Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

Alvy Ray Smith: Corporate Xerox was three-piece button-down suits—businessmen in Western New York State. Then they found out that there was this place out in California that was all beanbag chairs and hippies riding bikes and wearing sandals!

  Dick Shoup: They felt it made Xerox look bad and we shouldn’t have let it happen.

  Stewart Brand (writing in Rolling Stone): Until computers come to the people we will have no real idea of their most natural functions. Up to the present their cost and size has kept them in the province of rich and powerful institutions, who, understandably, have developed them primarily as bookkeeping, sorting, and control devices. The computers have been a priceless aid in keeping the lid on top-down organization.

  Bob Taylor: Xerox thought themselves to be a very responsible, upright, solid-citizen corporation. They thought Rolling Stone was a rag magazine of degenerated hippies and would have nothing to do with them and didn’t want Rolling Stone to have anything to do with Xerox.

  Alan Kay: And so Xerox went batshit when they saw it.

  Stewart Brand (writing in Rolling Stone): Alan Kay is designing a handheld stand-alone interactive-graphic computer (about the size, shape, and diversity of a Whole Earth Catalog, electric) called “Dynabook.” It’s mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third, and various cassette-loading slots, optional hookup plugs, etc. And that is the general bent of research at Xerox, soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.

  Alvy Ray Smith: He had written up Xerox PARC as a hippie place.

  Bob Taylor: Xerox corporate had apoplexy.

  Alvy Ray Smith: They went nonlinear.

  Stewart Brand: They put an armed guard at the door and they didn’t let reporters in ever after.

  Dick Shoup: But of course from our point of view we were proud to be on the leading edge and trying to move Xerox and anybody else who would listen into the future, because we could see what was coming.

  Stewart Brand (writing in Rolling Stone): When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over.

  Bob Metcalfe: Right after we finished MAXC we started work on the Alto computer, arguably the world’s first personal computer.

  Chuck Thacker: And we finally started listening to Bob Taylor, who had been telling us what to do for a long time but we didn’t understand it.

  Bob Taylor: The design center of computers in those days was the arithmetic unit. Everything, all the design, was focused on making that as efficient as possible. So I said, “Look, the eyeball is the connection between the brain and the computer. The computer therefore has to be centered on the display. And furthermore, it has to be personal. We want one for every user.”

  Chuck Thacker: Taylor had this bee in his bonnet. He thought that computers were not really just for computing. They were communication devices. And he kept trying to explain it to us, why this was very important, and we didn’t understand it. And finally we did, and one of the things we realized was that if you wanted to communicate with it, it kind of had to be personal.

  Bob Metcalfe: Can you imagine that? A computer on every desk? Wow. Very controversial in 1973. Why would you want a computer on your desk? What possible use could there be for such a thing? I remember people had that discussion.

  Charles Simonyi: Alan Kay had a clear vision of the Dynabook, and he was talking about it all the time.

  Alvy Ray Smith: His idea was that the computer should be simple enough that a kid could use it. He saw it all. He was very clear about it.

  Alan Kay: Because of my experience with Seymour Papert I got converted from thinking about computers as tools for adults to thinking about them as media, like reading and writing. And once I got that idea, you have to make it usable for children—which means that the user interface has to be very different.

  Larry Tesler: We had a diagram with an idea of what the user interface might look like. It didn’t look at all like the Mac or Windows; it looked more like a 3-D room: a desk, a file cabinet in the corner, things on the desk, and a trash can next to the desk.

  Alan Kay: What we wanted was something like a room: an area for a project where we keep all the tools.

  Larry Tesler: The idea was that you could point to stuff that looked semirealistic, representational, but it was not equal-sized icons like we have today. Alan Kay loved it.

  And so Alan Kay, PARC’s software theorist, got together with PARC’s resident hardware wizards, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker. Together they created the Alto.

  Chuck Thacker: For a while we actually called the Alto the Interim Dynabook, because it allowed Alan to do a lot of the software things that he wanted to do on the Dynabook. And so he actually paid for the first twelve machines or something like that.

  Terry Winograd: With a lot of this stuff at PARC, Alan had the vision, and the tech guys like Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker actually did it.

  Alan Kay: Chuck basically designed the whole Alto from start to finish in just a little over three months. That’s why Chuck got that Turing award. It was magic.

  Dan Ingalls: So the Alto was a beautifully designed minicomputer that had a removable disc pack and a bitmap display, and lots of computing power for creating images on a black-and-white display.

  Chuck Thacker: And so the bitmap display was one of the key good ideas in the Alto. The idea was that you could represent the picture on the screen as a pile of bits in memory and that any program could manipulate those bits and produce a picture.

  Alan Kay: The bitmap display acted as “silicon paper” that could show any image and this led directly to bitmap painting, animation, and typography.

  Butler Lampson: We thought a really important aspect of interactive computing was to be able to simulate as many of the properties of paper as possible. It’s a technology that’s been around for a long, long time.

  Bob Taylor: We saw that if we had a personal computer with a bitmap display that we could then use it for a lot of different things that people had not been using computers for—and that’s what we did.

  Butler Lampson: But initially the Alto wasn’t that much of a hit because we had no interest in software development. It was only after we started to have things like Bravo that it really got hot.

  Charles Simonyi: The Alto had a black-and-white bitmap display. It had a mouse. And so it was clear that quite a beautiful editor could be written for the Alto. The Alto needed an editor and I needed a PhD thesis. So that’s why the name Bravo. It was the second experiment for my PhD thesis.

  Butler Lampson: Bravo was a joint project between Charles Simonyi and myself.

  Charles Simonyi: We finished it in about three months; the first version didn’t have formatting yet, but it was attractive enough that Larry Tesler kind of picked up on it.

  Bruce Horn: Larry Tesler is one of the inventors of the modeless text editing concept, where you clicked and typed at the insertion point.

  Larry Tesler: Bravo was fairly low on modes at the beginning, but if you were in command mode and not typing mode and you typed the word EDIT—which would be a common thing we would type because we were building editing systems—E would select the entire document: E was shorthand for “entire.” And then when you typed the D in edit mode, it would delete the whole document. Then when you typed I it would go into insert mode, so when you typed T it would insert the T.

  Charles Simonyi: So all your work disappeared and T appeared on the screen.

  Bruce Horn: Larry would wear a T-shirt that said NO MODES on it. We got a big laugh out of that.

  Charles Simonyi: The first really useful version was in early ’75. It really worked like a modern word processor.

  Chuck Thacker: Bravo morphed into Microsoft Word. Laurel was an almost recognizable e-mail system, recognizable today. PostScript came from us. We had a lot of drawing applications. So it was a good run.

  Alan Kay: If you had come to PARC four or five years afte
r it started, you would have been in the midst of something. There were probably 150 Altos by then, Ethernets all over the place, laser printers were starting to appear…

  Charles Simonyi: About that time, we had a lot of visitors: the first time probably in history that nonprofessionals, especially spouses of researchers and friends of researchers, came in at night to use computers. That never happened before.

  The most persistent visitor was Alvy Ray Smith. He had dropped out of academia after realizing that what he really wanted was to be an artist, and he was searching for a new direction in life. One of the PARC researchers, Dick Shoup, was an old friend and invited Smith to the lab. Reluctantly, Smith came. And when Smith saw what Shoup was up to, he stayed.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I was a weekend hippie. I got my PhD at Stanford while I was hanging out in the parks. Dick Shoup has long hair but he was never a hippie. He never dropped acid or anything like that. He’s out on his own strange limb of the universe.

  Dick Shoup: I’ve always been into parapsychology and psychic phenomena and strange phenomena. And UFOs are even more of a third rail than psychic phenomena. And as usual there’s a tremendous amount of noise and hallucination and just plain misidentification of something in the sky, stuff like that. But there’s also plenty of very, very good evidence. I think there’s really something going on.

  Alvy Ray Smith: And we kind of hit it off at a conference and then he takes off to Xerox PARC. And so we stayed in touch. Even at PARC, Dick was always kind of out on his own branch.

  Dick Shoup: There were lots of ideas about what the group should do, and then people had individual things they wanted to do. And I had some ideas about what I wanted to do: graphics. I always wanted to do graphics.

  Alvy Ray Smith: He decided that he wanted to build this artist machine. And he built the whole thing. The computational guts of it was a Nova minicomputer—not an Alto. Altos were being made all around, but Dick needed more horsepower.

  Bob Taylor: Dick had opted to use a Nova instead of an Alto. Well, that put him at odds with everybody else in the lab.

  Alvy Ray Smith: They were always trying to get him to come into the mainstream. And then he built this picture memory, as he called it—a frame buffer. It was a magical device that had enough memory to hold a video picture, so roughly five hundred by five hundred pixels, and then display it using the standard NTSC-compatible video. All this is new.

  Dick Shoup: Not too many people were doing color. And in particular within PARC and within Xerox it was anathema. Because the Alto was just black-and-white pixels. And a lot of what other people were doing was just black and white. But I thought that if we were going to do video—to do anything remotely related to television as opposed to office documents—it was important to have color.

  Butler Lampson: Which is much more expensive, because you need at least eight bits for each point instead of one.

  Dick Shoup: I was diverging a lot from what most of PARC was doing, because they were orienting themselves around office systems and documents and the laser printing and document creation and editing, text editing, book editing, publication stuff, and so forth—for which black and white was much more appropriate. I thought that color was interesting personally, and I thought that Xerox ought to damn well be interested in that, not just black-and-white memos.

  Bob Taylor: Then Dick brought in the so-called artists who were not computerists and therefore had little in common with the rest of us.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I didn’t really understand what I was walking into. I walked into the great heyday of PARC, and Dick took me into his lab and blew my mind.

  Dick Shoup: I was making a train wreck of these two giant technologies—computers and television.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I went, Oh, that’s what he’s been talking about!

  Bruce Horn: I remember the room was always kind of dark. And so there was a big monitor and it was like, Look at this thing!

  Alvy Ray Smith: Now everybody just grows up knowing what a paint program is and that if you move the mouse this thing happens up there, but nobody understood it at the time.

  Bruce Horn: It was psychedelic. It was mind-blowing.

  Alvy Ray Smith: SuperPaint was a whole video graphics system: hardware and software. Dick Shoup could do both—he built all the hardware and wrote all the software. Dick’s machine was the first to have eight bits of color—256 different colors, enough to be interesting. And I went nuts.

  Bruce Horn: It was very, very unlike all the stuff we were doing, which was on the Alto, and in black and white.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Nobody had ever seen full-color and graphics ever before, and he had it. You could paint in full color! And I saw it and I thought, That’s my future, that’s it! It might’ve been the second visit where I stayed for like fifteen hours or something. Anyhow, basically that’s how we bonded on a permanent level.

  Jim Clark: Alvy and Shoup were always the artists. I do not know how you define artist, but I know one when I see one. I never was one.

  Bob Flegal: Alvy didn’t get hired. I don’t think he was even paid; he just came in on his own. We got him permission to come in.

  Alvy Ray Smith: One of the first things I did on Dick’s machine was the walk cycle—a silly pirate walking across the screen. I started teaching myself from this Preston Blair book by animating on this machine. Blair was this great animator who did the dancing hippos for Fantasia. The book had the classic walk cycle and the run cycle and it had a striptease—all the stuff.

  Adele Goldberg: You learn by playing. And Alvy just always had that twinkle of someone who played. There was a passion, and that passion was shared by a network of colleagues who he would bring in: creative people—and Alvy is certainly one of those people.

  Bob Flegal: Alvy was such a character!

  Dick Shoup: People were doing things in the middle of the night, painting and maybe smoking something.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I would come home at like four in the morning typically, because I’d stay until I dropped. I’d come home and crash and be up as soon as I could and go back in and keep going and keep going and keep going. It was so much fun. It was just a thrill a minute. Every day I was just flipping out. It was hard to go to sleep because it was so much fun tearing the world apart. Every day everything you touched had never been seen before or never been thought of before or codified before. Just everything that happened was new. We used to sit around and talk about how this was what it felt like to be with Balboa in Panama or something. You know: the first guys ashore, the first Europeans ashore. And you get to name everything. It was the early days, right?

  Dick Shoup: Some very strange images came out from Alvy and others.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I had a friend, David DiFrancesco, that would come down at night. He was a video artist, that’s what he did in the city. And we would jam. I would make pictures for a while and then just turn over to him and he would take what I’d left and he would work away on it and then he turned it back to me. I mean none of it was worth saving, but it was lots of fun—just crazy stuff. And meanwhile we are talking about all the fun stuff that’s going on and the hippie thing and drugs and so forth. We really hit it off.

  Dick Shoup: Was it a fancy-pants salon art rave? It was getting there.

  Alvy Ray Smith: People would be dropping by all the time to see. They’d heard about this machine and they’d drive by. Boy, everybody came to look at it.

  Dick Shoup: I’m sure if we had let it get bigger it would’ve turned into a real party. It was pushing the boundaries and it could’ve gone much farther, and some people think we had gone too far already. But I didn’t think so. It was pretty modest, really, compared to what was going on in the world as a whole at that time. So it wasn’t all that outrageous.

  Adele Goldberg: Bob Flegal, who’s a marvelous artist, and Dick Shoup told me a fabulous story that I bought into because I’m a little naïve. They said that they were making a monster movie. I think what they really told me was they were making s
ome monster sex movie and I left that to them.

  Bob Flegal: I was doing a fair amount of drinking at the time so who knows? We had a lot of fun there, all of us.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I just sat around and made art all day, that’s what I did, I just made art. And it was only after I was there for a while I realized, Hey, I’m a programmer, I can make it do what I want it to do. So I started creating programs and I would record the output onto video. And then eventually I edited all of it together into a piece I called Vidbits, and that was my entry into the New York avant-garde art scene.

  Bob Taylor: Alvy loved to interview. He loved to be a spokesman for something. And he would talk about PARC as though he were an insider and gave people the impression that he was an expert on PARC. So a lot of people would go to him and say, “Tell us about PARC.” And he would, but he didn’t know much about PARC. He was a self-promoter.

  Alvy Ray Smith: They were trimming back anything that was hippie-like or avant-garde, and that meant me. They didn’t want my art associated with them.

  Dick Shoup: Taylor got fed up with Alvy and the wacky graphics we were doing and the late nights and whatever else was going on, and he said we shouldn’t do that anymore. And he wanted to just cancel the project as a whole.

  Alvy Ray Smith: One day Bob Taylor came into the lab—Dick’s lab—where I worked every day, and he was puffing on his famous pipe.

  Bruce Horn: Bob was into smoking his pipe.

  Alvy Ray Smith: And he said, “Alvy, do you agree with me that over here in the corner is more the direct line of computer graphics than what Dick Shoup is doing?” Off in the corner was an Alto, with a black-and-white display, just doing really crude one-bit graphics. I’ve got eight bits and full color! Who cares about one-bit graphics? All of a sudden inside my heart just sunk and I went, Oh my God, this guy hasn’t got a clue. He’s basically not supporting Dick Shoup, who’s got the greatest idea of all. So although I’ve heard great things about Bob Taylor, my impression of the guy was he just didn’t get it.

  Stewart Brand: Bob was a close student, actually, of computer games. He took the same attitude I did, that this was where he could see a lot of the most important trends in interactivity that people would have with computers. But he got slapped and constrained by Xerox Corporate back East.