AL ALCORN AL ALCORN
On May 15, 1969, around the time Bob Taylor accepted the offer to move to Utah, Al Alcorn, an engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley, was working at his bench at the back of Hubbard Radio and Television Repair. He had taught himself to fix televisions and taken this part-time job to pay for his studies. On this particular afternoon, he could hear far-off shouts and chanting and the banging of makeshift cymbals. The sound was not unusual here on Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks south of a campus regularly rocked with anti–Vietnam War protests. He returned to his work.
A minute later, he looked up again. Something was unusual. The street people camped on the sidewalk outside his building were not playing their instruments or singing. Cars were not rumbling past. Shopping carts were not creaking by. Aside from the distant cacophony, there was no noise at all.
What was going on? Alcorn left his workbench and peered up the almost empty Telegraph Ave. He was surprised to see a huge group in the distance (he would later learn that it numbered around two thousand people), heading toward him.
He turned to look south and only then understood why his street was abandoned.
At that end of Telegraph, silent and shoulder-to-shoulder, stood 159 members of the Berkeley Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, and California Highway Patrol. They wore full riot gear. An eight-foot-high chain-link fence loomed behind them.
Behind the fence was People’s Park, an expanse of green that only a month earlier had been a jumbled mess of broken concrete, rotting trash, desiccated weeds, and abandoned cars. Some of the hundreds of activists who had transformed the mess into a genuine park called it “a cultural, political, freak out and rap center for the Western world.”1 The University of California, which owned the land, considered the creation of the park an illegal trespass. Governor Ronald Reagan, who called the university a “haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,”2 believed the park was a “calculated political act” intended to “bring down capitalism.”3 Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who had once led a crowd of five thousand Berkeleyites in a jeering chorus of “Fuck Ronald Reagan,” had recently challenged the governor, a regent of the university, to a duel.4
Al Alcorn liked People’s Park and had made it the subject of a personal photography project. He had captured shots of people clearing the land and moving in slides, sandboxes, benches, trees, shrubs, and flowers. Later, he had photographed the men with porkpie hats and John Lennon spectacles, the barefoot women in flowing dresses, and the huge pots of vegetarian stew—free to anyone who was hungry—bubbling over a new fire pit.
Earlier in the week, the university had shut down the park, clearing it of seventy-odd people who had slept there and then surrounding it with the high fence. The thousands of protesters now descending on the park with their chants and cymbals, Alcorn realized, must be coming to try to reopen it.
Nothing good would come of this. Alcorn hurried back inside. He told the shop owner that they should move to the back of the store.
Who did what next on Telegraph Avenue is not clear, even decades later. The protesters reached the police. Someone threw a brick or a rock. A car’s windows shattered. Someone opened a fire hydrant. Police called for backup.
And then—explosions.
At the back of the TV repair shop, Alcorn froze. He knew more than most people about explosions. He and a few friends had spent much of their free time in high school blowing things up. He recalls making TNT, plastic explosives, nitroglycerine—and most memorably, during Christmas break of their sophomore year of high school, a developing tank’s worth of rackarock that the teens had ignited in an old cemetery south of San Francisco. (The outcome was a three-foot crater where the developing tank had been and an afternoon at the police station.)5 Alcorn’s reputation as an explosives aficionado had led his brothers at Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity to charge him with exploding a vat of chocolate pudding in the middle of the university’s Channing Circle.IV
Standing with Mrs. Hubbard, the shop owner, Alcorn knew what he had heard explode on Telegraph Avenue: tear gas canisters. He took Mrs. Hubbard to the second story of the building—tear gas, he knew, would stay low to the ground—and stepped out onto a mezzanine that overlooked the street. Most of the marchers were running away. After a few minutes, the tear gas dissipated.
Alcorn thought the worst might be over. “I think we can get out now,” he told Mrs. Hubbard. They hurried down the stairs and out the door, careful to lock it behind them.
Hustling away from the park and Telegraph Avenue with Mrs. Hubbard, Alcorn surprised himself with a strange thought: maybe he should get his camera and go back. He had spent weeks photographing the park. Why not continue documenting the story?
He hesitated. He was a careful adventurer. He had tried LSD—but only a few times. He had stopped after deciding that LSD “makes you think of the big picture,” but “it doesn’t really change you essentially,” so why bother?6 He wore his hair long, but he planned to cut it when he graduated. And for all the time he had spent in People’s Park, he had always been careful not to eat the communal stew. He did not want to get sick.III
So Alcorn weighed the pros and cons of a return to People’s Park. He might get hurt. But he was a big guy. Two hundred pounds and five feet ten, he had been recruited to play football at Berkeley after a high school career that had included playing against a young running back named O. J. Simpson.7 Moreover, he was fast. When in shape, he could cover fifty yards in six seconds.
He decided to go back.
Alcorn had been mistaken to think that the worst of the confrontation had passed. He heard the scene before he saw it. Sirens blared. People screamed. The smell of a smoldering vehicle—an overturned police car, he soon saw—wafted toward him.
As Alcorn focused his telephoto lens, trying to get a close-up, he heard the pop of a gun. He turned to see a man about his age fall, hands over his stomach. He swung about to see who had fired a shot. The officer still had the gun in his hand and was looking around.
Alcorn ran like a scalded cat.
When the chaos ended on May 15, one man, James Rector, had been fatally shot as he stood on a roof watching the scene below.II Another man was blinded by buckshot. An officer received a light knife wound, and twenty other police were also injured. Sixty-three protestors and bystanders were hurt badly enough that they risked possible arrest at the hospital. Hundreds more were likely injured but not treated.8
Governor Reagan, reactivating the state of emergency that Berkeley had technically been under since a series of student protests in February, imposed martial law and sent in 2,500 National Guard troops. Major General Glenn C. Ames would later complain that “hippie-type females,” in their own version of chemical warfare, had given his troops brownies and juices laced with LSD.9 A curfew was imposed. Thousands of Berkeley residents continued to march in the streets, defying the bullhorn-magnified warnings against mass gatherings that rang through the days. False bomb threats were called in. The faculty voted to cancel classes. Buildings were evacuated. Graffiti and hand-lettered signs were everywhere: “Mothers and Children Against Troop Occupation.” “Protect Your Park.” In the final two weeks of May, police arrested nine hundred people in Berkeley.10
Alcorn took a striking image that captures the state of tortured, suspended animation that pervaded Berkeley in the spring of 1969. A tall young man—sideburned, blue-jeaned, hands on hips and abdominal muscles jutting above the shirt tied around his waist—faces off against a much smaller officer in fatigues and a heavy helmet. The officer’s bayonet-tipped rifle slices a diagonal between the two men.11 Another clash seemed inevitable.
On May 20, five days after the violence on Telegraph Avenue, some three thousand people, many wearing black armbands, marched against what many had come to call “Reagan’s occupation.” About seven hundred ended up at Sproul Plaza. No one seemed to notice that the soldiers and police stationed at either end of the plaza were letting people enter but not leave.
Troops on the ground pulled gas masks over their faces and looked up. A National Guard helicopter moved into the clear skies over the plaza.
Wisps, then puffs, then clouds of white smoke whispered forth from the chopper’s belly and descended over the crowd. It was CS—a potent, nausea-inducing gas—spreading over the plaza.
Panic. Vomiting. Coughing. Fainting. The gas was almost impossible to outrun.
Alcorn could not drop out of Berkeley. If he dropped out, he might be drafted. No way. He had classmates, teammates, and neighbors from high school who had come home from Vietnam injured or not come home at all. Alcorn had marched against the war and had opposed it in his own home, even though his father, a merchant marine, was shipping napalm into the war zone. When his father passed along an M16 automatic rifle he had somehow gotten from a returning soldier, Alcorn used a poster of President Lyndon B. Johnson for target practice.
Needing to stay enrolled and wanting out of Berkeley, Alcorn took a step any careful adventurer might admire: he signed up for a work-study program that would let him work off campus for six months but still maintain his student deferment. He would also earn some money.
His mother’s boss knew someone at the pioneering audio and video firm Ampex, headquartered across the San Francisco Bay from Berkeley, in Redwood City. The town’s motto, printed on an arch over the main street, was “Climate Best by Government Test.”12 Ampex had been started in 1944 by a Russian émigré, Alexander M. Poniatoff, who had named it by adding an -ex (“for excellence”) to his own initials. The company had introduced the first practical audiotape recorder in 1948 and then, eight years later, the first practical video-recording technology. The boldly lettered AMPEX sign was a landmark to drivers along the five-year-old Bayshore/101 Freeway that connected San Francisco to the Peninsula.
The company’s reach extended deep into American culture. In 1948, Bing Crosby had agreed to continue broadcasting his popular radio show only if he could use the new Ampex recorder to tape-delay his broadcasts. In 1959, Ampex technology had recorded the famous “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow. A few years later, Ampex video recorders had captured images of Earth sent by astronauts circling the moon aboard Apollo 8.13
His mother’s connection got Alcorn an interview at Ampex. Soon he had an offer to cross the bay and work for six months as an engineer in a satellite office in Sunnyvale, in the heart of what would soon be known as Silicon Valley.
Alcorn, assigned to a remote building on Kifer Road, dropped into an orderly world of numbers and T-squares. While students at Berkeley protested nearly every day, the engineers at Ampex could not even bring themselves to complain too loudly about the coffee that was so godawful rumor held it was brewed in a giant vat and stirred with a canoe paddle.14 The watchword at Berkeley was to trust no one over the age of thirty, but at Ampex, the younger engineers, even those who had grown out their hair and beards, admired the older men in their ties and pressed shirts. In many ways, the office resembled an old-fashioned European guild, with the senior engineers teaching the junior.15
Alcorn felt at home at Ampex, which he called his own “nerd paradise.”16
Alcorn’s group, some two dozen engineers and about 150 production workers and administrators, worked on a new product that could photograph documents and store the images on two-inch magnetic tape. Later, someone needing to see a document could call it up on a televisionlike monitor or print it out.17 Today any mobile phone with a camera can do this job in an instant, but in 1969, the task required a copier-sized machine to capture the images, a refrigerator-sized machine with tape reels near the top for storage, and a desk-sized device with a screen for viewing. Ampex called the system Videofile.
When Alcorn arrived at Ampex, a number of organizations were considering a purchase of the Videofile system, even though the hardware cost roughly $1 million and the necessary microwave infrastructure cost another million. Both New Scotland Yard and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department thought the Videofile system might store fingerprints and mug shots. Southern Pacific Railroad wanted it to organize waybills and other paperwork. Several insurance companies hoped the system might help with saving and reviewing documentation for claims, complaints, and reimbursements.
In the end, only a few systems were installed, and the Videofile project was shut down. But Videofile was a fruitful failure; it helped to launch two major companies in brand-new industries. Larry Ellison, a cofounder of the database giant Oracle, worked on the Videofile system in the early 1970s. And Alcorn was about to meet the men who would found the world’s first wildly successful video game company, Atari.I
Near the desk Alcorn had been assigned at Ampex, two men shared a small office. They made an odd pairing, Alcorn thought. Ted Dabney seemed like a standard-issue Ampex engineer. He had learned electronics in the marines. He spoke softly and often wore the abstracted look of a man who spent many hours in his own head. He was thirty-two, “a real grownup,” Alcorn thought.18
The fellow who shared Dabney’s office, Nolan Bushnell, was in his twenties, loud and brash, the kind of man who would later, without irony, describe himself as “the poet who interprets the gods for the masses, the gods being technology.”19 He was a trickster who while an undergraduate in college had secured a graduate student office by squatting in one and then telling the student who came to claim it, “I’m not sure we are supposed to share.”20 He had recently graduated from the University of Utah, where he had taken classes in the computer graphics program that Bob Taylor had funded at ARPA.
Even Alcorn could tell that Bushnell “wasn’t the greatest engineer,” but Bushnell appeared to feel no shame about his lack of technical prowess.21 He liked to say that graduating last in his engineering class was proof of his efficiency: “I got the degree but didn’t do more than I needed to.”22 Bushnell was always drawing attention to himself, which was not difficult, given his six-foot, four-inch frame and shaggy head of curly hair. Rather than just putting up with the lousy coffee, he brought in his own percolator. He started a stock-buying club that to Alcorn’s unpracticed eye looked like a fancy version of gambling, with guys in the office pooling their money to bet on the market. Alcorn did not know it, but Bushnell had come to Ampex not because he wanted to work at a top-notch engineering company but because the job allowed him to live in California and earn more money than anyone else in his engineering class. He had worked his way through college as a carnival barker, and it showed.
The mismatched officemates worked well together, despite their differences. Dabney was an excellent practical engineer and Bushnell an inexperienced but quick study. The men shared a love of the Japanese game Go—so much so that Dabney carved a board with the Videofile logo on the back, so that he and Bushnell could hang it on the office wall for easy access. Both Dabney and Bushnell had young daughters, and the families spent time together on the weekends.
After six months at Ampex, Alcorn completed a semester at Berkeley and then returned to his job. One of his first stops was Dabney and Bushnell’s office.
Only Dabney was there.
Where’s Nolan? Alcorn wanted to know.
Dabney lowered his voice. Nolan had left.
Left? Who would leave Ampex?
Dabney explained that Bushnell was trying to build something unusual. Dabney was helping him build it, and it was going well. So well that Dabney, too, was thinking of leaving Ampex.
What were they building? Alcorn asked.
A game you could play on a TV screen.
They’re crazy, Alcorn thought.
I. Ampex, in general, is one of the great overlooked companies in Silicon Valley history. The audio pioneer Ray Dolby worked there, as well.
II. The autopsy listed Rector’s cause of death as “shock and hemorrhage due to multiple shotgun wounds with perforation of the aorta.” An official report to Governor Reagan was careful to state that Rector was not a student but “on probation following conviction on charges of burglary and possession of marijuana” and, further, that inside his vehicle police had found “a Remington .22 caliber, semi-automatic rifle in a disassembled state; and a telephone induction coil, a piece of electronic equipment used for tape-recording telephone calls or for wire-tapping.” A footnote noted that he had enlisted in the Air Force in 1963.
III. This sort of considered caution was a hallmark of the early protest movements.Mario Savio, the initially reluctant leader of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, took off his shoes before climbing onto a police car to deliver a speech to the student protesters who had sat down in front of it.
IV. Alcorn says that the fraternity was defunct just two years after he pledged; with the Vietnam War and protest movements in full swing, few students were interested in joining a fraternity.