One day Alan Kay sat alone in the conference room of the Systems Science Lab, feeling a powerful urge to trash Smalltalk and start over from scratch.
For some time he had watched uneasily as his own group succumbed to the software equivalent of biggerism. With every iteration of Smalltalk—they were now on the fourth version, Smalltalk-76—he felt the language had become more elaborate, more sophisticated—and farther removed from his original vision of a system easy enough for children to learn.
But Smalltalk-76 was only the latest blow to Kay’s dream of a transparently simple programming language. The first, sadly, had been delivered by the children themselves. They had stopped learning.
The flush of triumph Kay and Adele Goldberg felt from teaching the Jordan kids how to program had barely worn off before they realized they had accomplished far less than they thought. While ten or a dozen kids had shown genuine aptitude and creativity in programming, these turned out to be the cream of an exceptional subset, pupils from the gifted track of one of the best school systems in the country. Most of the Jordan kids still struggled with the most rudimentary concepts as though they were programming in Greek.
Kay realized he had expected too much from the start. No matter how lucid the software interface or natural the commands, programming still presented difficulties to children—not to mention to many of the non-professional adults at PARC he had tried teaching as well—that could only be surmounted in one of two ways: by intuition (a gift granted to a precious few), or by being told the answer. He finally capitulated to reality that day in the SSL conference room, as he sat pondering a whiteboard on which he had scribbled out the code for a simple problem that had left his subjects confounded. With a shock he realized it was full of ideas obvious only to those who were, like himself, already steeped in the techniques and culture of computing. “I counted the number of nonobvious ideas in this little program. They came to 17,” he recollected. “And some of them were like the concept of the arch in building design: very hard to discover, if you don’t already know them.”
He was disheartened to discover that what had seemed at first to be a spectacular breakthrough with a group of preadolescents was nothing more than the “hacker phenomenon” at work: “For any given pursuit, a particular five percent of the population will jump into it naturally, while the eighty percent or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural.” It was also painfully evident that maintaining the learning curve of even the most talented kids demanded a tremendous effort by teacher and student—even here in Palo Alto, an ideal setting that would be impossible to reproduce on a large scale.
Perhaps the instinctively understandable programming system he sought was a chimera after all. As Adele kept reminding him, “It’s hard to claim success if only some of the children are successful.”
He was forced to wonder whether his very approach had been misguided. He had been convinced that teaching kids to program at an early age would permanently shape their thought processes. His real ambition had been to provide them with a singular window on human enlightenment. Yet his experiments led him to a contradictory conclusion. Programming did not teach people how to think—he realized he knew too many narrow-minded programmers for that to be so, now that he considered the question in depth. The truth was the converse: Every individual’s ingrained way of thinking affected how he or she programmed.
And was it not the same in every other field of human creativity? “A remarkable number of artists, scientists, philosophers are quite dull outside of their specialty (and one suspects within it as well),” he said later. “The first siren’s song we need to be wary of is the one that promises a connection between an interesting pursuit and interesting thoughts. The music is not in the piano, and it is possible to graduate Juilliard without finding or feeling it.”
Suddenly he felt a powerful desire to throw out all the old tools and start afresh. Scarcely four years after he had first outlined his ideas to the Learning Research Group, he was ready to make another run at the grail of simplicity. Drawn toward a new vision of Ideaspace, he brought the entire group to Pajaro Dunes for a three-day offsite in January 1976 to chart the new journey. Reinfused with enthusiasm, he even gave the retreat a theme—“Let’s burn our disk packs,” an allusion to the big yellow Alto storage disks on which they kept Smalltalk’s master code.
Then he discovered that they were no longer willing to follow him blindly.
The revelation was staggering. He spent most of the retreat trying to inveigle them into a fresh start on a hardware and software system radically different from Alto/Smalltalk. “No biological organism can live in its own waste products,” he exclaimed one evening. In earlier days that would have started them off on a thematic tour of Ideaspace and an exploration of the multifarious purposes of death and renewal. This time they took it as a threat to their own investment in a growing body of work, and turned him down.
“When Alan said to burn our disk packs it was Dan Ingalls who would have had to do it,” recalled Diana Merry. “And Dan couldn’t do it. There were too many bits on those disks he would have to recreate again, which made it very, very hard to let go. We lost the will to break it all apart. Alan finally had to realize it wasn’t going to happen.”
Smalltalk was no longer his system. He had started it, but once he turned it over to the “completers” like Ingalls and Adele Goldberg it had morphed into their own property. Ingalls was particularly determined to transform Smalltalk into a full-service programming language, the last thing Kay desired. Were it anyone else, he might have been able to keep control of the effort. But he could not fight Dan Ingalls, one of the few people in the world whose skill in his chosen field awed even Alan Kay. He had to let it go and admire the system for what it was, not what he wished it to be.
“Pajaro led to Smalltalk-76, which was two hundred times faster than Smalltalk-72,” Kay said later, unable to avoid expressing admiration for Ingalls’s finely crafted code, no matter how far it departed from his own goal. “But,” he added wistfully, “no kid ever wrote any code for Smalltalk-76.”
The 1976 offsite permanently changed the human ecology of Kay’s group. It was not a disaster, exactly, as he acknowledged later. There were no shouting matches or overt recriminations. They returned to PARC still friends and colleagues. “But the absolute cohesiveness of the first four years never rejelled,” he recalled. There might still be bicycle runs to Rosati’s in town for beer and brainstorming, but the thrill of biking back to PARC and implementing some unprecedented new idea on the spot had evaporated. To Kay the team had lost its balance. The idea of a Dynabook for Children had “dimmed out,” overwhelmed by everyone’s professional imperatives and their desire to elaborate on what were now, to him, old ideas.
Kay remained preoccupied with a lesson he had assimilated from Marshall McLuhan: Once humans shape their tools, they turn around and “reshape us.” That was fine if the tools were the right ones, but he was unconvinced that Smalltalk fell into that category any longer. Within a few weeks of the Pajaro Dunes offsite he enticed Adele Goldberg and Larry Tesler, two who were still willing to follow him off on a tangent, into joining his quest to regain the simplicity initiative.
The result was the Notetaker.
As Kay first sketched it out early in 1976, the Notetaker would be compact enough to perch on the user’s lap. Although a direct descendant of the Alto in its basic concept, it would jettison the Alto’s hard-wiring-and-microcode architecture in favor of one using microprocessors, the new family of silicon-based integrated circuits being developed by Intel and others. In his first sketches Kay incorporated a number of innovative technologies that had not yet appeared in the marketplace—but nothing, he insisted, that would not be available within a few years.
One thing that shortly became clear was that in building the Notetaker, Kay’s group would be on its own. The days of turning to CSL for hardware help were past. Lampson, whose word on technical issues was paramount in that lab, regarded Kay’s new project with icy disdain.
“Sometimes Alan isn’t really in touch with reality,” he said later. The Notetaker offended Lampson’s doctrine of research priorities, which stated that one needed to look ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. As a Time Machine the Notetaker was pitched so far into the future that Lampson could not believe it would teach PARC anything useful. Given the limitations of the new chips, the machine was shaping up to be smaller, slower, and dumber than anything they had ever built.
“I told them that within the limitations of the technology of today you will not be able to build anything interesting,” Lampson recalled. “You’ll be able to build a gadget that will work and it will be possible to program it. But you won’t be able to make it do anything interesting because the technology’s just too limiting. And that turned out to be absolutely correct.”
To Kay, Goldberg, and Tesler this was just Butler being exceedingly subtle. Who was he to say what was “interesting”? If they could build a truly portable machine that had, say, fifty percent of the Alto’s functionality, or thirty percent, or ten, would that not be “interesting”? In any case, he had made the same arguments about Dick Shoup’s Superpaint being too far ahead of the curve. Well, the Systems Science Lab had given Shoup a refuge from CSL’s cold contempt. If necessary they would steam ahead with the Notetaker by themselves.
But there was more to Lampson’s dismissal of the Notetaker than his doubts about the design. At about the time Kay first broached his idea for a compact portable machine, CSL had come under the spell of an idea that amounted to its polar antithesis. While Kay was scorning biggerism, the Computer Science Lab was embracing it, in the form of a dream computer they called the Dorado.
Like the Notetaker, the Dorado claimed the Alto as its direct forebear. But the resemblance ended there. The Dorado was to be the most ambitious computer PARC ever built. Where the Notetaker was to be deliberately modest and compact, Dorado would be fast, powerful, big, and noisy. Where the Notetaker turned out small enough to fit inside a suitcase, the Dorado was the size of an industrial refrigerator, with five fans for heat dispersion that roared like “a 747 taking off.”
That the Dorado was the product of rampant biggerism is evident from the way Thacker, its principal designer, described his earliest ambitions: “The original idea was that it would continue in the simple tradition of the Alto. I described it as sort of a 40-nanosecond Nova (that is, a Nova with a much faster clock).”*
His plan was simply to build a machine that would enable him to test a new generation of chips that promised to be faster and more reliable than those he had used in MAXC and the Alto. But by 1976, when the project finally got under way, those modest goals were overwhelmed by the vaulting ambitions of his colleagues. When Thacker laid out the Dorado’s preliminary schematic on an Alto running SIL, his program for automated circuit design, there was scarcely anything available to run on the Alto except SIL. By the time the first Dorado circuit boards came off a manufacturing line to be fitted into a seven-foot cabinet, the flowering of PARC technology had produced Mesa, a programming system so big it could burst the seams of any Alto in the building.
“The Dorado certainly got more complex than I had planned on,” Thacker said ruefully years later. “I do think it was the second-system syndrome at work. You’re successful and you say, ‘I’ll build something that’s a little bit better.’ Dorado may have been better, but it was certainly a lot more complicated. It took five years to get working and there were several false starts.”
The first of these occurred while he was still assigned to the Systems Development Division in the old Building 34 across the street from Coyote Hill. By then the Dorado had been designated to be the heart of a digital copier SDD was planning to build. The flaw in this plan, it quickly emerged, was that the new chips Thacker had been so eager to fit in his new design were a major headache to use. Employing a technology known as ECL, for “emitter-coupled logic,” they were indeed much faster and less buggy than the TTL—“transistor-transistor logic”—chips they had used in the Alto. But they were also terrible power hogs and threw off huge volumes of heat, which required patching in an additional power source to drive a fan. By the time Thacker finished his first-cut design of the Dorado processor, he knew he could never make it cheap enough for SDD to ship as a commercial product.
The labs regrouped. Thacker started over on a processor for the Star that would use the buggy old (but familiar) TTL chips. This evolved into the ill-fated Dolphin. Meanwhile, the Dorado program returned to the Computer Science Lab, which was immune to the ferocious pressures of shipment deadlines and commercial price points afflicting SDD. Everyone at CSL knew from the start, Lampson recalled later, that the Dorado would be “entirely impractical as a product.” But if the commercial marketplace was not prepared to spend the money to get one, they certainly were. The Dorado would be the biggest and best Time Machine ever.
The man assigned to oversee what was sure to be a record-breaking engineering project was Severo Ornstein. A solemn and intense individual whose professional resume included critical roles in the development of the LINC with Wes Clark and the construction of the first IMPs for the ARPANET at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Ornstein’s black beard and beetling eyebrows gave him the stern mien of a biblical prophet but masked an artist’s temperament beneath. He was the son of professional musicians—as a Harvard undergraduate he had briefly dallied with the idea of taking a music degree before settling instead on geology. In any case, his prickly temperament fit well into CSL’s unforgiving environment, where his barked “Nonsense!” became as familiar a hunting call as Chuck Thacker’s “Bullshit!” Although he had been recruited to CSL by Elkind, his stubborn and rigorous mind rapidly won over Bob Taylor, who soon invited him into his inner circle, the Greybeards.
Ornstein’s long experience with quixotic hardware projects made him a natural to head up the Dorado effort, even if his tough-minded assessment of the job made his colleagues uneasy about the scale of the undertaking. “I said it would take two years and ten people,” he recalled. “That was twice what anyone else was talking about.”
One day Lampson took him aside for an attempt at jawboning. “Look, Severo, I know you’re right,” he said. “But if you tell people how long it’ll take they’ll never start it. You have to lie to them.” One could almost imagine Ornstein’s eruptive reply: “Nonsense!” In the event, his estimate was right on the money.
Building the Dorado presented new logistical issues compared with MAXC, which was physically a bigger machine but was not expected to be mass-produced, or the Alto, which was mass-produced but small. Since there was no room for an assembly line on Coyote Hill, Ornstein rented another building about a mile away on Hanover Street, which became known as the “Garage.”
The CSL engineers’ fixation on building the Dorado helped fuel the Notetaker team’s inclination to go in the opposite direction. Given CSL’s determination to pervert the Dynabook concept by building a machine bigger than the Alto, “it’ll be a long time before we have the Dynabook,” Goldberg said one day. “Let’s do something that’s between the Alto and the Dynabook.”
In time she came to think of the Notetaker as an electronic notebook for kids to use in school. The idea was doubly ingenious: It not only gave them a paradigm to shoot for, but also established the machine’s physical dimensions. “That told us it had to be light enough to carry around so the kids could use it to take notes in class, then bring it home and back to school,” Tesler observed.
“Adele had in mind the eMate,” he added, referring to a small schooloriented laptop Apple Computer manufactured years later which bore a striking resemblance to Kay’s original Dynabook sketches.* “She knew it had to be somewhat heavier than the eMate, though she was hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be what it did, which was forty-five pounds, heavier than the kid.”
Between 1976 and 1978 the Dorado and the Notetaker projects proceeded along parallel but antithetical courses. The Dorado was so huge in scale that its sheer physical power sometimes overwhelmed the Garage’s efforts at quality control.
Recalled one technician, “It was easy to set a circuit board on fire because you had this unlimited amount of current. We saw several just literally burn up. The fans were so powerful you couldn’t see where the smoke was coming out. You could smell it, and you knew that there was something seriously wrong, but you couldn’t tell. So you had to shut the machine off and pull the boards to find out.”
One day, working with a partner, he spotted a wisp of smoke coming off a board and leaned into the machine to pinpoint its source. Suddenly a dozen little capacitors went off like incendiary bombs. The technicians hit the floor. When the devices ceased ricocheting off the walls, they got to their feet and gingerly eyeballed the errant board. The capacitors, they realized, had been installed backwards. They had been ticking away like tiny time bombs until the powerful current finally blew them and the board to pieces.
Kay’s group, meanwhile, focused not on how to pump an incendiary current through their machine, but how to make it run adequately on an electrical trickle and with the smallest and lightest components available.
Doug Fairbairn, who had joined the effort as chief hardware designer, was aware that Intel, which had long provided PARC with memory chips, had just introduced a processor-on-a-chip, the 8086. (This was the precursor of Intel’s x86/Pentium line of microprocessors, which today power most personal computers.) With Tesler’s help, he worked out a design in which three 8086’s would serve as the brains of the entire machine. They ordered the first chips Intel produced off the production line and promptly discovered a bug in the product, much to the manufacturer’s dismay.
“They said, ‘We just gave you the 8086 last week! How could you report a bug already?’”, Tesler recalled. But Intel had not reckoned with PARC’s do-it-yourself mentality. Years earlier the lab had purchased a rare million-dollar machine known as a Stitchweld, which could turn out printed circuit boards overnight from a digital schematic prepared on Thacker’s SIL program. “It turned out that no one else using the 8086 had Stitchwelds. Everyone else was going through complicated board designs, so they wouldn’t know for months if there was a bug. But at Xerox we gave them that feedback in a few days.”
Cramming everything inside a portable case remained their biggest challenge, for they did not intend to skimp on any of the technical features that made PARC machines distinctive. The Notetaker was to have a custom-built display with a seven-inch diagonal measurement and a touch-sensitive screen (to substitute for the mouse); stereo audio speakers and a built-in microphone; 128,000 bytes of main memory; a rechargeable battery; and an Ethernet port.
The latter, in fact, proved to be a particular headache. There was no question of going without it, of course—PARC could no more turn out a non-networked computer than it could go back to using electric typewriters. But fitting a standard Ethernet board—now boasting more than eighty chips—into the Notetaker’s cramped interior was equally out of the question.
One day Tesler crossed the street to SDD’s quarters in Building 34 and laid the dilemma before Ethernet’s inventor, Bob Metcalfe.
“Why does it take so many chips?” he asked.
Metcalfe patiently explained the function of every chip on the standard Ethernet board and why each was indispensable. Tesler countered that plenty of the circuitry could be discarded without undermining Ethernet’s basic operability. While everybody at PARC had their heads stuck in their high-performance systems, he told Metcalfe, a new world of computer design was taking shape on the outside. PARC was going to have to adjust.
Tesler’s views on the matter approached the heretical. He was referring to the hobbyist market, which was indeed exploding. The first annual West Coast Computer Faire, held in April 1977, had attracted thousands of young fanatics from all over the Bay Area. These were serious amateurs who built computers named Altair and PET out of kits ordered by mail, and gathered every weekend to swap shortcuts and software at gatherings like the Homebrew Computer Club.
They were enchanted with computing’s gadgetry as an end in itself, just as a previous generation had been with their ham radio sets. For many years yet their mindset would remain alien to those who had learned their computing at PARC. But Tesler, one of the few PARC engineers familiar with this niche, already saw they knew plenty that PARC would need to learn. They had found new ways to move functions out of hardware into software and to cut corners to save money and space. It wouldn’t do to dismiss them as kids playing with toys: Their computers worked.
“I don’t think the chips are all necessary on the Ethernet board,” he told Metcalfe. “These PC guys make their computers so cheap because they go through all these tricks. We ought to start doing the same.”
“That’s them,” Metcalfe replied. “Our boards have to work perfectly.”
“Maybe so, but our computers are worth ten to twenty thousand dollars in parts alone and they sell theirs for a hundred buck. We’re trying to do a cheap portable computer and we only have room for twenty-five chips on each board.”
“Then you’ll never do Ethernet,” Metcalfe replied. “You’ll have to wait for the Ethernet integrated circuit, which is at least five years away.”
“We can’t wait,” Tesler replied.
Then he recrossed the street and set about proving Metcalfe wrong. Tesler and Fairbairn compressed the Ethernet design as you might wring out a damp sponge, working it down to twenty-four chips by shunting more of the work to software than Metcalfe thought possible. The result was a board that just barely kept up with the three-megabit-per-second PARC Ethernet—but that did fit inside the Notetaker. (“Metcalfe loved it,” Tesler recalled. “But he was already working on the ten-megabit Ethernet for SDD, so it wasn’t relevant to anything he was doing.”)
The Garage rolled out the first Dorados in 1978 to conspicuous acclaim. “The Dorado was the only really great computer that PARC built,” judged Ed Fiala, who had played a role in every previous CSL hardware project. Where the Alto had been slow even for its time, the Dorado was a speed demon by any contemporary standard. “All the funky old Alto software ran on the Dorado so fast I got headaches from not waiting,” Jim Morris recalled. “Suddenly I realized that for the first time, I’m the bottleneck.”
For a Time Machine, the Dorado was also relatively inexpensive. Moore’s Law was beginning to make its power known in earnest: The machine cost only about $50,000 in parts while delivering the computing resources of three powerful Digital Equipment Corporation VAX—11/780 workstations, which sold for $500,000 each in 1980.
The machine’s power almost shook its creators’ faith that they were building something for individuals to use. “It was difficult to think of the Dorado as a personal machine, since it consumed 2,500 watts of power, was the size of a refrigerator, and required 2,000 cubic feet of cooling air per minute,” Thacker said later. Yet that, after all, was the essence of the Time Machine. Potent as the Dorado was, he was still confident that something on the same scale would be available on a desktop to the individual user within five or ten years, and he was right.
Meanwhile the CSL’s programmers plunged into work that had been stymied by the Alto’s limitations of speed and memory. Deutsch, Teitelman, and several others had already compiled a “wish list” of desirable features of an ideal programming system. To their delight, Dorado was powerful enough to incorporate them all into a system they called “Cedar.”
Cedar combined the best features of Mesa and Smalltalk. It offered the former’s industrial strength and clarity, which allowed programs written by one person to be understood and elaborated on by others, without giving up the latter’s graphical flexibility or its nifty features such as “garbage collection”—a sort of housekeeping function that used memory more efficiently by automatically clearing memory space occupied by data a program no longer needed.
For all its performance enhancements, the Dorado did have a few significant flaws. For one thing, it could not coexist in an office with a human being. The machine’s voracious appetite for electricity made it radiate heat like a barbecue pit, while the fans created an unimaginable din. In an attempt to make the machine quiet enough for an office, the designer tried housing it in a case so bulky it was nicknamed the “armored personnel carrier.” But the sound-insulating material stuffed inside only made the system run hotter, which made the fans work harder, which created more noise and heat in an endless, vicious circle.
“They were such an efficient heater in the office that the guy just about had to work in his underwear,” recalled Charles Sosinski, a PARC technician. Eventually they hit upon the solution of removing the Dorados from the offices altogether, stowing twenty machines together in a single, very well air-conditioned room from which they were linked by cable to the terminals, keyboards, and mice in individual offices.
But these technical problems never quelled the furious demand for the swift and robust machines.
“People would say, ‘I could get my work done in an hour, and it would take me all day on an Alto,’” Sosiaski remembered. For the first time since a couple of prototypical Altos nicknamed Bilbo and Gandalf emerged from CSL’s basement shop, there were not enough computers at PARC to go around. Even after full-scale production began, the Garage was able to turn out no more than ten or fifteen Dorados a year; in 1982 there were still only thirty in existence. Some junior scientists, especially those outside the favored halls of CSL, were reduced to reliving the bad old days of time-sharing. “It was very hard to get Dorados for quite a long time,” recalled Diana Merry. “When we were writing Smalltalk-80 I would have to come in late at night, because that was the only way to get one to work on.”
Almost simultaneously with the Dorado, the first Notetaker prototype was completed. Kay immediately termed it a triumph. What it lacked in the Dorado’s overwhelming power it made up for with a sort of bantam-scale élan.
The Notetaker ran a compact version of Smalltalk—76 and boasted an ingenious physical design that would be shamelessly mimicked by the first generation of so-called “luggable” computers six years later. When closed the computer looked like a plump plastic attaché case. One opened it cross-sectionally, like a cracked-open egg, by flipping two latches. The screen and disk drive were set in the larger piece, facing the user when the box was laid flat on a table. The keyboard was part of the second, smaller section, connected to the first by a flexible cable.
Bolted back into one piece, the Notetaker could be carried, albeit with great effort. Lifting it by the built-in handle strained the plastic case until it warped. “We used to say it ran at five herniations per block,” Kay joked. To avoid rupturing the case and dumping ten thousand dollars’ worth of components on the ground like groceries out of a wet paper bag, Tesler and Fairbairn built a rolling cart that also allowed them to slide it, just barely, under the seat of an airliner. One day Fairbairn, bringing the prototype to Rochester for a show-and-tell, fired it up on its batteries in midflight, therefore becoming the very first person to operate a personal computer on an airplane—the first of a legion of electronic road warriors wired to their work at 35,000 feet.
The Dorado and the Notetaker shared one other distinction. They were the last major projects undertaken at PARC by the scientists of its first generation. Between 1978 and 1982 the Dorado almost entirely replaced the Alto as the computer of choice inside PARC, and elicited numerous expressions of interest from customers on the outside. But no assembly line other than the low-volume Garage was ever approved by Xerox. Come 1983, a series of dramatic events would strip the Dorado of its design team and render it a technological orphan.
The Learning Research Group manufactured ten Notetakers and tried in vain, as usual, to interest Xerox in the product. Tesler spent the better part of a year flying around the country displaying the prototype to division executives. But whatever influence PARC ever had in Stamford or Rochester had visibly drained away. “Xerox executives made all sorts of promises,” Tesler said. “We’ll buy 20,000, just talk to this executive in Virginia, then talk to this executive in Connecticut.’ After a year I was ready to give up.”
Soon after the last Notetaker was built, Alan Kay announced that he was taking a long-promised sabbatical. For Kay the project’s exhilaration had already yielded to his familiar feelings of despair. The Notetaker was enticingly similar to the old cardboard model he had once used to illustrate the Dynabook. But his unquiet nature was to focus not on how close it came but on where it fell short. His outward glee at creating a new machine masked his real disappointment at how its compromises on weight and size had once again “squeezed out the end-users for whom it was originally aimed”—that is, the children.
Southern California beckoned. He had a new girlfriend, Bonnie MacBird, who he had met while she was researching a screenplay about computer wizards and who lived in Los Angeles. (After endless tinkerings by Hollywood executives this screenplay became the movie Tron, which came out in 1982, two years after Kay and MacBird were married. “We like to say the marriage turned out a lot better than the movie,” he said.) He announced he was temporarily relocating to L.A. to take organ lessons. He never returned to PARC.
Adele Goldberg took over the group after his departure. She was the logical choice, like Ingalls a champion implementer, as she proved by shepherding the next version of Smalltalk to completion—Smalltalk—80. A few years later with Dave Robson, another team member, she wrote the definitive Smalltalk textbook.
But the Learning Research Group was a very different place without Kay, its font of ideas. “It was like getting our heart cut out when he left,” Merry recalled. “It wasn’t too long after he left that we had another Pajaro Dunes offsite. I remember that being very sad, the first Pajaro Dunes when Alan wasn’t there. We missed him very badly. It really was in many ways the end of a lot of the good stuff.”
The rest of them hung on for another couple of years, finishing old projects. Some started looking for new challenges. Larry Tesler, fed up by his fruitless quest to interest Xerox in the Notetaker, was awaiting only a sign of when and where he should go.
That sign appeared one day in 1979, when a Silicon Valley legend in the making walked through PARC’s front door.
*This 40-nanosecond clock cycle translates to a processor speed of about 25 megahertz (i.e. 25 million processor cycles per second). Compare this to today’s desktop computers, which range in speed from about 133 to as much as 450 MHz.
*The eMate was a hit in the education market but a failure in the general market. Apple discontinued the model during its financial retrenchment in 1998