Bill Spencer’s introduction to PARC was jolly enough. On the day he assumed leadership of the Integrated Circuits Lab, his new colleagues welcomed him with a green cake: It was St. Patrick’s Day 1981.
But the charm rapidly paled. As he got to know the place better, he grew appalled at the working atmosphere at 3333 Coyote Hill Road. The lab that a few short years before had been the most exciting research venue in the country, if not the world, now appeared to be in the grip of some malignant virus. Whole departments shunned each other, except to fight over resources and belittle each other’s work. Everywhere you looked you found people harboring mysterious grudges and grotesque suspicions.
The most routine personal transactions were like minefields. Not long after his arrival Spencer, believing that he ought to be in touch with his “customers”—that is, the other labs at PARC that would be using his chips—sent out an e-mail message inviting several lab chiefs to a friendly meeting to toss around ideas. Everyone accepted.
A few days later Bob Taylor graciously offered the Computer Science Lab commons as a venue for the get-together. A gratified Spencer sent out another round of messages informing his guests of the new location. The next few hours brought a cascade of cancellations.
Bewildered, he picked up the phone and dialed Lynn Conway, the first respondent.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Why aren’t you coming?”
“It’s CSL,” she responded. “I’d be physically assaulted if I went in there.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Think what you want,” she replied simply. “But I won’t set foot in that lab.” The meeting never took place.
The more Spencer investigated, the grimmer he found the situation. Pake’s strategy of isolating Taylor by sundering PARC in two had exacerbated the schism, not resolved it. “At every staff meeting power grabs and disputes over resources dominated the discussion,” he observed. “Computer resources, office space, budget—you name it, they fought over it. It was so acrimonious and divisive that the center had ground to a halt while people spent all their time defending their turf.”
The contention was general, but Taylor appeared to stand at its center. His claims on PARC’s resources, based on his presumption that any work done outside his lab was scarcely worth doing at all, forced the others to dig in against any change that threatened even tangentially to shift the balance of power. Further roiling the atmosphere were rumors that he was shopping the Computer Science Lab as a wholesale package to a Xerox competitor (speculation focused on Hewlett-Packard, which was building a research center on a Palo Alto hillside just over the ridge from Coyote Hill). Taylor always steadfastly denied the story, but the suspicion never entirely waned.
Yet to blame Taylor entirely for the dysfunctional atmosphere would be unjust. To a certain extent the internal conflicts grew out of the ineluctable life cycle of a creative institution. In one form or another the same tension had been present almost since PARC’s founding; for most of the first decade it simply had been channeled more fruitfully.
“Up until 1977 or so the lab conflicts seemed more dynamic and actually productive in stimulating healthy competitiveness and innovation,” Lynn Conway observed. As projects matured, people moved on, and outside organizations assumed the exciting work of bringing PARC’s innovations to market, there was less of substance to fight about within the walls. And as is known to veterans of all intramural politics—whether they take place on a university campus or inside a corporation—the less at stake, the more vicious the battle.
At PARC the excitement had faded but the pressure cooker remained. The internecine competition took on a reflexive quality, as though people were going through the motions. Severo Ornstein recalled a telling incident soon after CSL spun off its graphics programs into a separate lab under Chuck Geschke and John Warnock. “These were guys we had worked very cohesively with,” Ornstein recalled. “But not two weeks later I heard someone in the hallway refer to them as ‘they.’ Chuckling, I thought, ‘This is how wars start.’”
Xerox’s indifference to PARC’s work also deserves some of the blame for nursing these unproductive conflicts. Futures Day had underscored how divergent were the vectors between parent and offspring. More depressing miscues followed, such as the clash of expectations over “Interpress.”
Interpress was a programming system that aimed to reconcile the different image resolutions of computer screens and laser printers. This difference often resulted in documents that looked perfect on an Alto display, but emerged as gibberish on the higher-resolution printers—which of course made a mockery of Bravo’s WYSIWYG feature. After years of painstaking work and several intermediate versions, Geschke, Warnock, Bob Sproull, Lampson, and others had at last invented a so-called page description language allowing printers of any type to output a document that accurately reproduced its on-screen representation, regardless of the incompatibilities between display and laser. But the difficulty of persuading Xerox to integrate Interpress into its laser printers and other typographical products made the process of actual invention look like a cakewalk.
“We spent months traveling around to all the divisions within Xerox and back to corporate selling this idea,” Warnock recalled. The program was extensively rewritten to meet objections by the various divisions. Finally, in 1982, the company agreed to make Interpress a standard component of its entire program line—but refused to announce or release it until every product could be reengineered to take advantage of it. The upshot would be an unendurable delay.
“I knew that would take at least five to ten years, and really it was just never going to happen,” Warnock recalled. “Chuck Geschke and I had a conversation in his office and said, ‘You know, we need to go do something else, because we’ve spent two years of our lives trying to sell this thing and they’re going to put it under a black shroud for another five.’ You were seeing PCs get announced, and Apples, and you kept asking yourself, ‘When is all this great stuff going to see the light of day?’ And you’d think about the Xerox infrastructure and the process it would have to go through to get into products, and it became sort of depressing.”
A short time later he and Geschke resigned to start their own company, Adobe Systems. After a couple of false starts they settled on a business plan that would ultimately turn Adobe into a $1-billion-a-year enterprise: the refining and marketing of a new “typesetting,” or page description, language, along the lines initially developed in Interpress. This language was Postscript, a typesetting system first bundled with Apple printers. Postscript allowed computer-generated documents to be printed on laser printers, linotype machines, and virtually everything in between. In its later versions it proved able to handle graphics and color with amazing fidelity. Within a few short years it became the de facto standard of computerized typesetting, and a dominating rival of Interpress itself—yet another technology that broke free from cloistered PARC to flourish on the outside.
Thus conflicts that might have been channeled into helping a new product reach market got turned inward instead. But Spencer, who arrived at a point when PARC’s most impressive achievements were already behind it, had not lived through these battles with the corporate mindset. He found it difficult to view the internecine tensions as anything other than childish squabbling. In any case, none of the quarreling had been resolved by late 1982, when George Pake asked him to succeed Hall as head of the half-PARC “Science Center.”
To Pake’s surprise, Spencer turned him down. The bifurcation of PARC was untenable, he said, and he would not be interested in managing one half of a house divided against itself. He did, however, offer to step in as PARC director—if and when Pake saw fit to reunite the two halves.
Pake agreed without hesitation, even with relief. He had found it painful to watch the bickering continue even after the partition. Moreover, he admired Spencer not only for his skills as a technical administrator but for his apparent ability to co-exist with Bob Taylor. Spencer and Taylor played tennis together every Saturday, their wives and children were friendly, yet Pake could see no sign that Spencer had bought into the CSL orthodoxy. He dared hope that after more than ten years he had finally found the one man on Earth who could keep Taylor in his place.
There was much about Taylor that Bill Spencer respected. In all his years in research he had met few managers so adept at running small or medium-sized teams. Taylor’s method of forging personal bonds and keeping up a jealous defense of his own role as laboratory autocrat was one Spencer thought would fail miserably in a large lab. But there was no denying it worked marvelously inside CSL.
“He never traveled,” Spencer recalled. “He would come in every day at ten in the morning, park his BMW in the same space every day, and pick up his badge from the security guard. He would go in his office, break out a Dr Pepper, and for the next eight to ten hours individually touch every member of his lab. As a consensus manager he was extraordinary.”
Professional problems, personal crises, interpersonal spats—whatever the issue—Taylor’s people came to Taylor. “Bob’s office was like the hub of a wheel. Through the day each of them would come in there. The question could be anything. ‘Can I go to the bathroom?’ ‘Is it time for me to go to lunch?”
One day Spencer witnessed an incident that seemed to sum it all up. He was sitting and chatting in Taylor’s office when a member of the CSL staff poked his head in to mention that he was going out for a game of tennis. As Spencer recalled, “Taylor said, ‘I see you’ve got a new can of balls there. You’re not good enough yet to play with new balls. Here’s a can of old ones. Use these, they’ll be better for you.’
“Now, here’s a thirty-five or forty-year-old man, a Ph.D., and he needs Bob Taylor to tell him how he’s going to play tennis!”
After Spencer became PARC director the troublesome consequences of Taylor’s all-encompassing paternalism got driven home. One of the most serious problems he faced was CSL’s inability to resolve its members’ disputes with the other labs, no matter how trivial. As he settled into his new office, Spencer started to bridle at the amount of time he spent mediating quarrels that should have been settled further down the line. “Whenever a CSL guy had a problem with anyone else there was no one he could take it to but Taylor, and Taylor would never deal with it. So every time there was a problem it ended up in my office. And I said, ‘This is not a workable situation. I will not solve the problems of fifty individuals in that lab.’”
He also recognized more strongly than ever the other deficiencies in Taylor’s management style. Taylor’s vaunted “flat” management structure, which meant that every researcher in the Computer Science Lab reported to him rather than to an intermediate level of management, had outlived its usefulness. In the old days it had served the purpose of ensuring that all the researchers pulled together in pursuit of a coherent vision (with the exception of renegades like Shoup and Bobrow). But it had also stifled creativity and—more important from the point of view of PARC management—prevented the center from spotting and nurturing management talent among the CSL staff. If any of the researchers possessed the skills to be the next Bob Taylor, no one would ever find out.
Meanwhile Taylor, still viewing Spencer as a potential ally, strived to draw him into his own vision of PARC, which was as a research center devoted entirely to personal computing, free of the dead weight of a physics lab. Shortly after Spencer’s promotion to head of PARC, Taylor asked him along to CSL’s annual Greybeard offsite at the Bear Hollow resort north of San Francisco.
“We invited Spencer so we could tell him how the resource allocation should be reorganized,” Taylor said—in other words, to repeat the case he had made to the ill-fated Bob Spinrad. “Everybody there complained to him about the investment imbalance.” The wary Spencer, however, thought the plan sounded like a blueprint for giving Taylor control of both CSL and SSL, something he was not about to do. He sat through the discussion noncommittally. Later, after they had all returned home, Taylor talked as though he thought the group had made its case to the new director. Ed McCreight disabused him of the notion at once. “Spencer listened,” he cautioned, “but don’t get it into your head that he agreed.”
On the contrary, relations between these two strong-willed individuals were destined to build rapidly toward a crisis.
Twenty years of experience as a laboratory manager had given Spencer very firm ideas about the obligation of researchers to help their employers turn their work into product—“technology transfer,” as it was known in industry. On this task he judged that much of PARC, and particularly CSL, deserved a failing grade. Henceforth, he decreed, fifty percent of the lab bosses’ annual evaluations would be based on how well they worked with their “customers”—i.e., the development and manufacturing units of Xerox.
Taylor’s response was, perversely, to step up his demand for new resources. If Spencer wanted this sort of additional contribution out of CSL, he said, he would need more “billets”—in other words, more staff openings. Spencer was astonished. The issue of staffing and budgets was exceptionally sensitive at Xerox, given that the company’s financially desperate situation had already led to layoffs in its 125,000-strong workforce. “The fact that the research budgets weren’t cut was amazing,” Spencer said. “In 1981 Xerox hit a wall and by 1982 it was in serious trouble. That year there was no profit-sharing for employees for the first time in company history. The place was being torn apart.”
In contrast to Pake, who dealt with Taylor largely through avoidance, Spencer was not one to suffer defiance mutely or let an affront go unremarked. He liked to give as good as he got: Upon his departure from one job his peers had presented him with a giant mock hypodermic, a testament to his penchant for “needling” others. When Taylor pushed, Spencer pushed back harder, dictating more and more explicitly how he expected Taylor to manage his lab. Taylor, the old expert at defining his role in the hierarchy, had finally met someone insistent on defining his role for him.
“Taylor is spiraling out of control,” Harold Hall observed to his diary on June 28 from the secure perch of a corporate staff job. The CSL staff watched apprehensively as the initial friendliness between Taylor and Spencer deteriorated into outright animosity—the tennis Saturdays were a thing of the past. Butler Lampson, who had become one of the world’s first networked “telecommuters” by moving to Philadelphia, where his wife was working as an immunologist, viewed the situation gravely enough to fly to Palo Alto to beg Pake to avert the impending cataclysm. But Pake, toughened perhaps by having Spencer around as spear carrier, proved unexpectedly determined.
“His position boiled down to that Taylor was too much a pain in the butt,” Lampson recalled. “And it’s true that Bob was a pain in the butt, absolutely no question about it. But he wasn’t actually causing George that much trouble. It’s ridiculous to say the functioning of the whole research center was being disrupted. What was really happening was these guys just got on some kind of power trip. They had to have control over Bob.”
This is too limited a view. Pake regarded Taylor’s behavior not merely as a personal tribulation, but as a roadblock preventing PARC from fulfilling its corporate destiny. As much as the laser printer represented a commercially valuable technology, Pake thought that only by persuading the company to link it with other PARC digital technologies could the lab help Xerox claim a piece of the future of digital electronic copying.
“That meant I needed to foster good relations between PARC and the development and engineering units of the copier division,” he said later. “Having a group of computer scientists, including their manager, who scoffed at and derided the copier engineers in Rochester did not help PARC develop such good relations.” Under Bert Sutherland the System Science Lab had forged a suitably collegial working alliance with the copier division. Pake’s alarm at Spinrad’s five-year plan had sprouted in part from the thought of how swiftly those friendly ties would be obliterated if Taylor were allowed to take over SSL.
Which is not to deny that Pake also had become deeply distrustful of Taylor’s powerful personal influence over his researcher’s souls. “I saw Taylor’s relationship to his lab members as analogous to Jim Jones and the Jonestown cult,” was his remarkable recollection. This impression must have been reinforced, if not inspired, by one senior researcher’s explanation for why he had turned down a chance to work with Taylor’s lab. “George,” the researcher told Pake, “I wouldn’t be willing to drink the Kool-Aid.”
“We understood very well Taylor’s relationship to his lab members,” Pake said later. “What we did not understand was what to do about it.”
Meanwhile, it fell to Spencer to get everyone on Coyote Hill working together in an atmosphere of mutual civility. That August, in a desperate attempt to ease the rancor among his lab chiefs, he convened his own offsite at Pajaro Dunes. There, in the same setting where Alan Kay’s group had regularly repaired to contemplate the digital future, the senior lab managers of Xerox PARC flayed each other in an emotional showdown. Until two or three in the morning they vented their feelings like patients in gestalt therapy. “People let their hair down to talk about what really were the problems at PARC,” Spencer recalled. The debate seemed honest and heartfelt. As dawn was breaking over the dunes, he allowed himself to think that Taylor—the target of most of their complaints—had finally realized the error of his ways.
“Bob said, ‘I’ve never heard any of this before,’” Spencer said. “‘Nobody’s ever told me what I did wrong. I’m sorry, I didn’t know that I was doing these things. I’ll change and it will never happen again.’ Everybody thought, ‘Wow! We’ve solved the problem. Now we can go back and start doing research.’”
But Taylor did not come away from the retreat with the same perspective. What he had chosen to hear was not a blanket condemnation of his personal behavior, only a rehashing of a few old incidents about which no one had ever directly complained to him before. On those terms he was perfectly willing to apologize for any inadvertent misunderstandings and let bygones be bygones.
In any case, the era of good feelings did not last long. The very next day Taylor showed up in Spencer’s office. As Spencer recalls this encounter, Taylor all but disavowed every promise he had made. “Don’t believe anything you heard last night,” he said, leaving Spencer dumbfounded. “That isn’t the way it’s going to be.”
Taylor recalls having a distinctly different agenda. He said he was merely anxious to set Spencer straight on some incidents in which he thought he had been cast unfairly as the villain. “I certainly did not tell him, ‘Hey, I was just bullshitting when I said such and such.’”
Either way, it was obvious that the Pajaro Dunes bloodletting had not produced the catharsis Spencer had hoped for. Whatever Taylor thought of the recent confrontation, clearly he was not committed to improving his intramural relationships. Spencer was fed up. He was determined to lay down the law, in writing, and give Taylor a hard deadline to alter his behavior.
A few days later he summoned Taylor to his office for a formal reading out of his alleged violations of good corporate conduct. He ordered Taylor to end any contact he had with competing companies; to reorganize his lab into sections and create an intermediate level of management to supervise them; to stop denigrating the other PARC labs and their work; and, most humiliating, to report to Spencer’s office every Monday at 9 A.M. to discuss his progress toward those goals.
Failure to fulfill those terms, Spencer said stiffly, could result in Taylor’s termination. Then he sent Taylor away with a written memo reflecting what he had said, along with the injunction that the document was confidential and he was not to discuss its contents with anyone.
But for Taylor to leave his own people in the dark was unthinkable. Before the end of the day he called his closest advisors, including Thacker, Mitchell, and Ornstein, to his house in Palo Alto, where he handed Spencer’s memo around. He appeared stunned and dejected, as though recognizing that the final act in his Xerox career was playing out.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but the handwriting’s on the wall,” he told them. He seemed to take particular umbrage at the injunction to cease seeking a deal with another company, an offense of which he insisted he was innocent. “That’s like telling me to stop beating my wife,” he said.
Spencer’s memo prompted Taylor’s supporters to stage another round of appeals to Pake, this time with explicit warnings that the upshot of forcing Taylor out would be wholesale resignations from CSL. “A whole bunch of people who were in a position to know went to them and very carefully explained what was going to happen if they did this,” Lampson said. “And they didn’t believe us, even though it was perfectly obvious that we were the source of knowledge on this subject because we were the people who were going to leave. They didn’t believe us, or they didn’t care.”
Taylor himself figured there was only one avenue of appeal: directly to David Kearns. Spencer had already apprised Kearns, by now the Xerox CEO, of the impending storm by sending him a copy of the memo with the notation that he expected Kearns to back him up on the conditions therein. Otherwise one of them—Spencer or Taylor—would have to go “and he could choose which one.” When Taylor asked for a meeting Kearns deputed his chief technical officer, Sandy Campbell, to mediate the quarrel.
Campbell called Spencer and Taylor to Stamford for a marathon parley aimed at resolving the battle “based on the principle,” as Spencer put it, “of who had the bigger bladder.” Convening in Campbell’s office at eight-thirty in the morning, they aired their grievances without respite, fueled only by coffee and Dr Pepper. All the old issues took their turn on the stage: Taylor’s arrogance, his demand for a disproportionate share of the budget, his failure to develop managerial talent on his staff. Spencer further suggested that Taylor by his intransigence had actually impeded technology transfer at Xerox.
“My response was that there was more technology transfer from CSL to SDD than ever in the history of computing,” Taylor recalled, “because every tool SDD used they got from us.”
“But SDD failed,” Spencer said.
“That’s not my fault,” Taylor snapped back. “I was hired to produce the best technology I could. If the product group was not able to take advantage of our technology a lot of people are culpable, not me.”
Finally Spencer accused Taylor of making his memo public in contravention of a direct order. By then it was two in the afternoon and they had been hard at it for more than five hours.
“Did you do that?” Campbell asked Taylor.
“Sure I did,” Taylor replied breezily. And why not? “Could anyone be foolish enough to think that this guy was going to tell me to change the way I operated and I’m not going to explain that to the lab?” he remarked later. “That’s stupid.”
On that note, Campbell broke up the meeting. Taylor and Spencer shared a corporate car to New York’s Kennedy Airport without exchanging a single word during the more-than-hour-long trip. On the commercial flight home that evening they sat far apart, silently preparing for the final confrontation.
Taylor had tipped the Greybeards in advance to his agenda when he summoned his lab the following Monday morning, September 19, to the beanbag room. The rest of CSL could only guess why Taylor had called Dealer for such an unusual day and hour. They listened in mounting consternation as the only boss many of them had ever known recapitulated the high points of his career, teary-eyed and emotional. Several of his points he had earlier made in a separate memo to Spencer, who was present.
“Most people spend a lifetime without opportunities for pioneering completely new ways of thinking about large collections of ideas,” he said. “I have been fortunate to have been a leader in three: time-sharing; long-distance interactive networking; and personal distributed computing.”
Under Spencer’s uneasy gaze, Taylor proceeded to rehash the recent sequence of meetings and confrontations. Then came the fatal words.
“I want you all to know I’ve handed in my resignation,” he said, and walked out.
A stunned hush descended on the room. Spencer unwisely took the floor and, as one participant later remembered, “tried to continue the meeting as though what had happened was routine and it was now time to move on to new business.”
Instead the room exploded in fury, all of it aimed directly at him. “I have never watched a grown man be shat upon like that by forty people at once,” said Severo Ornstein. “I almost felt sorry for him—except that I was so angry at him.”
The desperate Spencer tried to hold his own against an audience with all the forbearance of a lynch mob. He argued that Taylor’s departure need not represent a major shift in the way the lab was run or a change in their work, that it was a temporary blip soon to be overcome. No one was buying the line. Suddenly a stentorian voice rang out.
“This is bullshit!”
All heads swiveled to the source of the outburst. Chuck Thacker had risen to his feet. In the most precise terms an engineer’s engineer could summon to his lips at that fervid moment, he informed Spencer that he had just committed the gravest mistake of his life. His eyes swept the room. He said he hoped what he was about to do would not be taken as a model or a hint to anyone else; it was a personal statement and he wished it to be viewed that way.
Then he said, “I resign,” and followed Taylor out the door.
Spencer was dumbfounded. Taylor’s resignation he was prepared for; Thacker’s came out of nowhere. As the meeting erupted in further recriminations he lost what remained of his grip.
“What can I do to rectify this?” he asked aloud.
A voice from the back of the room, over by the whiteboards—he never learned whose it was—called out: “You can fucking resign!”
His jaw set, Spencer replied, “The company made this choice, not me.” Shaken and humiliated, he departed.
“Spencer fired Taylor,” Butler Lampson said later. “Taylor got fired, he didn’t resign, no matter what you think happened technically. They created an environment within which he had to resign. They told him, you must do the following twelve things. Basically what it came down to was going into Bill Spencer’s office every Monday morning to lick his boots.”
Kearns, to his credit, granted the Greybeards’ subsequent request for an emergency audience. Presumably he was aware of how Taylor’s ouster had played in the computer science community, because he had been inundated with telegrams and letters from dozens of top academic researchers—as though Taylor’s entire ARPA army had risen in protest. Nevertheless, as the commanding officer of a company locked in apocalyptic battle with the Japanese, his sympathy for the self-indulgent eggheads of PARC was necessarily restrained. He preferred to view the flap as the unfortunate result of an executive’s ordering a subordinate quite properly to get with the program. If Taylor refused, he had to go.
For their part, the Greybeards were under no great illusion that Kearns would overrule Spencer. The very episode carried within itself its own irrevocability; as Ornstein reflected, a reinstated Taylor would have been “completely unmanageable.” But having flown East on the principle that silence would only be worse, they went through with it.
Thus they spent a futile morning with Kearns and McColough, who was still chairman of the board. Ornstein found himself repeating in Kearns’s ear, like a mantra, “This lab will be gone inside of six months.” The third time, Kearns turned to him with a steely glare and said curtly: “I heard you.”
“I came away thinking, he’ll back his guys,” Ornstein recalled.
The exodus did occur as they predicted, although not instantaneously. While Thacker left immediately to work with a startup company marketing a paging device he had invented, many other CSL staff members deferred their resignations until after the end of the year, when their bonuses, retirement credit, stock options, and other perks would vest for 1983.
But then the floodgates opened. “During that first couple of weeks in January there were like two or three resignations a day, because people had already done their looking around,” Warren Teitelman remembered. “We would stand out in the halls afraid to read our e-mail, because it would only say, well, we lost two principal scientists and three senior scientists today.”
There can be little doubt that Bob Taylor’s bosses underestimated—and more critically, misunderstood—his relationship with his laboratory members. On an administrative level he had ceded the job of corporate politicking to Jerry Elkind; on a technical level he was vastly overshadowed by Butler Lampson (as was almost everyone else). But his role was always more subtle, and bound to seem different depending on whether it was viewed from within the lab or without. Taylor had created the very habitat that his engineers and scientists depended on to pursue their work. He was not only the buffer between them and the mundane concerns of corporate Xerox, but the indispensable lightning rod for all the complaints about their arrogance and elitism.
“Taylor sacrificed a lot of his career at Xerox so we wouldn’t see a lot of the bullshit,” Alan Kay remarked later. This sentiment was widely shared. It accounted for much of their loyalty to him (even among those with whom he had clashed), and even more for their fear that things would be immeasurably different once he was gone.
His resignation marked the passing of an era at PARC that some people believed, perhaps correctly, had run out its string anyway. To Spencer and Pake, Taylor was not merely the strident exponent of CSL privilege; he was the defender of a stultified regime.
“I knew there was a high risk we would lose people,” Spencer recalled. “But by 1980 the research center had really come dead in the water. So you’d had this wonderful burst of imaginative things, a great burst of energy, and by that time it was dead. I had a feeling we were going backwards. Absolutely, the place needed a change.
“If I had had my choice I would not have chosen to lose all of those computer scientists. But in retrospect, it may have been a good thing.”
Taylor meanwhile found a sponsor for a new lab. It was not Hewlett-Packard, as Pake and Spencer suspected, but Digital Equipment Corp., the maker of the PDP-10 minicomputer that had caused CSL’s very first flap with Xerox so many long years before. “DEC called to ask if I would consult,” Taylor said. “Then three of their real estate people showed up and asked: Where should we build the lab?”
Selecting a site near downtown Palo Alto, on the far side of the Stanford campus from PARC, Taylor ultimately attracted fifteen CSL staff, among them Thacker and Lampson, to the DEC Systems Research Center, Robert W. Taylor, director. The emigration of so many top scientists to one place finally got Kearns’s attention. He and his right-hand man, Bill Glavin, flew to DEC headquarters outside Boston to implore Ken Olson, its founder and CEO, to halt the raid on PARC. They even delivered a rather fatuous warning that Xerox was a very large DEC customer…for the moment.
Nothing ever came of the threat. But as Kearns later recounted, a few years later Olson pulled him aside at a corporate chief executive’s conference to complain about the Palo Alto SRC’s independent-minded engineers.
“We’re having some difficulty with the group,” he griped, “now that we’re trying to tie them more directly to the business strategy.”
Kearns chuckled. “Ken,” he said, “that’s how you got them in the first place.”
Spencer, meanwhile, was left with the task of restoring the morale of dozens of PARC engineers shocked and upset at Taylor’s departure. Shortly after the ouster he joined the Learning Research Group at one of its last Pajaro Dunes retreats.
The atmosphere of change could not have been stronger. Kay and his fecund imagination were gone. Adele Goldberg and Dave Robson had published the first commercial guide to Smalltalk, which Xerox had officially released to the public.
PARC’s original three laboratories had fissioned into six, including the Intelligent Systems Laboratory under John Seely Brown—spun off from SSL, which was recast as the System Concepts Laboratory under Goldberg. With the exception of the Optical Science Laboratory, which was still headed by John Urbach, all of the original PARC labs had new managers.
Spencer took it as his duty to communicate to Alan Kay’s old group how different the world had become. The PARC of Jack Goldman and George Pake, of researchers following their instincts into a new world without the least concern for corporate imperatives, was gone. Pake’s original deadline—the ten-year grace period before Xerox would see results from PARC—had passed. In that time the center had given the company the laser printer, Ethernet, and the technology of the Star, but there was more to do. Henceforth the researchers would have to play a more direct role in helping the company exploit their knowledge. People like Taylor, with his worldview of scientific research and corporate profit as two somehow antagonistic forces, were now in the way.
“I can still see myself sitting with Spencer on the steps looking out at the dunes, toward the water,” recalled Diana Merry. “I was trying to get him to explain to me why he thought he had to push Taylor out.
“He said, ‘Well, you know, he just wouldn’t play on the team.’”