Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Bill Paxton: At the time 90 percent of the people thought he was a crackpot, that this “interactive” idea was a waste of time, and that this wasn’t really going anywhere, and that the really good stuff was artificial intelligence… There were a few people like Bob Taylor who picked up on the idea. And it eventually fed out into Xerox PARC and then Apple to take over the world. But, at the time, Doug was a voice crying into the wilderness.

  Bob Taylor: Doug and I talked about doing this demo in early ’68, and I was strongly encouraging Doug to do it. He said, “It’s going to cost a fortune. We’re going to bring in this huge display, we’re going to have online support between San Francisco and Menlo Park, and it’s just going to cost a ton of money.”

  Alan Kay: And basically, when they approached Taylor about doing this, Taylor said, “Look, spend what you need, but don’t do it small—and be redundant enough so the thing really works.”

  Bob Taylor: I said, “Don’t worry about it. ARPA will pay for it.” ARPA was created by the Department of Defense at the instigation of Eisenhower. The idea was to launch an agency that would support high-risk research without red tape so that, hopefully, we would not get surprised again the way Sputnik surprised us.

  Doug Engelbart: It was a time when we were just sort of on a good-friends basis and you interact. How much should I tell them? I told them enough so that they got the idea of what I was trying to do and they were essentially telling me, “Maybe it’s better that you don’t tell us.” We had a lot of research money going into it, and I knew that if it really crashed or if somebody really complained, there could be enough trouble that it could blow the whole program. They would have had to cut me off and blackballed us, because we had misused government research money. I really wanted to protect the sponsors, so I could say that they didn’t know. So that’s the tacit agreement we had between us. As a matter of fact, Bill English never did let me see how much it really cost.

  Alan Kay: I believe ARPA spent $175,000 of 1968 money for that one demo. That’s probably like a million bucks today.

  Doug Engelbart: A lot of money.

  Bob Taylor: Bill English was the miracle worker for most of that demo.

  Doug Engelbart: Actually, the demo really never would have flown if it weren’t for Bill English. Somehow he’s in his element just to go arrange things.

  Alan Kay: Even good ideas are cheap and easy, but we also had Bill English and his team of doers who were able to take this set of ideas and reify it into something.

  Bill English: It was a challenge to get everything from SRI to the Civic Center. I mean that was thirty miles away! What we did was lease two video circuits from the phone company. They set up a microwave link: two transmitters on the top of the building at SRI, receiver/transmitters up on Skyline Boulevard on a truck, and two receivers at the Civic Center. Cables of course going down into the room at both ends. That was our video link. Going back we had two dedicated 1,200-baud lines: high-speed lines at the time. Homemade modems.

  Doug Engelbart: We needed this video projector, and I think that year we rented it from some outfit in New York. They had to fly it out and send a man to run it.

  Bill English: We used an Eidophor, a Swedish projector, a complex machine. It was a large machine—almost six feet tall—an arc-light projector. And what it did was focus the arc light on a spherical mirror. The mirror was wiped with the windshield-wiper blade that smeared oil over it, between each frame, and the electron beam actually wrote the image in the oil! It was an incredible method.

  Alan Kay: There wasn’t just one Eidophor there, there were two. They were both borrowed from NASA. And then the question was, “Well, what if our redundancy there doesn’t work?”

  Stewart Brand: They were on the screaming edge of what this technology was capable of, in terms of bandwidth and reliability and all the rest of it.

  Alan Kay: So then they went to Ampex, which had just started doing high-res video recording, and got a huge Ampex recorder and they did the entire presentation on it and it was running while the live thing was going on just in case something fucked up.

  Doug Engelbart: There were boxes that could run two videos in and you turn some knobs and you can fade one in and out. With another one you can have the video coming in and you can have a horizontal line that divides them or a vertical line. It was pretty easy to see we could make a control station that could run it.

  Alan Kay: Bill was the one who designed this whole thing, who made this whole display system and everything else. Bill was the coinventor of the mouse; he was not really a second banana.

  Doug Engelbart: Bill just built a platform in the back with all this gear.

  Alan Kay: Engelbart was the charismatic one. Bill was the engineer.

  Doug Engelbart: The four different video signals came in and he would mix them and project them. There was no precedent for that, that we had ever heard of.

  Alan Kay: The scale of that demo—it’s just unbelievable.

  Bill Paxton: I was the new guy and pretty much clueless, so what I was most impressed about was that Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog, was our photographer. Talk about somebody to loosen up the atmosphere!

  John Markoff: Stewart was really the person who, more than anybody, shepherded psychedelic drugs from the spiritual and the therapeutic to the recreational. He was the vector of the counterculture.

  Stewart Brand: Some people through Engelbart’s office had been paying attention to the stuff I was doing with the Trips Festival and so on. They thought I might bring some production values, or knowledge about how to put on a show, to the demo that they were planning. So, they invited me over.

  Alan Kay: In those days the Whole Earth Catalog, which was actually a store as well, was located right across the street from SRI.

  Stewart Brand: I remember walking over there thinking, This could be interesting and maybe even important. When I saw what they were doing, it seemed all very swell and obvious. Of course you would want to do the kind of things that they were doing with computers! They invited me to several of their meetings planning the show.

  Alan Kay: Stewart was just involved. I met him through Bill English, at a party. A lot of the Whole Earth people were there.

  Stewart Brand: When I went into Engelbart’s lab for the first time, there was a big poster of Janis Joplin, which is kind of an indication that they were feeling like part of the counterculture.

  Alan Kay: In that whole area—University Avenue in Palo Alto and then El Camino going all the way into Menlo Park—the counterculture was going on.

  The NLS debuted at the national computer conference at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center in December 1968. When the lights came up, Engelbart sat onstage with a giant video screen projected behind him, and a mouse at his fingertips. Then, in what has become known as “the Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart showed off what his computer could do.

  Stewart Brand: I participated in the demo part of the show itself.

  Bill Paxton: Stew was behind the camera, and one of the first things he did was focus it on a monitor and zoom in so that the image filled up the entire screen. He was getting this great feedback loop going. Do that at home. It’s really cool—very psychedelic. This is basically where things were behind stage.

  Stewart Brand: I had been a professional photographer, and that was why they said, “Oh great, you handle the camera.” It was pretty much just point and focus. But the demo was astounding.

  Doug Engelbart: It was the very first time the world had ever seen a mouse, seen outline processing, seen hypertext, seen mixed text and graphics, seen real-time videoconferencing.

  Alan Kay: We could actually see that ideas could be organized in a different way, that they could be filtered in a different way, that what we were looking at was not something that was trying to automate current modes of thought, but that there should be an amplification relationship between us and this new technology.

  Engelbart’s NLS terminal had a screen
and keyboard, windows, and a mouse. He showed off a way to edit text, a version of e-mail, even a primitive Skype. To modern eyes, Engelbart’s computer system looks pretty familiar, but to an audience used to punch cards and printouts it was a revelation. The computer could be more than a number cruncher; it could be a communications and information-retrieval tool. In one ninety-minute demo Engelbart shattered the military-industrial computing paradigm, and gave the hippies and freethinkers and radicals who were already gathering in Silicon Valley a vision of the future that would drive the culture of technology for the next several decades.

  Bob Taylor: There was about a thousand or more people in the audience and they were blown away.

  Andy van Dam: I was blown away to see this professional system with this unbelievable richness and complexity. It was an otherworldly experience, and in fact, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that it was all for real.

  Bob Taylor: Nobody had ever seen anyone use a computer in that way. It was just remarkable. He got a huge standing ovation after it was over.

  Alan Kay: The thing that we loved was the scope of it—Engelbart was really cosmic.

  Butler Lampson: It was pretty spectacular.

  Stewart Brand: I’ve seen a lot of demos since then, and been part of demos, at the MIT Media Lab and so on. But I’ve never seen anything that was so dangerous, and undertaken with such bravado. We never did a full rehearsal of the event; there were partial rehearsals, but that was a real-time improvisation that people saw. I don’t think people realized that it was improvisation, but it was improvisation. It gave a certain extra high-wire-act quality to the thing that may have come through. And I have to say, Doug was pretty spectacular at managing all of that, and being such a master of the medium itself, and having become the master of the completely kluged-together communication system he was operating with, he was totally unflappable up there on the stage. When Bill would whisper in his ear, “Stall for a couple of minutes, we can’t get the…” whatever it was that wasn’t working, Doug would just pause and discourse on something else until he got word that “Okay, we’re good to go.” And, we lucked out. It all worked enough to take the day.

  Andy van Dam: At the time, I had been working with Ted Nelson on our first hypertext system with a team of three part-time undergraduates. We were working in the hammer-and-chisel phase of this industrial revolution, coding in assembly language, and we were pretty good at it. But, here these guys had invented machine tools. They had built tools to build tools: This whole recursive “bootstrap” idea, starting with the system itself, and working all the way up through augmenting the human intellect, was just mind-boggling. It informs us today, still.

  Steve Jobs: We humans are tool builders. We can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind.

  Ken Kesey: It’s the next thing after acid!

  Steve Jobs: Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.

  Bill Paxton: A lot of people in the audience that day were profoundly impacted by it and went out and said, “How can I do this?”

  Ready Player One

  The first T-shirt tycoon

  The earliest computers were war machines, and in the beginning Silicon Valley ran on Defense Department contracts. Yet it was a “war machine” of a totally different order that gave Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture the character it has today. Spacewar, the first compelling computer game, was written for an early computer called the DEC PDP-1. One of the PDP-1’s big selling points was the screen: It had one. The PDP-1 was also “inexpensive”—which meant that universities could afford to buy them. Nolan Bushnell, an engineering student at the University of Utah in the midsixties, played Spacewar in his school’s computer lab and it left a lasting impression. After graduating he moved to Silicon Valley, and in just a few short years figured out how to bring computer games to the masses with Pong. It was a massive hit and Bushnell, still in his twenties, suddenly found himself in charge of what was, arguably, the most important company ever to rocket out of the Valley. Not only did Bushnell single-handedly create an industry around a new American art form—video games—he also wrote what has become the quintessential Silicon Valley script. The story goes like this: Young kid with radical idea hacks together something cool, builds a wild free-wheeling company around it, and becomes rich and famous in the process.

  Michael Malone: Nolan Bushnell is hugely important. He’s the first T-shirt tycoon. He’s the first modern Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s not building heavy-duty hardware. He’s not doing silicon. He’s doing consumer electronics.

  Nolan Bushnell: I was at the University of Utah. Evans and Sutherland headed the computer science department at the time, and yielded a whole bunch that we called the Utah Brats: Jim Clark, John Warnock, Alan Kay, Ed Catmull. I was in their thrall. I thought that the work they were doing was truly extraordinary. They were graduate students and I was an undergraduate.

  Alan Kay: Nolan would sneak up and do things on the computers. We didn’t go out and drink beer, but Nolan is a good guy.

  Nolan Bushnell: My fraternity brother said, “There’s something you got to see,” and we stealthily went into the computer lab. He had jammed something in the lock mechanism so we could get in. We didn’t turn the lights on. It was just us and the green display glowing back at us. It was a big round radar screen, a converted radar display left over from the Korean War.

  Al Alcorn: Nolan saw Spacewar, a game that ran on the PDP-1.

  Nolan Bushnell: It was a life-changing experience for me.

  Michael Malone: The great breakthrough was the realization that semiconductor technology would be getting to the point that you could bring intelligence to consumer products. And Nolan’s the guy.

  Nolan Bushnell: To put it into context, I was putting myself through school working at the local amusement park, Lagoon. It was a dollar-an-hour job, sucker pay. “Come throw a ball! Win a stuffed animal! Let me guess your age, weight, and occupation!” The job was really selling at a very basic level, and I found that I was pretty good at it. I could regularly bust my quota and make a lot of commission. The following year they made me assistant manager, and then manager, and so at twenty-one years old I had 150 kids reporting to me. So I knew intimately the economics of the coin-operated game business.

  Al Alcorn: I think that Nolan will proudly say that he graduated last in his class at the University of Utah, but he also worked in an amusement park, so he saw the connection: If I could put a coin slot on that million-dollar PDP-1, I could make a few hundred bucks. He knew it was economically unfeasible, but he also knew there was play value there.

  Michael Malone: Nolan was the first guy to look at Moore’s law and say to himself: You know what? When logic and memory chips get to be under ten bucks I can take these big games and shove them into a pinball machine.

  Nolan Bushnell: When my wife and I were driving from Utah to California I told her, “I will have my own business in two years.”

  Ted Dabney: I knew Nolan back when he had a junky little car, he owed money on his school, he could barely afford his rent… early on he was a really neat guy. We had fun, we’d go around to pizza parlors, he’d tell me all about his brilliant ideas, so I knew him then. I had no reason to doubt he’d ever lie to me. Or to think that he would lie to me, but it turns out he did.

  Nolan Bushnell: In 1968 Silicon Valley was really just starting in a lot of ways. Everywhere there were these large tracts of prune orchards and every month another orchard would be taken down and they’d pile up all the cut trees next to a sign that said “free firewood” and soon there would be a concrete tilt-up there. The center of gravity was Mountain View and Sunnyvale, where Fairchild and Intel and National Semiconductor were.

  Bob Metcalfe: Intel was just getting started. There was no Apple. There was a Hewlett-Packard, but they barely made computers, just barely. They were old and respectabl
e, but a tiny little company.

  Al Alcorn: The Valley at the time in the sixties and seventies was dominated by military stuff: Lockheed and all these big places—and semiconductor companies. Also, the Del Monte fruit factory; they were making fruit cocktail right there behind Videofile in this giant factory that smelled like a fruit cocktail in the summer.

  Nolan Bushnell: I worked for a division of Ampex called Videofile in Santa Clara.

  Steve Mayer: Coincidently, Larry Ellison and Oracle came out of Ampex, also.

  Al Alcorn: I was an undergraduate at Cal Berkeley in the work-study program, where you work for six months in the industry and then go to school for six months. I got a job at Videofile, working in the camera group. Nolan was in that same group under a guy named Kurt Wallace, the boss of all of us. Nolan was a brash, young, tall engineer, right off the bus from Salt Lake City, and he basically showed up and said, “I want to work here.” Kurt was impressed and hired him.

  Ted Dabney: Videofile was a way of recording documents and video on a very large rhodium disk, which was kind of like the disc you have in your computer, only now it was huge and you could have instant access to video and pictures.

  Steve Mayer: It really brought computers and video technology together for the first time in a significant way.