Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Nolan Bushnell: Understand that we had no purchasing department, no manufacturing skills. We had no procedures. We had no quality control. We had nothing, you know?

  Al Alcorn: We made all kinds of mistakes. It was absolutely crazy. We went to the unemployment office to hire people—parolees and very colorful people, and we were being ripped off pretty heavily, but we were making so much money on this thing that it didn’t kill us.

  Nolan Bushnell: What we didn’t know is that when you want employees you don’t go down to the labor department, ’cause that’s where all the druggies are. We hired a bunch of these druggies and pretty soon we noticed some theft, we lost six or eight TVs before we fired the guys that were kind of, you know—dodgy.

  Al Alcorn: When we started Atari I was twenty-four. Nolan was twenty-six or something. Because we were so young and so inexperienced we didn’t try to put in rules. Punching a time clock wasn’t the point, it was getting the job done. If you could do it without showing up, so be it! Some people had to show up and be there to get their job done, but there were some people that could just make it happen and they would work anytime they wanted.

  Nolan Bushnell: People talk about the party atmosphere, but what they don’t realize is that it was all based on hitting quotas. We had an extremely young workforce.

  Chris Caen: I started at fifteen as a summer intern. By the time I was eighteen I was a product manager. I had a hard-walled office, was making good money, and thinking to myself, Why do I need to go to college?

  Nolan Bushnell: The girls that were stuffing the computer boards and doing the testing were in their early twenties or eighteen or nineteen. The guys who were muscling the big boxes around, packing and shipping them, were all in their early twenties.

  Chris Caen: People had dropped out of high school and dropped out of college to work at Atari; they met their spouses there.

  Nolan Bushnell: What everybody wanted was a party and some beer and some pizza and they ended up going home with each other.

  Al Alcorn: Atari at the time had all these people and the smell of dope burning in the back and whatnot.

  Nolan Bushnell: It was the hippie lifestyle.

  Chris Caen: There was something magical about working at Atari at the time, which I have never experienced in any tech company—large or small—since. This sounds eye-rollingly naïve now, but it really was a family.

  Nolan Bushnell: We were working hard and playing hard, and everybody was happy.

  Al Alcorn: I remember when we started, nobody would talk to us. Then, all of a sudden, we became big.

  David Kushner: In terms of the American landscape, Atari was almost like punk rock or something like that. Pong was just so minimalist and so compelling, and it managed to hook an entire generation.

  Clive Thompson: Pong was so bare to the metal that you really felt like you were interacting with the substance of computation: This thing hits that thing and we calculate a new trajectory.

  David Kushner: Just like the Ramones could take a few chords and just grab you by the throat, Pong had a joystick, a button, and a bunch of blocks on the screen—and you would spend the entire day there, playing it.

  Clive Thompson: I was completely mesmerized. Oh! Finally, we are directly looking at Newton’s concept of physics: trajectories in a frictionless world. There was something unbelievably beautiful and unsettling about it, in this sensual and tactile way.

  David Kushner: If you were a geeky teenaged guy in that period of time, you were blowing your lawn-mowing money on Atari. But Pong also became a status symbol: It was such a phenomenon that Hugh Hefner had to have one in his bachelor pad in Chicago!

  Al Alcorn: Then Atari was a big thing and everyone wanted to talk to us, and they believed what we said! The more staid the company, the more outrageous Nolan would behave.

  Michael Malone: It’s hard to capture just how crazy Nolan was in those early days. He was a wild man. He was young. He lived high. He had the Rolls-Royce. The code name for each new product was named after some hot girl on the assembly line. He really did have that master-of-the-universe thing. I mean there was coke with the assembly-line girls in the hot tub. This guy did the whole Cash McCall thing. He was just throwing out sparks in every direction.

  David Kushner: Nolan really was the Merry Prankster of Silicon Valley, and so he attracted all the other Merry Pranksters who had nowhere else to go.

  Al Alcorn: It was fun.

  Ralph Baer: They made a couple hundred Pong games during 1972 toward the end of the year. And it was thirteen thousand Pong games the next year. The competition made more than that, everybody was making knockoffs.

  Al Alcorn: Bally copied it, but it was with permission because we had a relationship with them. Nutting just stole Pong and made a game called Computer Space Ball, because everything they had was Computer this—Computer Quiz, Computer Space, Computer Space Ball… Clever! Why didn’t they ask us? Everybody else stole it except Ramtek. When I say “stole it,” I mean just copied the circuitry that I designed. Ramtek actually looked at it and made their own electronic version. They made a copy, but they didn’t take the schematic.

  Nolan Bushnell: Our copiers were essentially fast followers: They’d buy one of our games, they’d Xerox the printed circuit board, they’d ramp up manufacturing and go for it. They were jackals. It pissed us off.

  Ted Dabney: They probably had somebody planted that, you know, stole for them. You know, industrial espionage is big business, it always has been.

  Al Alcorn: The guy who was making our boards for us, I will not mention his name, was also making extra copies and selling them to the competitors. It was just a direct theft. You don’t need to understand the circuitry, you just need to put the parts in. Everybody was stealing our games to the point where we were the advanced development group for the entire fucking industry. It was kind of frustrating.

  Nolan Bushnell: We started countermeasures. We were getting to be a big semiconductor customer, so we asked them to privately mark some parts that we were using, and we designed some games so if the copiers just read the parts and ordered the parts and plugged them in they wouldn’t work. Because they were the wrong parts! That put one of our competitors out of business. I can remember us having a little champagne party on their front lawn when they declared bankruptcy. By 1974 we had gotten rid of most of the jackals if not all of them. We had a huge market share at that point, we were dominant, but that summer was very dark.

  Al Alcorn: Nolan’s first attempts at selling games overseas were an utter disaster beyond recognition.

  Nolan Bushnell: We didn’t realize that Japan was a closed market and so we were in violation of all kinds of rules and regulations of the Japanese, and they were starting to give us a real bad time.

  Al Alcorn: And Ron Gordon came in as a consultant and fixed all that for us for a huge commission.

  Nolan Bushnell: I was twenty-eight years old and really trying to operate on a global stage with really no clue about what it was all about. There was never an Atari business plan; we were just making it up as we were going along.

  Al Alcorn: Nolan had read this book about a company’s growth and he learned from this book that the team that gets you to $1 million in sales can’t get you any further. You’ve got to get pros to get any further.

  Ted Dabney: He hired this president of the company that was a real yahoo, I mean a real yahoo, okay? He also hired a vice president of engineering that could not—would not—make a decision! And then he hired this salesman, as vice president of marketing, who didn’t even know how to spell marketing.

  Al Alcorn: They were like B players out of Hewlett-Packard: a marketing guy, a finance guy, and we hired an Ampex engineer to be VP of engineering, so we had a manufacturing guy. So Nolan had these people in and they really didn’t understand start-ups, and they basically ruined the company.

  Ted Dabney: So I says, “Nolan, you and I have got to talk.” So we got on our motorcycles, headed over to a pizza parlor, a
nd we sat down, and I say, “You’ve got to get rid of these guys, you’ve got to get rid of them.”

  Al Alcorn: Nolan couldn’t fire people.

  Nolan Bushnell: I drove into the parking lot of our Winchester Avenue facility, and it just kind of occurred to me that my company was paying the payments of everyone’s car. It was just one of those things.

  Ted Dabney: Nolan said, “All these people depend on us, don’t they?” And I said, “Yeah.” I said, “And their landlords, and the grocery stores, and everything. They all depend on us.”

  Al Alcorn: Then engineering made a key mistake—one of the mistakes that we made.

  Nolan Bushnell: A part in our driving game had failed. And remember, we were operating on positive cash flow.

  Al Alcorn: The games we did ship, we had to take back. It was so bad!

  Nolan Bushnell: So all of a sudden we had a floor full of machines that couldn’t be sold, which stopped our cash flow.

  Al Alcorn: The peak of frustration was him in tears. Nolan was in tears. You could see Nolan was thinking, This is over. The company was going to die; we were going to shut it down.

  Nolan Bushnell: We got sued for nonpayment of our bills. The sheriff had come to attach our assets—our bank accounts—so we had to switch bank accounts every week!

  Al Alcorn: And then what happened was that Ron Gordon saw that his goose laying the golden eggs was dying.

  Nolan Bushnell: We were just coughing blood.

  Ted Dabney: Atari was going down.

  Al Alcorn: And Ron came back and fired all those guys, talked to the banks to get our bank line going, and revived the company. And boom! He got us going again.

  The Time Machine

  Inventing the future at Xerox PARC

  In the wake of the young engineers who were drawn to Silicon Valley to work at the old-school electronics shops (like Ampex and Hewlett-Packard) and in the newfangled semiconductor foundries (Fairchild and Intel) came the blue-chip corporations looking for their own future—most notably, Xerox. In the early seventies the company had decided to build a research and development lab in the heart of the Valley: the Palo Alto Research Center—also known as Xerox PARC. The idea was to prototype the computerized office of the future. Inspired by Engelbart, the engineers at PARC designed and built a breakthrough computer, the Alto. Among the Alto’s many innovations was the graphical user interface: The Alto had overlapping windows, menus, icons, and fonts. From those elements the first modern word-processing, e-mail, and paint programs were built. Other computers built by PARC could create psychedelic video and cartoon animation—in full color. Underlying all of it was the so-called bitmap display. Each pixel on PARC’s many computer screens was mapped—connected—to a bit in memory.

  Butler Lampson: The pitch was “Xerox is starting this new lab and it’s a long way away from Rochester, and the charter is to invent ‘the office of the future.’ And nobody quite knows what that means, so we should be able to make it anything we want. And there’s plenty of money!”

  Chuck Thacker: What we did was very simple. We spent a lot of money to simulate the future.

  Butler Lampson: Our game was to build time machines. It was extremely clear that the machines that we were building in the early and midseventies would be economical in the eighties. And it was extremely clear that they were wildly uneconomical at the time we built them.

  Alan Kay: Through money—and assuming Moore’s law—you can basically put a supercomputer on a desk, which is what we did.

  Dan Ingalls: It was almost a free ride, because so many things were just ready to be invented: The entire world of bitmapped graphics was there to be invented.

  Bob Metcalfe: And it was California, so we rode bicycles. I remember we used to ride our bikes along Arastradero Road over to Alpine Road and go to the Alpine Inn at lunchtime. We would drink beer at lunch, and that meant the afternoon was gone and that work might resume that evening after dinner. It was very laid-back. There was only one meeting per week. We’d sit in these beanbag chairs, and we would discuss what was going on at the lab. It was a very idyllic time.

  Dick Shoup: We were all trying to figure out what to do.

  Steve Jobs: They were doing some computer research, which was basically an extension of some stuff started by a guy named Doug Engelbart, when he was at SRI.

  Bob Taylor: Engelbart’s work influenced me lot. Some of our people spent summers on occasion working in Engelbart’s group, before there was a PARC.

  Alan Kay: I date PARC from 1971. Basically the five years through 1975: That’s when most of the stuff got done.

  Chuck Thacker: The first thing we did was try to figure out what we would use for computing resources. And we looked at SDS: because Xerox had just bought Scientific Data Systems.

  Butler Lampson: The standard computer for computer science research at that time was the DEC PDP-10. We needed to be able to run the PDP-10 software, because that’s what all the other researchers were running.

  Charles Simonyi: But DEC was a competitor to Xerox, so it was completely politically incorrect for Xerox to have a competitor’s machine for their research.

  Chuck Thacker: And we realized that it would really be unseemly if we bought a PDP-10 from DEC—so we built one: the MAXC.

  Alan Kay: It stands for Multiple Access Xerox Computer.

  Chuck Thacker: I designed the memory, Butler designed the processor. And you could do that in those days.

  Charles Simonyi: There was this wonderful tradition that new people had to do a shit job—that’s what it was called in the vernacular. So my job at Xerox was building the MAXC.

  Bruce Horn: I was the guy who would do the backups at night, and I’d go and, you know, put the tapes on the thing and run all the backups and everything. So that’s kind of fun. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old.

  Dick Shoup: We all were playing with Spacewar. There was really nothing else to do then, because we were building things.

  PARC’s first outside visitor of note was Stewart Brand, fresh from editing and publishing The Last Whole Earth Catalog, and newly famous as a result of its countercultural success. He came to PARC for the tour in 1972.

  Stewart Brand: I went to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone and said, “I want to do this story about what’s going on with computers,” and he said, “Fine, go ahead and do it.” He was doing it based, totally, on his good feelings about the Whole Earth Catalog.

  Alan Kay: Stewart and I knew each other a bit. He contacted me and said he was going to do a piece basically on Spacewar.

  Stewart Brand: What I had seen with Spacewar was that it drove the technology. It drove the human interface faster than any other application.

  Alan Kay: The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer.

  Stewart Brand: Bear in mind that I had seen people playing Spacewar as early as 1962 in the computer labs at Stanford. They were young, randomly dressed people, in a back room of a nice Stanford office crying out with joy and excitement about something—and that something was the game.

  Steve Russell: There were games on computers before Spacewar, but Spacewar was very influential, because it circulated through lots of colleges and universities, so everyone who was interested in computers in the nineteen sixties all knew about it.

  Stewart Brand: That was my first inkling that there was something going on around computers that was not the standard New Left take on computers, which was that they were dire instruments of control.

  Lee Felsenstein: The line was that they were instruments of the future in terms of automating production. The New Left didn’t think that was such a great idea.

  Stewart Brand: Amongst the general flow of hippie romanticism, there was an opposition to technology and, by implication, an opposition to science. And I thought that was dreadful.

  Lee Felsenstein: Those who sneered at computers had no involvement with them. It was a convenient thing to do from a distance. But if you had any d
egree of involvement with them you came to love the magic of it, “the romance of it,” as Alan Kay put it.

  Bob Taylor: When Stewart Brand showed up, I had no idea he was coming. I didn’t know why he was there. I didn’t know who put him up to it. He said, “Well, we just want to talk to a few people.” Stewart Brand didn’t just want to just talk to me. He wanted to talk to a lot of people. He wanted to find out what was going on. I said, “Okay, fine.” So I encouraged him and he did his thing. I saw nothing wrong with it.

  Stewart Brand: Alan Kay was definitely my avenue into understanding the Xerox PARC and a great deal more. He just introduced me to his perspective on what was going to become personal computers, and probably he used that term offhandedly, which I’d then put in print. It became the standard usage. He was very articulate and operated on a level of abstraction, in terms of having a theory of what’s going on, that was reminiscent of Doug Engelbart. Though Alan talked and acted like more of an engineer with a strategic vision and Doug acted more like the visionary with the visionary vision, I suppose.

  Alan Kay: Stewart wrote a very good piece. Unfortunately Rolling Stone was a rag in those days—a West Coast rag, not an East Coast rag.

  Stewart Brand (writing in Rolling Stone): Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers—Threat or Menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science… These are heads, most of them. Half or more of computer science is heads.

  John Markoff: One of the terms of art then was head, meaning “acid head.”