Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Larry Tesler: We were very proud of that, being in the Smalltalk group.

  Bruce Horn: So long story short, that was a blinding insight for Steve. Oh my God! This object-oriented programming stuff that PARC has is superpowerful! He saw that power.

  Larry Tesler: Steve was just really focused on the UI and the way it looked—the simplicity and the beauty of it.

  Steve Jobs: I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear. It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments.

  Adele Goldberg: Steve just sat there, didn’t say a word. He sat there staring. And then they left.

  Trip Hawkins: Steve had his private visit. So then he comes back to Apple and he goes, “Okay, we’ve all got to go back and see this again.”

  Steve Wozniak: There were about five of us.

  Dan Kottke: It was the members of the Lisa team. The Mac at that point in time was a tiny little thing: just a processor, some RAM, and a video generator. It didn’t even have a mouse.

  Trip Hawkins: So we were the brain trust that had to go back and see what Steve was all excited about and decide what we were going to do about it.

  Adele Goldberg: They came back with the entire development team: Steve Jobs and the entire Lisa programming team. This is what people don’t understand.

  Larry Tesler: We arranged a bigger demo where we’d show them more.

  Adele Goldberg: I said, “You’re blooming crazy!” You can’t give a demo to the programming team. That’s a “how” not a “what” presentation. That’s a complete giveaway.

  Bob Flegal: Adele did not want to do that demo. In fact, she turned on her Adele meter pretty high, like only she can do. She really caused quite a stir with management.

  Adele Goldberg: I simply said, “You order me to do it, and I’ll go do it. But it’s a mistake.” They didn’t want to know why it was a mistake.

  Larry Tesler: Nobody wanted to show them everything. We didn’t even want to show them everything that was being done in Smalltalk, or everything that was being done on the Alto, let alone show them other hardware and other systems.

  Adele Goldberg: Xerox inadvertently did a public disclosure at a level that freed the entire team, my entire research team, from its nondisclosure. That’s the story that no one wants to talk about. A legal public disclosure is what happened.

  Larry Tesler: We wanted to show them enough that they would build bitmap displays and mice and laser printers and other things that we could get at a consumer-ish kind of price, because they were buying it for a bigger market than we were. And that required showing them a little bit more. So we did.

  Bruce Horn: Atkinson was just looking at it so closely—trying to figure it out.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Bill Atkinson was the main graphics engineer at Apple, and he was doing the graphics on the Lisa.

  Bruce Horn: He was nose to the screen, just trying to figure it out.

  Trip Hawkins: We were not complete strangers to bitmapped graphics, because Apple II had them. It’s just what you could do with them on an Apple II was kind of limited.

  Trip Hawkins: What PARC had was completely innovative thinking about the entire user experience.

  Steve Wozniak: Multiple windows on the same computer screen? When I saw that I said, “God, it’s like you’ve got three computers in one! Once you have that you’ll never go back.” The Smalltalk language allowed them to write software in a different way than ever before.

  Adele Goldberg: So we proceeded to have a Smalltalk language and implementation discussion, practically giving the answers to the team.

  Larry Tesler: I was getting better questions from the Apple management than I ever got from the Xerox management. It was clear that they actually understood computers.

  Adele Goldberg: We walked through all the details, all the details.

  Trip Hawkins: So that was the seeds of it. Of course then we come back and we’re thinking. Yeah! So what do we do about this? And by that time we already had a project.

  John Couch: The Lisa.

  Trip Hawkins: A dinky little R&D project, and Steve and a handful of engineers had got started on that, and we had a lot of debates about which processor to use. And there had been this debate where a lot of the engineers were thinking we don’t want a mouse.

  Steve Jobs: The problem was that we had hired a bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard, and they didn’t get it.

  Trip Hawkins: And this became a real bone of contention.

  Steve Jobs: I remember people screaming at me that it would take us five years to engineer a mouse and it would cost $300 to build. And I finally got fed up. I just went outside and found Hovey-Kelley Design and asked him to design me a mouse.

  Dean Hovey: I had no idea what a mouse was.

  Jim Sachs: Steve Jobs said, “It’s going to be the primary interface of the computer of the future.” That’s how he described it, which we thought was laughable. You could balance a checkbook without a mouse, and you could write BASIC programs without a mouse, and that was about all people were buying Apple IIs for. That and playing games, and there were already game paddles and joysticks, or keyboard input, and nobody could think of what a mouse would be used for in a game. We of course went back to the office and snickered, and thought, Maybe he hasn’t had enough meat in his diet? But if he was willing to pay us $25 an hour to do this, we would design a solar-powered toaster for him. So we said, “Sure, Steve.”

  Jim Yurchenco: So the first thing we did was to go out and see what ideas we could steal, which is how engineers work—why reinvent the wheel?—and one of the things we came up with was a trackball module: a very large trackball used in Atari game machines.

  Nolan Bushnell: We did a trackball for the coin-op business. We used it in several games: Missile Command, Centipede, Atari Football—that was a good one. But we really had problems with having it jam and all that, and so we solved a whole bunch of technical problems.

  Jim Yurchenco: We looked at it, and what they were doing was interrupting beams of light with slotted wheels—a different orientation, and everything was at a much larger scale, and of course the ball was supported by the structure and was depending just on gravity, but it sure seemed like a real promising approach.

  Jim Sachs: The mouse Xerox had had a mean time between failure of something like one week, at which time it would jam up irreparably, or the little wire fingers would break. It had a very flimsy cord whose wires would break.

  Dean Hovey: It just shows, particularly in Silicon Valley, how you take a good idea and run with it and improve it. It’s very rare that a lightning bolt strikes and you come up with something that’s never been thought of before. It’s a lot more taking from this, taking from that, and trying to make something work, and going for it.

  Steve Jobs: In ninety days we had a mouse that could be built for fifteen bucks that was phenomenally reliable.

  Jim Sachs: People often ask me, when they see the mouse patent on my wall, whether I invented the mouse. I point out that I did not invent the mouse. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse. His mouse was crude but effective, and remarkable because he demonstrated it, along with a graphical user interface and all kinds of other things, at Brooks Hall in 1968. Engelbart’s mouse consisted of two rotating disks attached to potentiometers and a big, clunky wooden box.

  Dean Hovey: Xerox had obviously implemented various versions of it, but the execution around it was still flawed. It wasn’t something that would scale such that it could change the world as it had the potential to.

  Jim Sachs: I credit Steve Jobs with having the vision that that is the way the masses would use computers. One would never have concluded that that would be “the primary interface to millions of computers in the future.” But he was correct. I think he’s not been recognized enough for that. I think people tend to spend more time thinking about the you
ng, brash, rude, obnoxious Steve Jobs of the 1980s, not that he truly had a vision for seeing this gem in a lab in Xerox PARC, and saying, “They may not be able to commercialize it, but we can.”

  Dean Hovey: We had working prototypes in the late 1980, early 1981 time frame.

  Jim Sachs: It’s also interesting to note that in 1980, at Hovey-Kelley we didn’t have access to a computer to plug a mouse into! So we were a little puzzled as to what this thing really was going to do.

  Trip Hawkins: We gave it to Bill Atkinson, and he wrote a driver that did stuff graphically. And until that happened, there had been this debate where the mouse was a real bone of contention, but when Bill wrote that driver and it did something and at least half the engineers go, “Oh yeah. Yeah. I get it!”

  Larry Tesler: And after that, it just kind of got away from Xerox.

  Adele Goldberg: We started losing personnel to Apple over the next couple years.

  John Couch: A lot of the people that were at Xerox PARC ended up joining my team, like Larry Tesler and others.

  Larry Tesler: And Apple ended up getting all this technology, improving on it.

  Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs felt that Xerox had this great technology, but Apple was the one who could make it cheap and affordable—like Woz had done with the Apple II.

  Dan Kottke: The graphical interface with the mouse and windows? That was pretty much taken from Xerox PARC.

  Bill Atkinson: We tried a lot of things, we didn’t just take what Xerox had done. In fact, many of the things that we did, they didn’t have at all.

  Trip Hawkins: For example, the Alto did not have icons.

  Bruce Horn: And so the double-click to open, drag-and-drop, double-click to launch an app that had the associated file? So Smalltalk didn’t have such things. There were no entities that were files in Smalltalk.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The question for the sake of history is “How much did Apple get from Xerox PARC?” And so the biggest issue is, “Did we have multiple windows before the PARC visit?” Bill thinks we did; I think maybe we didn’t. It’s unclear. But definitely the mouse came out of the PARC visit. We did not have a mouse before then.

  3P1C F41L

  It’s game over for Atari

  The video game craze peaked in the early eighties: MTV VJs talked about their love for Atari on air; “Pac-Man Fever,” a novelty song, topped the charts; Hollywood was churning out thrillers like Tron and War Games. Tron’s plot fictionalized the obsessions of the Valley’s programmer class and one of its main characters, Alan Bradley, was modeled after Alan Kay. In the movie the Alan Kay character enters cyberspace to stop a computer program gone rogue. In actual fact, Kay was working on making Tron’s fictional cyberspace real—at Atari. After PARC fell apart in the wake of Steve Jobs’s visit, Kay was recruited by the high-flying computer gaming company to be its chief scientist. He was in charge of Atari’s lavish new lab, and virtual reality was one of the main avenues of research. Unlike Xerox PARC, however, Atari Research never amounted to much. It was devoted to research, not development—R, not D—and just that one letter, that D, made all the difference.

  Alan Kay: Things were not good at PARC in 1980. And somebody I knew said, “Well, as long as you are looking around, why don’t you go down and talk to Ray Kassar at Atari?”

  Al Alcorn: Ray Kassar was running Atari, and he would have the staff meeting just for the old-timers—me and a few others. We called it “the limp dick society” because we knew it was just to keep us amused. I left in 1981. So to replace me they hired the best R&D man in the world, Alan Kay.

  Alan Kay: That year Atari’s gross just by itself was $3.2 billion, and that was several hundred thousand dollars more than the entire movie industry in Hollywood. So at that time Atari was bigger than all of Hollywood: They had money coming out of their ears!

  Chris Caen: It’s funny. Now everyone talks about Apple, but people don’t remember how big and pervasive Atari was. At one point Atari was twenty-seven buildings in six cities. You could almost trace the outline of Silicon Valley by connecting the dots. We used to call Highway 101 “Via Atari” because you’d be driving to meetings up and down 101, and all around you there are cars with Atari parking stickers. It was that first magical wave of Silicon Valley.

  Michael Naimark: The company was just rocking and rolling.

  Alan Kay: They used to send the corporate jet up the coast to get shrimp for the executive dining room, and the joke was you could tell how Atari was doing by the size of the shrimp in the executive dining room.

  Michael Naimark: Jokes about garbage bags full of jumbo shrimp the size of lobsters.

  Alan Kay: Ray offered me a job and the bribe was a huge budget.

  Al Miller: We had heard rumors that they were spending $100 million a year on R&D, which I don’t doubt.

  David Levitt: Alan Kay was one of my big mentors, and suddenly Alan was chief scientist of Atari, this billion-dollar company that came out of nowhere.

  Howard Rheingold: At Xerox PARC, Alan Kay had sort of been the kid to Bob Taylor, and now Atari was sort of the next generation. Alan Kay was the adult supervision there.

  Alan Kay: My first act as chief scientist was to hire pretty much all of Nicholas Negroponte’s graduate students from MIT. Because what Atari needed was something more like what Nicholas had been doing. And God, he had a great bunch.

  Scott Fisher: I was working with Nicholas Negroponte, and Alan showed up at the Architecture Machine Group with a bunch of the Warner execs in tow. Basically they came to buy the lab. And Nicholas, of course, in his inimitable way was interested in that amount of money, but I think in the end he said, “This is MIT. You cannot buy the lab.” So we were disappointed. But then Alan came back a little bit later and made offers to six or seven of us to come out to Sunnyvale and work for Atari. For me that was a hard choice, because so many fun things were happening with Nicholas.

  Jaron Lanier: This was all wrapped up in the founding of the MIT Media Lab, which was essentially all the same people and which was getting going at the same time, although the Media Lab hadn’t quite started yet.

  Michael Naimark: All of a sudden by the fall of 1982 Alan had a critical mass, this amazing group of people. And I think we had a half-dozen key projects at the time.

  Alan Kay: We did a bunch of things: virtual reality, communication… I mean Atari was basically a consumer electronics company, so my thought was that what we wanted to do was develop media.

  Tom Zimmerman: Atari Research was close to paradise for an inventor. I was doing research on music, electronic music. The idea was to do a voice-controlled synthesizer, so you could hum into it and it would play any instrument. You could play a violin, trumpet, flute, just by humming. Very ambitious!

  David Levitt: Media, music, artificial intelligence, all the things that we knew were going to be part of Atari’s future.

  Scott Fisher: Atari Research was meant to be a kind of resource for the whole company, all the operating divisions. And all these crazies that Alan hired that would then go get farmed out to work with different groups.

  Michael Naimark: I hung out with the coin-op guys partly because they were doing optical video disc stuff, because we had done a lot of that at MIT, of course—just trying to get those into the arcade games they were building. So that was fun.

  Brenda Laurel: It was me and a bunch of MIT kids and the most fun thing we did was we started writing memos in the voice of a guy named Dr. Arthur Fischell, also known as Artie Fischell.

  Artie Fischell: Dr. Arthur Fischell is artificial. Get it?

  Brenda Laurel: We actually made this guy up. We were a collective of people personifying this guy, who we claimed was the new director of the lab because Alan wasn’t around a lot.

  Michael Naimark: Alan, as chief scientist, was the head not only of Atari Sunnyvale Research Lab but Atari Cambridge Lab, which was next door to MIT in Tech Square. And the folks at the Cambridge Lab were mostly young artificial intelligence PhDs—and Jaron Lanier, t
he VR guy with the dreadlocks.

  Jaron Lanier: Kay was spending most of his time at the lab in Cambridge.

  Scott Fisher: I think this idea of having this additional member of Atari Research that was completely made up was mostly Brenda’s idea, but it caught fire quite quickly.

  Michael Naimark: Artie Fischell was something that we tried our best to have as our little secret from the rest of Atari. We wanted to see how far we could push things.

  Brenda Laurel: We got him an employee number, an office.

  Scott Fisher: He could get snail mail there. And we got to a point where Arthur had an e-mail account.

  Michael Naimark: And a subset of Atari Research, not everybody, had his e-mail password to log in as him.

  Kristina Woolsey: Realize that e-mail was somewhat new at the time. And we used it in the lab very fancifully.

  Brenda Laurel: I mean memos were going around on e-mail and people were sending memos back to him, and I think he had a part-time secretary.

  Scott Fisher: To get him to participate remotely in lab meetings, we had a pitch-shifting speech device so that we could take turns and always have kind of the same voice.

  Brenda Laurel: I did his voice on the phone with an Eventide Harmonizer to lower it in real time. He had a British accent.

  Michael Naimark: So he developed a personality as being this older, worldly guy.

  Brenda Laurel: He had a whole family, a whole backstory. He had worked for the British Postal Service, he invented squid jerky, things like that.

  Scott Fisher: Just seeing how far we could go in getting him into the physical world was a great challenge.

  Michael Naimark: Eric Hulteen had submitted a purchase request under Artie Fischell’s name for a Saturn V booster rocket.

  Brenda Laurel: Alan added “a pack of gum” and signed it. So this is going through the system and I swear to God, these facilities guys show up and say, “Well, how are you going to launch this thing?” “How much space do you need?”