Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Bill Atkinson: Apple management didn’t want it to air. They ordered Steve to sell the time back.

  Lee Clow: So we sold off all the time except for one sixty-second window during the Super Bowl which, not by accident, we didn’t sell.

  Mike Murray: So Steve talks to the board and the board says, “Well, then we will run an Apple II spot.” So they went to the vault and looked at them but none of them were relevant. So reluctantly they said, “All right, run it.” And it was shown on the Super Bowl.

  Steve Wozniak: And there’s Big Brother on the television saying, “Everybody has to think the same.”

  Big Brother (lecturing the skinheads): Today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!

  Andy Hertzfeld: It was clearly an allegory. Most commercials aren’t allegorical.

  Steve Wozniak: You know, kind of like IBM World: “Everybody has to have the identical thought. Contrary thoughts will not be tolerated.” And then the young track lady with the red outfit throws a hammer at Big Brother on the big screen and it explodes and everybody’s just gasping: A new world is coming… Oh my God, that was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen! An incredible piece of science fiction!

  Ridley Scott: We nailed it.

  Bill Atkinson: It won a Cleo.

  Mike Murray: The following night on ABC, CBS, and NBC—those were the three networks then—it was shown as news. Not as advertising, not as PR. It’s Dan Rather and Peter Jennings saying, “Apple Computer has introduced a new computer called the Macintosh.” And they showed this outrageous ad and they would show it in its entirety.

  The Macintosh itself debuts a couple days later at the Flint Center on De Anza Junior College campus in Cupertino. Jobs is the emcee. But before the big reveal, he delivers a short Valley-centric history lesson.

  John Markoff: There had been leaks ahead of the Macintosh for years—literally—and so there had been tremendous buildup. There was the failure of the Lisa. Already the connection between the work at Xerox PARC and Apple technology was well known, so there was this expectation that this was the future of computing. All of that was palpable.

  Steve Jobs (from the stage): It’s 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has just invented a new technology—called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later: the late sixties. Digital Equipment Corporation and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as “too small to do serious computing,” and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market. It is now ten years later: the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast, introduces the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as “too small to do serious computing,” and therefore unimportant to their business.

  Randy Wigginton: Steve loved to point out how other people screwed up, and how he’s amazing and stuff.

  Steve Jobs (from the stage): The early nineteen eighties—1981—Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer, and Apple has grown to a three-hundred-million-dollar corporation, becoming the fastest-growing company in American business history. With over fifty companies vying for a share, IBM enters the personal computer market in November of 1981 with the IBM PC. It is now 1984. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?

  Randy Wigginton: The Mac group had the first three rows of the auditorium to sit in, and we were eating it up.

  Bruce Horn: We really did think that this was going to liberate people from the tyranny of Big Computing.

  Randy Wigginton: Like, “Here we are. We are freedom fighters, the Empire is about to win, the Death Star has moved into position, and we are the only ones there that can save the planet.”

  Steve Wozniak: The Macintosh was going to lead to big problems later on, but he convinced us all. I believed it was the future. John Sculley believed it. Steve convinced us all, and we believed it.

  Randy Wigginton: We actually believed it!

  Yukari Kane: Looking back, there’s definitely an irony there. Apple is now an empire—the most valuable company in the world—and once you become an empire, you are the establishment.

  Steve Jobs (from the stage): There have only been two milestone products in our industry: the Apple II in 1977, and the IBM PC in 1981. Today—one year after Lisa—we are introducing the third industry milestone product: Macintosh. Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now—and it has turned out insanely great!

  For his finale, Jobs pulls the Macintosh out of a bag, plugs it in, turns it on—and walks away so that Macintosh can “introduce itself” while sitting unattended on the podium at center stage.

  John Markoff: Macintosh spoke when it came out of that bag.

  The Macintosh computer (from the stage): Hello, I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you can’t lift!

  Steve Jobs: When it was introduced, after we went through it all and had the computer speak to people itself and things like that, the whole auditorium of twenty-five hundred people gave it a standing ovation and the whole first few rows of Mac folks were all just crying.

  Randy Wigginton: It was Steve at his finest. It was amazingly choreographed. It was a show to beat all shows.

  Andy Cunningham: It was a hugely successful launch: I think it got more publicity than any launch that has occurred before or since, so it obviously worked.

  John Markoff: Macintosh was Steve’s marketing sensibilities coming into full flower. It was orchestrated in a way that he would later routinize—the onstage presentation format, the dramatic unveil, the “secret,” and all of that. Everybody is still playing the same script that Steve invented, basically.

  Mike Murray: So then the next board meeting, three weeks later, they summon the Mac senior team and when we all go into the boardroom they stand up and clap.

  Bill Atkinson: And so, one of the biggest differences when the Mac finally shipped is it was the first computer that people really fell in love with. People actually would say, “Gosh, I want one of those. How can I justify it to my spouse?”

  Jaron Lanier: I remember bringing one to MIT: “Look, there’s a Xerox PARC machine that you’re actually going to be able to buy in the store!” And they were like, “Wow!”

  Fumbling the Future

  Who blew it: Xerox PARC—or Steve Jobs?

  Tasked with building “the office of the future,” the scientists and engineers at Xerox PARC churned out a slew of ideas—most of which ended up in another company’s computers. Nineteen eighty-four’s Macintosh was PARC’s Alto, watered down and reimagined as a consumer product for the computing masses. That fact pretty much everyone can agree on, but in Silicon Valley the ultimate significance of this technology transfer is still a matter of debate. Was Apple’s visit to PARC the Promethean moment, where Steve Jobs stole the graphical user interface from Mount Olympus in order to give it to us mere mortals? Or is that oft-told story just Valley hokum and mythmaking—and furthermore, fundamentally backward? To hear the story as told by some who were actually there, Jobs wasn’t astute enough to recognize what PARC had actually invented. And thus he stole the wrong thing. The Macintosh copied th
e Alto’s look and feel, but none of its deep structure. In this telling, it was Steve Jobs himself who fumbled the future, because if Jobs had truly understood PARC’s fundamental breakthrough—and had kidnapped that, too—then we really, truly, could have had the power of a Prometheus.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Okay, so what did Xerox do?

  Chuck Thacker: Xerox was doing pretty well in the copier business—they had this big fat cash cow that they could just milk—and these upstarts come in…

  Alvy Ray Smith: They just could not believe that people who looked like us could have business ideas.

  Dick Shoup: I looked like a complete homeless hippie person.

  Chuck Thacker: They had no idea what they had.

  Bob Taylor: Most of the stuff that people use today when they use a computer—windows, a bitmap display, Ethernet, electronic mail, servers of all kinds, distributed computing architecture…

  Alvy Ray Smith:… and color graphics and the windows-based UI and all of that, and then the laser printer—I mean it was just all happening: the personal computer was being invented!

  Bob Taylor: All that stuff was invented by PARC.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Here they had the gift. The computer was theirs and they could have been the computer company of the world.

  Steve Jobs: They could have owned the computer industry. It could have been the IBM of the nineties. It could have been the Microsoft of the nineties!

  Trip Hawkins: It’s one of the greatest examples of disruption in history: how badly they blew it, how far ahead they were, what they could have had, how easily they could have had it ten years before anybody else, and how they kept blowing it over and over, even when they had plenty of time to catch up. It was pretty bad.

  Alvy Ray Smith: They had everything and they kissed it off and everybody cried. All the supposedly hard-core scientists like Alan Kay and Dick Shoup? These guys literally cried when they heard that Xerox corporate was kissing off the computer.

  Alan Kay: Businesspeople should be shot. They always say, “We are in business to make money.” And I say, “Well, not really, you just want to make a few million or billion.” But the return from PARC is about thirty-five trillion! Count those extra zeros and tell me what they are really doing. They are just trying to be comfortable.

  Alvy Ray Smith: And when I was a Young Turk that’s what I thought, too. They really blew it.

  Alan Kay: The whole thing was just a complete bust, but the urban legend about Xerox not making money is completely false. Xerox made billions on the laser printer. They paid for PARC several hundred times over. They just missed everything else.

  Alvy Ray Smith: They kissed off everything except the laser printer. The only thing they kept out of all of that was what they absolutely knew really well, and that was the laser printer.

  Chuck Thacker: Because Xerox wasn’t a computer company!

  Alvy Ray Smith: What you say in business these days is they “stuck to their core competency.” Their core competency was black-and-white, ink on paper, right? That’s what they did.

  Alan Kay: They just were so brain-dead and so unable to understand anything about any process that was not simple business.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Did they make a mistake? From a corporate point of view probably not. After having started two companies myself and having had all the Young Turks come to me and say, “Alvy, we should do this, this, this, and this,” it becomes quickly evident that you can’t do every bright idea that comes down the pike. You just can’t. You have to prune the tree. And your job as management is to prune the tree and stick to what you know. I still think they blew it, though.

  Bob Taylor: It’s pretty clear that Xerox fumbled the future.

  Butler Lampson: But the “fumbled the future” idea is quite misleading. Obviously it’s true that Xerox developed all this technology and the only real benefit of that was the computer printer. But in fact they made a huge effort to commercialize it in the form of the Star system. They set up an independent division, a so-called System Development Division. They had a very good engineering team, and this engineering team had a vision of what it was that they wanted to build.

  Chuck Thacker: The Star was the beginning of the era of what I call scientific workstations because they were built for performance and much less so for cost.

  Butler Lampson: And they built it, much to my astonishment. They shipped the Star system in 1981 and it was better than anything you could buy from anybody else for at least a decade. The irony of this is that back at PARC there were people like Chuck and me who were saying to these guys, “This is too ambitious. It’s going to cost too much. You should build something much more like the Alto.” But they didn’t do that.

  Charles Simonyi: At the time, I was working at Star basically out of necessity, and I was very frustrated, I saw biggerism.

  Chuck Thacker: Biggerism—I think I coined that word. It grew out of an observation that had been made by Fred Brooks in his book The Mythical Man-Month. One of the things Fred pointed out is that the second system is the hardest one. When you’re building your first system you’re very careful because you’ve never done it before, and you use well-understood engineering principles, and if you get it right and you are successful and then you feel great and you’re willing to tackle something that’s much bigger, and that’s where the danger comes. This goes under the mantle of “the second system syndrome”—that’s what Fred called it. But it’s also exemplified in something called Myhrvold’s First Law of Software which is that “software expands to fill the available space—it’s like a gas.”

  Charles Simonyi: Star was biggered to an unbelievable extent.

  Chuck Thacker: It was a biggered version of the Alto.

  Bob Taylor: The Star was designed to be not just a computer but a complete system, and it was very expensive because it had many components—printers, Ethernet, computers.

  Adele Goldberg: Minimum buy was four Star workstations on a network with a printer and separate storage—you shared storage.

  Bob Taylor: And it sort of out-designed itself in a way. Its abilities could not live up to the ambitions, so it fell short. It was too slow, it cost too much.

  Charles Simonyi: The Star was not going to work. We were not going to win.

  Chuck Thacker: So Simonyi went to Microsoft.

  Charles Simonyi: In February of ’81 I drove my car up to Seattle and started working right away.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Years later I was at Microsoft and I met up with Simonyi. He took me over to his mansion there on Billionaires’ Row on Lake Washington. I said, “How did you happen to leave?” He says, “You guys thought that you were at the center of the universe, didn’t you?” I went, “Yeah.” He said, “If you had met this kid Bill Gates and talked to him and heard his vision like I did… I realized you guys are not the center of the universe. This kid is.” He left and went with Bill.

  Adele Goldberg: Back at PARC we wrote a detailed proposal for a machine we called the Twinkle, the “little Star.” And we told them that they could have product out in a year if they were willing to go with a 68000-based implementation of Smalltalk running a simple text editor and painting program with the mouse interface and some tutorials for how to do all that and hooked it up to printing. We pretty much had the prototypes done. It needed to be productized. And it could have been out in ’83. We worked hard on that. And we sent that to office systems group and we never heard anything back, not a thing.

  Bob Taylor: Xerox could have reengineered the Alto to make a better machine than the Macintosh, I believe, but they chose not to do that. They did not make another run at the fence.

  Adele Goldberg: And then in ’84 out comes the Twinkle but they called it a Macintosh. We all had the same idea. So we looked at it and we thought, Too bad. We could have done that. We would’ve had that out.

  Bob Taylor: Remember Apple failed with the Lisa. Lisa was their first attempt.

  Butler Lampson: Lisa had exactly the same properties as the Star s
ystem, and it failed for exactly the same reason.

  Bob Taylor: And so Xerox looked at that and said, “We’re done.”

  Butler Lampson: But Apple had a second go-around with the Mac. With a lot of pruning as well as the advantage of three-years-later technology, they were able to make something that was in many ways quite similar to the Alto.

  Bob Taylor: Computers previous to the Mac I would regard as toys. But I don’t regard the Mac as a toy. It was just a very weak manifestation of an Alto. Very weak. I mean it fell far short of the Alto in every respect, except cost.

  Alan Kay: When I got to Apple I wrote a memo; the title was “Have I Got a Deal for You: A Honda with a One-Quart Gas Tank.” The first line of it was, “Looks great in your driveway but don’t try to go down to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.” And went on from there. It was short. It was like two or three pages. It was pointing out, “Hey, what the fuck are you guys doing?”

  Andy Hertzfeld: Everyone knew what he meant. The main thing he was referring to was RAM. And we knew it didn’t have enough RAM. It was just completely a technological compromise.

  Dan Kottke: RAM was just very expensive in those days, and we’re talking about an all-graphic screen—it’s all RAM you’re looking at there, so it’s very expensive.

  Bruce Horn: The Mac was simply not big enough to do any sort of object-oriented programming system. Basically if you look at a Mac and you look at Smalltalk, you have a mouse, you have overlapping windows. In the Mac you had pulldown menus and you have modeless text editing. Other than that there’s no Smalltalk. It’s not programmed in Smalltalk. It didn’t use Smalltalk concepts under the hood. So there was basically no Smalltalk or any Smalltalk concepts whatsoever inside of the Mac.

  Alan Kay: So you wound up with something that was skin-deep compared to what the PARC thing was but that had lost the soul of everything being accessible, everything being malleable and so forth, and we never got it back. And that messed things up forever. That messed things up to today.