’s people reveled in the thrill of actually getting PARC technology out to the marketplace. “After we sold, like, twenty machines, we had this wonderful dinner in Palo Alto,” Simonyi recalled. “I made this wonderful speech about how today it’s ten machines, and next year it will be one hundred, and then ten thousand. Everybody was laughing from sheer hubris.”
The inevitable crash landing awaited just over the horizon. As ASD placed more Altos out in the world, John Ellenby was receiving the all-too-familiar impression that he was hitting a brick wall. Rather than absorb the lesson that these were marketable products, Xerox management seemed largely to view ASD as a sort of stalking horse for the Star.
“It was a sacrificial thing,” Ellenby said. “It was, ‘Let’s show some customers we’re coming’—but it pissed off the customers that we didn’t follow through with it.” He compared himself more and more to a member of Eisenhower’s expendable vanguard, like the decimated Canadians at Dieppe in 1944: “Market probes were good if they got follow-up. But you don’t just go and land troops on a beachhead without a means of getting further inland or pulling them out.”
Adding to his frustration were the mounting signs that SDD was faltering. The Star’s launch date was now off into the next decade, and not a sure thing even then. Ellenby saw a unique opportunity for Xerox to offer a computer product with proven market acceptance that could be ready in a matter of months. “Basically, I said if you really want to get some products out there quickly, then we can do it. We know people are willing to pay for these things because that has come out in the probes. We do need to perform the engineering that makes them high-quality, and we need to put in place the manufacturing. But we know how to do all that.”
In late 1978 he consigned to paper a plan to manufacture an updated Alto out of electronic components available off the shelf, to be bundled with BravoX and a suite of SSL-developed office systems software known as OfficeTalk, as well as a black-and-white laser printer called the Penguin. The result was an inch-thick document whose title, “Capability Investment Proposal,” aimed to stress the point that Xerox should implement the Alto program on a small scale, but with serious follow-through.
Drafting the proposal was only part of the battle, however, and a small part at that. Quite justifiably, Ellenby had doubts about how long it would take his report to wend its way up the Xerox chain of command. As it happened, the issue got taken out of his hands by a legendary corporate figure named Shelby H. Carter.
Then Xerox’s national sales manager, Shelby Carter was the type of person who could not but bridle at Xerox’s torpid decision-making. A Texan ex-Marine fighter pilot who pursued his quarry with the implacable force of a tornado and fashioned himself one of the greatest salesmen of all time (few customers dared disagree), Carter was a throwback to the old Xerox of relentless sales targets and blood-in-the-shoes pounding of pavement. Every bit as instinctive an inspirer of men as Bob Taylor, he preferred to work his magic among bigger crowds.
“He used to conduct what were known as Jet Squad Meetings,” recalled David Kearns. “Carter would hop into the corporate jet and fly to two or three cities a day and stir up the troops. In New York City they might gather at Shea Stadium. Carter would stand on the pitcher’s mound and deliver his spiel, and the salesmen in attendance would be spellbound. Then they would go out and sell copiers with an almost crazed intensity.” On sales reps who met his exacting standards Carter would bestow the treasured memento of a Bowie knife mounted on a plaque. For many of them it meant more than a cash bonus.
By the late 1970s, however, Carter’s influence within the corporation was distinctly on the wane. With the possible exception of David Kearns, he could no longer command a rapt audience in the executive suite. The genetic code of the place had changed. “The hip-shooting Shelby Carters weren’t listened to as much at meetings anymore,” Kearns observed. “Carter would say, ‘I have a hunch about this,’ and everyone would respond, ‘No way. We don’t act on hunches.’”
One of Carter’s hunches concerned the Alto. Convinced that a properly motivated sales force could sell the machine, big-time, he had placed a trusted lieutenant named Frank Sauer inside ASD to keep him up to date on the marketing program and to involve Xerox’s Santa Clara sales office in the planning. One day Sauer slipped him a copy of Ellenby’s proposal. Carter, who had been deeply involved in the Futures Day planning and appreciated Ellenby’s talents as a result, “took a look and got pretty excited,” Ellenby recalled. “He was a great believer in making things happen. So one day he happened to be sitting next to David Kearns at a New York Mets game and said, ‘Hey, John’s team is really up to something exciting. Don’t forget these are the guys who did Boca Raton for you.’ And Kearns said, ‘Get me a copy right away.’”
The proposal thus skipped over several levels of management on its way to the top. This was a dangerous move. As much as senior executives liked to talk about tearing down the bureaucratic walls to get Xerox moving again, they remained very fussy about protocol. When word filtered down that the proposal had somehow reached Kearns, Ellenby was assumed to have deliberately leaked it to the chief executive—understandably, since his can-do style at Boca Raton had earned him the reputation of “a hot shot who got the job done regardless of other people’s organizational feelings,” as he put it himself. An “extremely pissed off” Elkind even threatened to fire him, Ellenby recalled.
Ellenby denied having had anything to do with sending the report upstream. But now that it was done, he remained unrepentant. He was fed up with Xerox and considered the proposal his last crack at achieving his goals within the organization. If it did not fly, he was ready to go off and start his own company. He also felt that the proposal would never have made it to top management any other way.
“Elkind would not have passed it to his boss, who would not have passed it to his boss,” he said. “Xerox did not work that way.”
He was right. Elkind said later he did not think Ellenby’s program could ever succeed within Xerox, even absent “the disruption of bouncing it several steps up the management chain”—especially with the Star still holding pride of place as the corporation’s designated spearhead in office systems. Carter’s impertinence had earned the Alto no friends. As Elkind predicted, the proposal met with nothing but resistance and hostility all the way along the management line.
Still, it might have succeeded had Kearns thrown some real weight behind it. This he was unwilling to do. Having reached down to grab the proposal as though to demonstrate he could be as entrepreneurial and spontaneous as the next man, he turned it over to a deputy for a routine appraisal.
The deputy, Robert Wenrik, tested it against the judgments of the usual suspects, including SDD and Bob Potter. Both found plenty to carp at, including the perennial issue of cost. In the end Wenrik shot down Ellenby’s work with a bureaucratically vacuous rejection letter. “We have concluded that Xerox will not adopt the proposal you have prescribed,” it read; “however, we appreciate the thought you have given to the many issues covered in your proposal…”
“I kept a copy,” Ellenby said one day many years later, withdrawing it from his files. “It’s pretty interesting what he did say here, like ‘Some of the challenges which you clearly identified are being pursued through the normal management channels, and should be resolved over the next few weeks…’ Which was not the case, because they never were. And ‘Your proposal assisted us in dealing with the problem more expeditiously than we normally might have…’ I don’t think that’s true, I think actually the proposal delayed things, it was like throwing a wrench into the works.
“Then he goes on to say, ‘I’m confident that you will continue your support to the challenges we face in Jerry Elkind’s probe activity…’ Knowing full well that Jerry wanted to fire me.”
In January 1980, about one year after receiving Wenrik’s letter, Ellenby quit Xerox. Partially with the money he had earned in his corporate profit-sharing plan by staying the extra year, he founded a company called Grid Systems, which manufactured the world’s first laptop computers. The product line derived not from any work he had done at Xerox, whose lawyers had cautioned him sternly against recruiting any of his team members to his new company, but from flat-panel display and microprocessor technology he had learned from Ferranti. The dream of transferring PARC’s technology to the outside would have to wait. Ellenby, like so many others, had found it impossible to accomplish this as an employee of a company that treated his brand of aggressive advocacy purely as a threat.
“Dave Kearns took it upon himself to come out to PARC and spend a bit of time discussing my capability proposal after he saw it,” Ellenby recalled. “He said, ‘What will you do if I decide not to do this?’
“I said, ‘I’ll make sure my folks are well set and happy within their corporation because they like this corporation. But I’m going to have to leave, David, because I’ve burned too many bridges.’”