The Time Machine
It was April in California’s Santa Clara Valley, a fine time to be changing the world.
Very late one night in 1973 a small group assembled inside the office of an electronics engineer named Charles P. Thacker. The room was located on the ground floor of a low-slung building set upon the crest of a gentle ridge in the foothills of the Santa Cruz range. Pastureland and apricot orchards covered one side of the hill; a spreading growth of industrial laboratories and research facilities dotted the other, so that the ridge itself seemed to mark the divide between the region’s agricultural past and its high-technology future. The building housing Thacker’s lab, along with two others located in a dale about a half-mile away, encompassed Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known to its small but growing staff as Xerox PARC.
The visitors had come to attend the birth of a computer. Today such an event inevitably would be accompanied by crowds, banners, music, speeches, multimedia shows projected on three-story-high outdoor screens, press releases, media tours, and admiring cover pieces in all the important magazines. Not to mention the smell of money, the unambiguous signal of society’s insatiable thirst for any technology promising a smarter, faster, and brighter destiny.
On this occasion there was no such fanfare—a shame, given that the machine Chuck Thacker was about to unveil to his colleagues would help plant the seed of that modern frenzy. There was no smell of money, only the barbed aroma of ozone and solder. None of those present had joined PARC with the thought of becoming rich, anyway. Xerox paid them well enough, a couple of notches over the standard for scientists and engineers possessing their considerable skills. But today’s popular image of the computer nerd as incipient high-tech millionaire was nobody’s fantasy then. Instead they had been attracted to PARC by the thrill of pioneering. One of them compared it many years later to the sheer joy of making the very first footprints in a field of virgin snow.
Thacker checked a few last electrical connections on his machine, his cigarette smoldering nearby. He was thirty and of medium height, with a squarish build and an unruly cowlick that seemed perpetually to overhang his wily eyes like an awning. Among this group of youthful Ph.D.s he was unusual in possessing merely a bachelor’s degree in physics, but their deference to him on questions of engineering was unequivocal. Acknowledging the gifts that had already made him an indispensable participant in the design and construction of two trailblazing large-scale computers, they paid him the ultimate accolade: Chuck Thacker, they said, was an “engineer’s engineer.”
Thacker’s designs were simple and spare, devoid of the egotism that often spoiled the work of even the best of his fellow professionals. He was a master of parsimony and the sworn enemy of its opposite, which he called “biggerism.” In a Thacker schematic one never found a logic gate or a ground wire out of place, and he policed the work of his colleagues so they would meet the same exacting standard. Any engineer who set forth a dubious or dishonest idea in PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory, where Thacker worked, was likely to be stopped in his tracks by an explosive “Bullshit!” At PARC one found no shortage of big egos and stern judges, but one thing on which all agreed was that once Chuck Thacker pronounced your idea “bullshit,” you had best shut up and start shoveling.
It was therefore not surprising that when in 1972 the scientists of PARC conceived a revolutionary kind of digital machine they relied on Thacker to convert the concept into circuitry. The machine he and his hand-picked team built in the course of an amazing few months conformed to specifications never before required of a working computer.
Its most arresting element was its human scale. Where the typical computer of this era was the size of two or three refrigerators standing back to back and wired to many more racks of special-purpose hardware, the “Alto” was to be self-contained and small enough to bark a shin on as you wheeled it under your desk.
The Alto was interactive, which meant instantly responsive to the user’s demands. Contemporary computers communicated with their users indirectly, through punch cards or teletypes so slow and awkward that a single bleak exchange of query and response required days to complete. It was like trying to sustain an urgent conversation by Morse Code. But the Alto would communicate with its user via a full-sized TV screen that could display text and images mere nanoseconds after they were typed on a keyboard or drawn with an electronic device.
One more thing: Each Alto was to serve a single individual. This was a revolutionary concept to users whose experience consisted exclusively of sharing the precious resources of university mainframes with hundreds of other users. With the Alto there was to be no waiting in line for a turn to run one’s own program. To use a term coined by Alan Kay, the PARC scientist who was one of the machine’s principal conceptualizers, the Alto was to be a “personal computer.”
Every one of these specifications violated the accepted wisdom of computer science. Computers were big because their hardware circuits took up room. They were slow because they were serving scores or hundreds of users at once. And they were shared because digital technology was so expensive its cost had to be diffused among many users per machine. It was the same rationale by which the airlines covered the cost of aircraft and fuel by transporting 300 passengers at a time in Boeing 747s. One computer per person? To contemporary designers this seemed an act of outrageous profligacy. The computer memory necessary to support a single user would cost nearly ten thousand dollars. Squandering so much money would be like giving every passenger from Boston to San Francisco an individual plane.
But to Thacker and his colleagues such objections missed the point. The Alto aimed to be not a machine of its time, but of the future. Computer memory was horrifically expensive at the moment, true, but it was getting cheaper every week. At the rate prices were falling, the same memory that cost ten grand in 1973 would be available in 1983 for thirty dollars. The governing principle of PARC was that the place existed to give their employer that ten-year head start on the future. They even contrived a shorthand phrase to explain the concept. The Alto, they said, was a time machine.
Thacker had spent much of the Alto design phase working out ways to make things smaller while retaining just enough memory and power to run complex software while simultaneously keeping the display active. In quest of efficiency he lifted tricks and shortcuts from every obscure corner of engineering science. Hardware added mass and slowed the system down, so wherever he could he replaced hard-wired circuits with miniature software programs called “microcode.” This allowed him to wring bulk out of the design by jettisoning circuit boards like a balloonist dropping sandbags to gain a few more precious feet of lift. He knew his design was spare; he was just not sure it worked. Now the moment had come to find out.
The Alto’s operating software had not yet been written, so its brains resided temporarily in a commercial minicomputer called a Nova, which was cabled to the Alto’s back panel like a resuscitator to a comatose patient. A few members of the lab had crafted a sort of animated test pattern by converting several drawings of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster into sequences of digital ones and zeros. Thacker flipped a switch or two and the bitstream flowed over the cables from the Nova into the Alto’s own processor and memory. There it was reordered into machine instructions that governed which of the display screen’s half-million dots, or “pixels,” were to be turned on and which were to be left dark. If it worked properly, this process would produce the series of test images in black outline against a glowing white background.
Everyone’s eyes focused on the screen as it flickered to life. Suddenly the pattern appeared. As the group watched, transfixed, Cookie Monster stared back at them, shaggy and bug-eyed, brandishing its goofy grin, flashing upon the screen while holding the letter “C” in one hand and a cookie in the other.
That the image itself stood in absurd counterpoint to the sheer power of the technology did not matter. The message was not in the content, any more than the world-altering significance of the telephone could have been found one century earlier within the literal meaning of the words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”
They understood that just as Alexander Graham Bell’s phrase had once been shot from one point to another by electrical impulses harnessed in a brand new way, so had the Cookie Monster been painted onto a phosphorescent screen by an entirely new power: Not drawn by hand, but created via a stream of electrical pulses mapped onto memory chips as digital bits and read out again as a moving image.
To Chuck Thacker the thrill was indescribable. He knew he had done more than create a novelty. He and his colleagues had reduced the computer to human scale and recast its destiny forever. The goofy figure munching its way across the display gave only a hint of what this technology would mean to people ten, twenty, even thirty years in the future. But its course was set. It was as though they had all stepped off a cliff into the void and alighted in a new world, bearing proof that time travel, after all, was real.
In 1973 the companies and individuals later to be identified with the advent of the personal computer were otherwise engaged. IBM was still turning out electric typewriters; Microsoft’s Bill Gates was a freshman entering Harvard; and Steve Jobs, the future co-founder of Apple Computer, was a college dropout wandering around India in search of his Zen master.
But the Alto had arrived. Compact and powerful, small enough to fit under a desk and simple enough for children to use, it was truly the world’s first personal computer. It was also nearly ten years ahead of its time, for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, the first successful commercial expressions of the ideas PARC brought to fruition in 1973, did not appear until the 1980s were well under way.
Such was the operating standard in the lab where Alto was born. At Xerox PARC, the home of one of the most exceptional teams of inventing talent ever assembled in one place, prodigious feats of invention and engineering sprouted as commonly as daisies in an open field. Legendary names among the computer elite but almost entirely unknown to the general public, PARC’s scientists pioneered the technology behind today’s most exciting innovations. America and the world are today in the grip of an unprecedented technology craze; very few are aware that most of what drives the frenzy was invented, refined, or perfected at Xerox PARC.
At the moment of PARC’s founding, computers were viewed much differently from the way they are now. They were exasperatingly difficult to use, the tools of a cult of professional engineers and designers who seemed to take a perverse pride in making them as obscure and intimidating as the oracles of ancient Greece. (This was, after all, exactly what gave those same engineers and designers their special status.)
The scientists of PARC changed all that. They took it as their credo that the computer must serve the user rather than the other way around. That it must be easy and intuitive to operate. That it must communicate with the user in human terms and on a human scale, even if at supernatural speeds. They were determined to tame the machine just as their ancestors tamed the wild dog and taught him to hunt and stand guard.
At a critical moment when the very science of computing stood at a crossroads, its future uncharted, they transformed the machine from a glorified calculator into the marvel of graphical communication it is today. Its role in modern life was far from preordained when PARC’s scientists convened. They charted the course.
Every time you click a mouse on an icon or open overlapping windows on your computer screen today, you are using technology invented at PARC. Compose a document by word processor, and your words reach the display via software invented at PARC. Make the print larger or smaller, replace ordinary typewriter letters with a Braggadocio or Gothic typeface—that’s also technology invented at PARC, as is the means by which a keystroke speeds the finished document by cable or infrared link to a laser printer. The laser printer, too, was invented at PARC.
Surf the Internet, send e-mail to a workmate, check your bank account at an ATM equipped with a touch screen, follow the route of a cold front across the Midwest on a TV weather forecaster’s animated map: The pathway to the indispensable technology was blazed by PARC. There, too, originated the three-dimensional computer graphics that give life to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the inspired playthings of Toy Story. How pervasive is PARC’s technology in today’s desktop computer world? When Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 for stealing the “look and feel” of its Macintosh graphical display to use in Windows, Bill Gates’s defense was essentially that both companies had stolen it from Xerox.
One of the most unusual and prolific research facilities in history, PARC was originally conceived in much more modest terms—as a research lab for a computer subsidiary Xerox had recently acquired. How it burst those boundaries in the early 1970s to become something more closely resembling a national resource is part of its special mystique. Four factors contributed most to PARC’s explosive creativity. One was Xerox’s money, a seemingly limitless cascade of cash flowing from its near-monopoly on the office copier. The second was a buyer’s market for high-caliber research talent. With the expenses and politics of the Vietnam War cutting into the government’s research budget and a nationwide recession exerting the same effect on corporate research, Xerox was one of the rare enterprises in a position to bid for the best scientists and engineers around.
The third factor was the state of computer technology, which stood at a historic inflection point. The old architectures of mainframe computers and time-sharing systems were reaching the limits of traditional technologies, and new ones were just coming into play—semiconductor memories that offered huge gains in speed and economics, for example, and integrated circuits that allowed the science’s most farsighted visionaries to realize their dreams for the first time. Never before or since would computer science be poised to take such great leaps of understanding in so short a period. The intellectual hothouse of PARC was one of the few places on earth employing the creative brainpower to realize them.
The final factor was management. PARC was founded by men whose experience had taught them that the only way to get the best research was to hire the best researchers they could find and leave them unburdened by directives, instructions, or deadlines. For the most part, the computer engineers of PARC were exempt from corporate imperatives to improve Xerox’s existing products. They had a different charge: to lead the company into new and uncharted territory.
That Xerox proved only sporadically willing to follow them is one of the ironies of this story. The best-publicized aspect of PARC’s history is that its work was ignored by its parent company while earning billions for others. To a certain extent this is true. The scientists’ unfettered creativity, not to mention their alien habits of mind and behavior, fomented unrelenting conflict with their stolid parent company. Determined in principle to move into the digital world but yoked in practice to the marketing of the copier machine (and unable to juggle two balls at once), Xerox management regarded PARC’s achievements first with bemusement, then uneasiness, and finally hostility. Because Xerox never fully understood the potential value of PARC’s technology, it stood frozen on the threshold of new markets while its rivals—including big, lumbering IBM—shot past into the computer age.
Yet this relationship is too easily, and too often, simplified. Legend becomes myth and myth becomes caricature—which soon enough gains a sort of liturgical certitude. PARC today remains a convenient cudgel with which to beat big business in general and Xerox in particular for their myriad sins, including imaginary ones, of corporate myopia and profligacy. Xerox was so indifferent to PARC that it “didn’t even patent PARC’s innovations,” one leading business journal informed its readers not long before this writing—an assertion that would come as a surprise to the team of patent lawyers permanently assigned to PARC, not to mention the center’s former scientists whose office walls are still decorated with complimentary plaques engraved with the cover pages of their patents. (As is the case with most corporate employees, the patent rights remained vested with their employer.) Another business journal writes authoritatively that the Alto “failed as a commercial product.” In fact, the Alto was designed from the first strictly as a research prototype—no more destined for marketing as a commercial product than was, say, the Mercury space capsule.
Another great myth is that Xerox never earned any money from PARC. The truth is that its revenues from one invention alone, the laser printer, have come to billions of dollars—returning its investment in PARC many times over.
Xerox could certainly have better exploited the manifold new technologies issuing from PARC in its first fifteen years, the period covered in this book. The reasons it failed to do so will be examined in the chronicle ahead. But whether one company, no matter how wise and visionary, could ever have dominated, much less monopolized, technologies as amorphous and Protean as those of digital computing is a wide-open question. What is indisputable is that Xerox did bring together a group of superlatively creative minds at the very moment when they could exert maximal influence on a burgeoning technology, and financed their work with unexampled generosity.
This book is largely an oral history, drawn from the words and recollections of people who were there. Many have moved on to other work, some of it based on their discoveries at PARC and some of it spectacularly lucrative. Almost to a person, however, they remember their years at PARC as the most exciting and fulfilling of their lives.
It should be emphasized that PARC in this period was an exceptionally multifarious place, embracing not only computer technologies but solid-state physics and materials science. Most of the work accomplished at the research center in those latter disciplines lies outside the scope of this book for several reasons. For one thing, the more traditional physical sciences did not offer the same opportunities for extravagant and revolutionary results as computing, at least not at that moment. Nor did the physicists test Xerox’s corporate strategy, internal politics, or, indeed, standards of employee behavior with quite the same zest as the computer people. This is not to say the physicists should be wholly deprived of their place in the limelight; in truth, some of the most exhilarating work of PARC’s second fifteen years has occurred in the center’s physics labs—another testament to its founders’ patience and foresight. But because the intellectual ferment of PARC’s formative years was concentrated so powerfully in the Computer and Systems Science Labs, I have chosen to focus on them.
In doing so I have strived to give the reader as close to a hallway-level view of PARC as could reasonably be attempted, starting with its birth pangs as a collection of youthful prodigies, through the rapturous years of exploration and discovery, and ending as the members of its first generation disperse to bring their discoveries to the rest of the world. It would be impossible for anyone who did not live through it to paint a truly comprehensive portrait of this period at PARC; even those who were there emerged with conflicting—sometimes wildly conflicting—recollections of the same events. My goal has been to assemble these recollections into a coherent history, and through it to shed light on how a unique convergence of events, personalities, and technologies happened to beget one of the most productive and inventive research centers ever known.