I’ve Never Seen a Man Type That Fast

 BOB TAYLOR

It had taken years for Bob Taylor to reach this moment in November 1977. The Boca Raton Hotel and Club, steps from the Atlantic, gleamed in front of him on a lovely fall morning. Inside milled some three hundred executives and their wives, flown in from all over the world on first-class tickets to spend four days in the sun at the Xerox World Conference. They had slept in luxury rooms, listened to Henry Kissinger opine on the Soviet Union, and whiled away free hours at all-expenses-paid deep-sea fishing trips, tennis lessons, cocktail parties, and casino nights.¹ Now, on the last morning of the last day, they had assembled for the highlight of the conference: Futures Day, an invitation-only glimpse at “the shape of tomorrow” via a demonstration of the Alto personal computer system.²

Every night for the past three evenings, champagne glasses had clinked and orchestras had played. But the days had told a different, uglier story. In 1977, Xerox was in trouble. The World Conference was a last-ditch multimillion-dollar attempt at a morale booster.³ Three decades of uninterrupted growth had crashed to a halt. In 1975, the company had taken an $84.4 million write-off on the Scientific Data Systems computer company it had bought for $918 million and that Taylor had warned against. At around the same time, Japanese copier companies began encroaching on Xerox’s markets, sending Xerox’s share price from $179 in 1972 to $50 on the first day of the conference five years later.⁴ While their wives attended fashion shows, the executives sat through somber presentations by Xerox’s top brass. CEO C. Peter McColough called for “three or four hundred million dollars of expense reductions,” while President David Kearns said he did not want the company growing “by one single person” in the next year.⁵

The conference organizing committee, hoping to end on a positive note, had budgeted $220,000 for the final-day look at PARC’s computing breakthroughs.⁶ For Taylor, the chance to demonstrate PARC’s work culminated an effort that he had begun two years earlier. The Alto system by that time included most of the elements that the executives were about to see in Florida, including the graphical user interface, mouse, and network. In Palo Alto, inside PARC, the demand for Altos had reached the point that people were coming in at night to use them. There was even talk of instituting sign-up sheets for each machine.⁷ But few at Xerox corporate headquarters seemed to care or notice.⁸ Efforts by Taylor’s boss, Jerry Elkind, to convince Xerox to reorient its computer strategy away from big machines in favor of “an Alto-like personal computer system” had yielded no result.^VI

Once the Alto system was working well, Taylor decided to close what he, with apologies for military overtones, called an “information systems gap” between PARC and the rest of Xerox. He wanted Xerox employees outside of PARC to use Altos during their regular workdays. “We are all concerned about transfer and the lack of in-place recipients of our systems,” he wrote. He wanted a “user experiment” to determine how well the Alto and its software worked when “actually used by people.”⁹ To that end, in 1976, PARC made a short film about the Alto, which Taylor narrated while sitting on the corner of a desk, pipe in hand, his tie as wide as his head. The Alto would be transformational, he explained, eliminating much of the “drudgery of office work” and freeing office workers “to attend to higher-level functions so necessary to a human’s estimate of his own worth.”¹⁰ His push worked. By the time of the Boca Raton conference in 1977, some four hundred Altos had been installed at Xerox.

But none of the new users was a senior executive. The November morning in Boca Raton would be PARC’s best chance to introduce the Alto to the men who would determine whether the machine would stay a curiosity within the company or become a real product in the wider world.

Forty-two people, many of them from Taylor’s lab at PARC, had been working full-time on a forty-minute Hollywood-meets-Engelbart’s-Mother-of-All-Demos demonstration for the conference’s final Futures Day presentation. Chuck Geschke from Taylor’s lab served as second-in-command to John Ellenby, who was responsible for the effort. Geschke, who would go on to cofound the software giant Adobe with fellow PARC alumnus John Warnock, says he only began to see himself as a manager after Taylor told him that he had potential.¹¹

The PARC team commissioned a musical score and hired a professional narrator and lighting designers with movie credits to their names. After a rehearsal on a Hollywood sound stage, they had $1.6 million in equipment—a dozen Altos, five printers, twenty-five keyboards (two of them with Japanese characters), servers, tens of thousands of feet of cable, a small studio’s worth of video and multiplexing equipment, pounds of documentation, and dozens of mice, tools, repair parts, and power supplies—loaded onto a pair of DC-10s and flown to Boca Raton. There the PARC group would hold four more rehearsals over three days.¹²

And now, here in Florida, Futures Day had arrived. Ellenby and Geschke, along with their team, were running the final checks and wishing each other luck. The executives were assembling.

There was only one problem with Futures Day from Taylor’s perspective: he was not allowed into the room.

The Futures Day presentation required a special pass—Xerox had hired extra security to enforce the rule—and Taylor did not have one.¹³ The pass was a hostage in a battle of wills between Taylor and George Pake, the head of PARC who had hired Taylor only after telling him that without a PhD, he was not qualified to run the computer science lab. The relationship between the two men had deteriorated to such dysfunction that Pake had not cleared Taylor to receive a pass to Futures Day, and Taylor had refused to ask Pake for one. “I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to say no,” Taylor recalls.¹⁴

The larger issue at play was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of PARC itself. Taylor believed that the computing groups were the only worthwhile part of the research center, and Pake thought that Taylor had no idea what he was talking about. In Taylor’s early years at PARC, he had believed that Pake would one day “come to his senses” and devote the bulk of PARC’s budget to building small, user-friendly, networked computers. Taylor asked at least three different eminent computer scientists to come to Palo Alto and explain to Pake how revolutionary and important the work in the computer science lab was. “He never did understand,” Taylor says, adding that Pake put an Alto on his desk only after “he was just sort of intimidated into doing it.”¹⁵

For nearly every PARC budget cycle, Taylor lobbied Pake to take funds away from the other labs and give them to the computer science lab. By Taylor’s accounting, the computer science lab was responsible for 80 percent of PARC’s accomplishments but received only 18 percent of PARC’s budget.¹⁶ When Xerox instituted austerity measures in 1975 and Pake cut an equal amount of funding from each lab’s budget, Taylor, who thought that cuts should reflect each individual lab’s importance, was enraged.

But Pake wanted to tread carefully. Believing that it was the job of a research center to cast a wide net, he hesitated to eliminate work that might later prove valuable to the company. In 1977, he said that a fear that Xerox might not “receive its money’s worth” from PARC had “haunted me since I came out here to start PARC.”¹⁷ Taylor, meanwhile, thought the wide-net argument was an excuse to cover up Pake’s real reason for not targeting cuts: the mild-mannered director was afraid of angering people by singling out certain projects or labs as more worthy than others.^V

The battle between Taylor and Pake might have remained a not-atypical managerial push-pull—if Taylor had not openly derided the other research groups at PARC. Taylor reserved particular disdain for the physicists in the general sciences lab.^IV Pake was a physicist. Taylor enjoyed jokes with punch lines about the real-world stupidity of physicists. During a talk to the general sciences lab, he informed the assembled physicists that one of their wives had told the wife of a researcher in his lab that “a computer scientist isn’t really a scientist.” He then added, “We’ve got mathematicians in CSL [the computer science lab] who can run rings around any mathematician you’ve got”—a startling display of aggression, based on a secondhand rumor, hurled at a group that had invited him to speak.¹⁸

Every performance review that Taylor received glowed with praise, but many also commented on his behavior toward other labs: “Bob should be more receptive to people from other Xerox groups and to their work” (1972); “He tends to regard other research domains as intrinsically less important. This attitude, expressed both implicitly and explicitly . . . works to Bob’s disadvantage because people are consciously wary of him” (1980); “I would very much like to see Bob show a more generous attitude toward the work of others” (1981); “I have urged, and continue to urge, Bob to ‘cool it’ ” (1982).¹⁹ Pake did not write these comments—there was almost always a layer of management between the two men—but he did have to deal with the fallout of Taylor’s partisanship, fielding complaints from other labs and wrestling over budgets every year. Taylor says that Pake responded, in typically passive form, by ignoring him. “He came into my office twice in thirteen years.”

Even now, at Futures Day, Taylor was causing trouble for Pake. Taylor had spent the past year managing the computer science lab while his boss, Jerry Elkind, was on a temporary assignment with corporate engineering on the East Coast. When Elkind’s return was imminent, a few months before Futures Day, the research staff of the computer science lab had begun lobbying Pake to find a different job for Elkind and make Taylor the permanent head of the lab. Taylor says he had nothing to do with instigating the coup, which seems to be the case.^III

Pake was not eager to give Taylor full charge of the lab. He was wary of Taylor’s influence over his researchers, once allegedly likening Taylor to the cult leader Jim Jones, who in 1978 convinced more than nine hundred followers to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.²⁰ Pake responded to the researchers’ request by removing Taylor from lab management entirely and naming him a member of Pake’s own technical staff.

By the time the Boca Raton conference began, Taylor had been reporting to Pake for only a few months, but there were already problems. Pake might well have been plotting the move he would make reluctantly in January, after Futures Day, when he would put Elkind in charge of efforts to introduce the Alto into universities and some government agencies. He would name Taylor head of the computer science lab.

But for now, Taylor, not invited to Futures Day, prowled a loading dock behind the Boca Raton hotel, trying to figure out how to break in. The moment marked a new nadir in the Pake/Taylor battle of wills. Taylor knew that he could have walked into Futures Day without an invitation—plenty of people would vouch for him—but that was not his way. If Pake did not want him there officially, he was not going in officially.

He was looking for a back entrance when he spied, near the loading dock, a group of men with camera equipment and lights waiting to enter the building. After a few minutes, the door opened. Taylor followed the workers though. “They went upstairs to a balcony to mount their lights to shine down on the stage,” Taylor recalls. “I went up there with them.”

Ensconced in the balcony, Taylor crouched behind a spotlight and looked down. He saw Pake sitting with Bert Sutherland, the head of the systems science lab that worked closely with Taylor’s. (“Sutherland got an invitation,” Taylor noted.) He turned away and waited for the show to begin.²¹

The house lights went down. A film appeared on the screen. “Here is our future, the modern office. Our opportunity,” a voice intoned as the camera scanned past earth-tone fabric wall art hung over an earth-tone sofa in the PARC lobby. “Beneath the chrome and coordinated colors lurk huge problems, for this office is little changed in generations.”

The film went on for several minutes, flashing to statues from Greek antiquity; the Robert Frost quote about the road less taken; and images of a rising sun, paper airplanes morphing into jetliners, scientists looking through scopes, men in jeans sitting in beanbag chairs, and a group of children playing Pong around a television set. (“Are today’s children telling us something? Are they telling us they are ready for tomorrow?” the narrator asks.)

A new voice then boomed into the hall: “The shape of tomorrow may be here today. Yes, welcome to the all-Xerox office system we call Alto.” With that the demonstration began.

The forty-two people in Florida from PARC, along with a separate team back in Palo Alto connected via television, showed how a computer could edit documents, draw bar charts, toggle between software programs, and pull up documents and drawings from stored memory. The presenters manipulated mice, highlighted text on screen, worked with people on other Altos, completed expense forms electronically, forwarded them for processing, typed in foreign characters, sent emails, and printed documents.²² A narrator assured the viewers, “Does it seem complicated? We can assure you it’s not. It is what Xerox calls a friendly system. In field trials, an experienced typist became proficient within hours, and even beginners learn in a day or two.” Since more than four hundred Altos were in use around the company, the presenters explained to the executives, all of the apparent magic was working for Xerox every day.

It had taken fewer than four years for the system—a complex collection of hardware, software, networks, printers, and servers—to blossom into reality from the vision of the man now watching surreptitiously from behind the spotlight.

For the executives who had never used or seen an Alto, the demonstration had to have been eye-opening. Outside of research labs, computers came in two flavors: big and hobbyist. Both were the purview of specialists. Although Sandy Kurtzig and others were developing software for people who had never before used computers, minicomputers were generally tended by experts and used only in very limited ways by nonexperts (responding to prompts on a screen, for example). The new hobbyist machines interested only hackers such as those at the Homebrew Computer Club, who were happy to flip switches or type in long strings of characters in order to hear a tinny rendition of a Beatles song played through a transistor radio.

Few people at PARC, including Taylor, knew about or paid attention to the Apple II, which had been introduced six months before Xerox’s Boca Raton conference. While the Apple II marked a significant step beyond hobby machines toward a more user-friendly computer, it lacked the Alto’s graphical user interface, mouse, ease of use, and network capabilities. Even five years after the Apple II’s introduction, lay users complained that it took many hours to figure out simply how to begin to use a personal computer. What does it mean when the screen prompts you to “load a file”? What is a “boot diskette”?²³ When Fawn Alvarez used a computer—an Apple II—for the first time at ROLM, she could not figure out how to turn it on, and once it was on, she was afraid to turn it off, for fear that “it might lose its information.”²⁴

The Alto represented a different class of machine. The hobby computers were modeled on the big computers, but the Alto was modeled on the Licklider-Taylor vision of interactivity and ease of use. The Alto, intended for use by everyday office workers, was also networked to other computers, which made file storage, email, and printing possible.²⁵

Xerox president David Kearns would later call PARC’s presentation at Futures Day a “technological extravaganza,” saying that “people told themselves that they had seen the future of our technology, and it was impressive.”²⁶

But when Taylor emerged from his hidey-hole behind the lights and visited the room where a number of Altos had been arranged for use by the executives, he did not see the enthusiasm that Kearns described. After greeting George Pake with a hearty hello that, Taylor says with relish, infuriated him, Taylor noticed that it was the wives, not the Xerox executives, sitting in front of the Altos, typing away and using the mice. The husbands, unimpressed, stood around the perimeter of the room with their arms crossed.^II Later someone told Taylor that he had heard one executive ask another what he thought of the demonstration. The second responded, “I’ve never seen a man type that fast.” He had missed the point.

Xerox would go on to try to commercialize a successor to the Alto, so it is not accurate to say that the company had no enthusiasm for the technology presented at Futures Day. But the reaction that Taylor witnessed among the assembled executives, something between indifference and incomprehension, is understandable. Aside from the introduction of the Xerox copier, the fundamental technologies of the business office—electric lights, typewriters, and telephones—had not changed in decades. Why should people embrace this radical change now?

Moreover, most people in Xerox’s executive suites focused on copiers that handled information and documents after they had been created. By contrast, the PARC researchers were pushing for a move backward in the process: to the creation of information and documents. The computer seemed even more foreign because the California upstarts were insisting that work in the office of the future would be centered on screens. The prediction was ominous for a copier company that made most of its profit by selling paper. Taylor did not know it, but strategic planning sessions among the highest-level executives often debated whether copiers could become obsolete. Some executives wondered “whether PARC technologies were not only speculative, but also potentially subversive to future Xerox profitability.”²⁷

The PARC team tried to address the concern at Futures Day. Again and again, in the film accompanying the demonstration, the narrator was scarcely able to say something bad about paper. Speaking of “office problems,” he offered, “The prime symptom of the problem—Dare we say it?—is the medium by which information is transmitted and stored. The villain—Can we face the truth?—is, yes, paper.” The narrator assured viewers that the technologies on display represented not a radical break for Xerox but a logical next step. He promised, “A paperless office? Not at all. But paper will have a new value. Paper will have significance. Emphasis.” Time-lapse photography showed parts being swapped out of a copier to transform it into a laser printer. “Familiar machines, modified for electronic printing,” the narrator soothed over pulsing music.

Given Xerox’s fear of the paperless office, perhaps it is not surprising that the one PARC technology that the company would profitably bring to market, the laser printer, is the only one that directly consumed paper.

There may also have been something to Taylor’s observation that it was women, not men, in front of the Alto computers after the formal demonstration. In corporate America in the 1970s, typing was the job of secretaries, and secretaries were women. As late as 1980, computer manufacturers worried that the machine might never be adopted in offices because, as one computer marketing manager put it, managers “regard a keyboard as something that doesn’t suit their status.”²⁸ The researchers in Taylor’s lab all knew how to type because it was impossible to code without typing, but few men in the United States were typists.^I

Jerry Elkind, the boss Taylor recruited at Pake’s insistence, thinks the bias against typing worked against the Alto and its successor machines even after the Boca Raton demonstration. The flagship software program on the Alto was a word processing program called Bravo. (Its writer, Charles Simonyi, would later move to Microsoft, where Bravo became the design influence for Microsoft Word.) Word processing is, of course, a typing-intensive undertaking. Moreover, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a document produced by a word processor was not qualitatively different from one that was typed. It was easier to edit the word-processed document, and some fonts and special characters were more easily available, but in the end, the computer and the typewriter produced similar documents.

By contrast, the “killer app” software that ultimately catapulted the personal computer into commercial markets was the spreadsheet.²⁹ Spreadsheets required only keying in numbers, something men regularly did on adding machines and desktop calculators. And the spreadsheet provided an enormous benefit over earlier calculation tools: change a single number, and the change would ramify through the entire series of calculations. In the past, changing a value had meant erasing and recalculating everything. Whereas word processing required a big cultural shift (learning to type like a woman) for a small practical advantage, spreadsheets required essentially no cultural shift for a huge payoff. Butler Lampson has said that the people in the PARC lab built the software they needed. They needed a word processor to communicate with one another. They did not need spreadsheets. The Alto optimized the wrong application.

By 1977, some researchers at other Xerox-sponsored labs in other parts of the country were jealous of PARC’s being held up as the company’s great hope.³⁰ David Kearns, the then president of Xerox, has written of “a brutal clash of cultures . . . the West Coast systems gang pitted against the East Coast copier-duplicator gang.” Many of the East Coast executives had come from IBM and Ford, and some saw Taylor’s group as “people who spent their time coming up with sophisticated ideas that never made any money for the corporation.” Meanwhile, Taylor’s group, in Kearns’s words, “regarded the copier people as the past, a group of stodgy individuals completely out of touch with the future path of the world.”³¹ Some executives at Xerox singled Taylor out by name as a key source of friction. “I talked with Bob Taylor often and it was apparent that he had a deep contempt for all persons from Rochester and Stamford,” recalled one.³²

The rift between Taylor and the senior management of Xerox had opened the moment Taylor arrived in Palo Alto and told George Pake that Xerox had bought the wrong computer company. The lab was less than two years old when a Xerox executive visited a Dealer meeting, only to be pelted with questions as to “whether or not people at the corporate level were listening in a responsive way to what we at PARC have to say.” (The answer: “a qualified yes.”)³³

The split deepened after Rolling Stone published Stewart Brand and Annie Leibovitz’s 1972 article that praised the PARC computer scientists’ “bent away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.” Brand recalled that the “East Coast headquarters embarked on a major flap about unauthorized information, photos, four-letter words, and the scurrilous Rolling Stone.” Back at PARC, Taylor and other employees were subject to new security rules, and Taylor was called out in his annual performance review for the “stumble.”³⁴

Some people in Taylor’s lab smoked pot or used harder drugs outside of work. Some practiced transcendental meditation in their offices.³⁵ Alan Kay stocked the PARC library with every book from the Whole Earth Truck Store, and another researcher volunteered with a San Francisco–based nonprofit that aimed to establish public computing terminals around the Bay Area.³⁶

Yet the computer science lab was far from a hotbed of hippie activity or even beliefs. Xerox did not allow alcohol at its facilities, so even as the workers at Atari were smoking pot on-site and other small companies began holding beer bashes on their campuses, PARC researchers took tea breaks. Taylor and many researchers wore collared shirts and slacks and worked typical business hours. Chuck Thacker calls the core of the lab “very straight folks” and notes that although many of them had been at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park protests, they had worked in unmarked buildings and “tried to stay under the radar because we would not have liked to have our data center burned down.”³⁷ PARC researchers who coded through the night and wore casual clothes did so not because they were making a political statement but because they came from an academic computer science background in which such behavior was the norm.

Many in the lab, Taylor included, disliked top-down, centralized authority. But the roots of personalized interactive computing stretched back much further than Watergate or Vietnam, to people such as Licklider, who were more concerned with making computing useful for the average person than “sticking it to the Man.” Xerox PARC was an elite research institution. Most of its staff had very little in common with the hackers at the Homebrew Computer Club.

The differences were hard to perceive, however, peering at PARC not from the San Francisco Bay Area, but from the executive floor of Xerox headquarters three thousand miles away. According to the former head of computing for Xerox, PARC was “the Berkeley campus, but one up.” His offered evidence: “People jog. There is tofu in the cafeteria.” Though he conceded that at PARC, “the girls are slim and drawn-out, and there are some real nice girls there,” he nonetheless deplored the overriding philosophy of the place, which he described as “computer lib.”³⁸

PARC was a small part of the giant machine that was Xerox. Former president David Kearns’s 330-page book about the company devoted only a dozen pages to PARC.³⁹ That this enfant terrible, brilliant and not ready for polite society, was so often a source of corporate aggravation did not bode well for the computer science lab or for Bob Taylor.

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I. A 1977 Datamation article on the “automated office” promised that the “clerical stigma” associated with a keyboard wouldn’t be a problem in the future because “In the electronic office, managers will be keyboarding, too.” The article, which summarized Citibank’s experience with twelve pairs of minicomputers linked over dial-up telephone lines to connect senior managers and their secretaries, noted, “Our secretaries have shown far more flexibility and adventurousness in using the system than our managers have.”

II. Chuck Geschke has an identical memory.

III. Thacker, Lampson, and Elkind agree that Taylor was not involved with the coup, and a May 1977 email also makes it sound as though Taylor had not been consulted about the planned lobbying (though it does say, “I think Bob would like to be invited enthusiastically to be the manager”).The email’s author, Bob Sproull, wrote that the researchers wanted the change “because Bob is ‘good,’ and not because Jerry is ‘bad’ ”

IV. Not everyone in the general sciences lab was condemned. Taylor admired the work of the inventor of the laser printer, Gary Starkweather. Chuck Thacker, the Alto’s hardware mastermind, says that Taylor’s denigration of the physicists at PARC was baseless.

V. Bill Spencer, who did not agree with Taylor on much, similarly described Pake, whom Spencer liked very much, as overly concerned with pleasing everyone.

VI. In 1974, Elkind wrote a remarkable letter to Xerox leadership, drafted with assistance from Taylor, Lampson, Thacker, and Bill Gunning (then head of the systems science lab). The personal computer, Elkind wrote, is “an idea whose time has arrived. Technology now makes it possible to produce practical and affordable personal machines.” He also explained that the Alto’s microcode “allows us to use the same basic hardware for many different applications in much the same way that Hewlett Packard has been able to provide several different calculator models from the same hardware.” He suggested that Xerox could pursue seven possible applications for the Alto (“super calculators” for specific user communities; a custom message system for the military; and systems for accounting, computer research, personnel management, stenotype, and publishing).