Conspicuous among those heroes was Alan Kay, who Brand introduced as something of a hacker eminence offering his own definition of "the standard Computer Bum": "He's someone about as straight as you'd expect hot-rodders to look. It's that kind of fanaticism. A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship. . . . They're kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals." Kay's assessment of the computer scientist's professional mores could not have been better designed to raise hackles in the Stamford executive suite. "People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all," he observed, "and you have plenty of time for screwing around."
There was much in what he said, and much of himself. The hackers he evoked were the kind of independent souls more easily found on the university campuses where he had spent much of his life than in traditional corporate headquarters, which did not figure in "Spacewar" except as the enemy lair.
Kays idiosyncratic techno-romanticism colored Brand's entire piece. His heartfelt view of the computer as a tool for at once simplifying and enriching human life came through unambiguously in his breezy apotheosis of the hacker as gamester-king.
In terms of PARC's internal and external politics, however, Taylor's depiction in the article was bound to reverberate even more. He and his happy band of ex-ARPA warriors came across as if they owned the place, or at least as though there was nothing much more to PARC than their work. They talked as if they had won the battle for the computer's future and were already writing its history.
Brand described PARC's scientists as aggies in a game of marbles and Taylor as the center's "chief marble collector" (which was accurate enough, for the moment). Asked about his job title, Taylor got cagey: "It's not very sharply defined. You could call me a research planner."
But there was no need for him to be more specific. When Brand described the lab's "general bent of research" as "soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it," there was no mistaking whose philosophy was being articulated. As for the duly appointed director of CSL, Jerry Elkind merited not a single mention in "Spacewar," an ominous token of his tenuous authority.
"Spacewar" delighted PARC's computer scientists, particularly the younger set fresh out of graduate school. And why not? They had welcomed Brand, fed his notebook with their ambitions, and sat docilely for Rolling Stone's glamorous photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was taking a sort of sabbatical from her usual fare of movie and rock stars to get the architects of the future down on film.
But their attitude came as a disagreeable shock to the company. Xerox's enormous bureaucracy served a customer base that was the very definition of huge, centralized, and impersonal. It manufactured big machines whose output got measured by the millions of pages. Stamford's planners no more anticipated placing computing power in individual hands than they would think of installing a copier at every secretary's desk.
If the computer scientists of PARC had intended to throw down a challenge to those who paid their salaries, they could scarcely have chosen a more provocative way to do so. Xerox had once been a small, scrappy, risk-taking company, but the long years of monopoly had driven that sort of passion clear out of the corridors of power. What had replaced it by 1972 was the sober mentality of professional finance and sales management. There was no room for the unexpected, especially where the corporate image was concerned. Headquarters employed platoons of professional image-polishers to protect the corporation against exactly this sort of ambush. The rules were explicit: No employee, from the chief executive down to the lowliest mailroom clerk, could talk to the press without a PR minder in tow. The communications department ruthlessly monitored all press coverage, issuing stern correctives to newspapers or magazines that erred on so much as an executive title.
Yet here was its new multi-million-dollar research center spread out for unsupervised public view in a ratty rock music magazine, with actual Xerox scientists photographed in their T-shirts and jeans, barefooted, lounging self-indulgently in beanbag chairs. In the light of the times and in the context of Rolling Stone's usual fare, corporate executives could only conclude from their insular perch in Stamford that PARC was reeling out of control, shamelessly squandering the research facility's budget on adolescent techno-fantasy trips rather than solid, marketable scientific pursuits. This was symbolized by Pake's (inaccurate) recollection years later that the Rolling Stone article "flat out stat[ed] that a lot of these guys were brilliant druggies. [That] wasn't the kind of publicity the corporation wanted."
In fact, the article neither stated nor even remotely implied anything about drug use at PARC. Brand was no Ken Kesey chronicling the escapades of a merry band of stoned-out party guys but a self-styled social theorist interpreting the new technologies against the era's political backdrop. Nevertheless, for the stolid traditionalists who inhabited Xerox headquarters "Spacewar's" text and pictures inescapably evoked lax morals and California hippiedom.
Pake was anguished about "Spacewar" because more than almost anyone else at the research center, he was intensely aware of PARC's shaky standing at headquarters. It had been scarcely a year since John Bardeen had saved the center from extinction. PARC had yet to turn out a product of indisputable value; nor had it garnered the Bell Labs-like renown that would have been proof against further attack. (The notoriety of an article in Rolling Stone would hardly fill that void.) But at least he was insulated by distance from the worst of the shock waves. The same could not be said about Jack Goldman, who was stuck on the East Coast to weather the storm. Murmurs of reproach lurked around eveiy corner on the executive floor: For these slobs you cadged a 20 percent pay differential? More ominously, he was getting blamed for a serious breach of security.
At first Goldman tried to deflect the criticism by arguing that on balance the portrait of PARC was a positive one and that Rolling Stone, alien as it was to the indignant mandarins of Stamford, had an undeniable appeal to the population from which PARC drew its best recruits. "It's probably indicative of the culture that was prevalent at PARC that they looked up to Rolling Stone as a proper vehicle for their community," he said later. "It was their peer group who would read about what's going on there." But this argument, he acknowledged, unsurprisingly failed to sway "the white-shoe legal types, who looked at Rolling Stone as something to be disdained." There was no use arguing that more than half of "Spacewar" dealt with Bay Area labs other than PARC (where "Spacewar" the game was in fact seldom played). The piece would be forever remembered as the one that introduced PARC to the world in an entirely undignified light.
In the end Goldman had no choice but to make a show of reining in PARC's free spirits. Accompanied by a corporate lawyer, he flew out to read the riot act to his pet researchers, paying special attention to those unwise enough to have allowed themselves to be directly quoted, Taylor and Kay.
"I recall almost a sadness on Jack Goldman's part," recalled David Thornburg. "Here we were operating in a very free environment, and somehow there was a sense that a trust had been violated. It was made crystal clear to us that this was not all right. If it happened again, the lab was going to be shut down."
Within weeks the consequences became concrete. The inmates- running-the-asylum democracy that had prevailed since the founding, particularly on the computer science side, was ended. All employees were issued identification badges and instructed to keep them displayed at all times. The building entrances were outfitted with security stations, where visitors were stopped and handed a nondisclosure pledge to sign. (Quirkily enough, the pledge attested that the visitor would not "import" any of his or her ideas into PARC, a departure from customary agreements, which bar visitors from carrying proprietary information out of the lab. In any case, the goal was to protect Xerox from a claim that PARC had misappropriated someone else's ideas, and it was sti
ll in use as of this writing.)
Xerox also clamped down hard on PARC's contacts with the media, especially the popular press. Although publication in peer-reviewed technical journals was allowed to continue, the articles were closely vetted by corporate examiners newly aware that there might be developments at PARC worth safeguarding.
A few people tried to make light of the new arrangements. Badges got blown up into T-shirt imprints, so they could be more fashionably worn. One employee turned his into a belt buckle. If the guards and receptionists noted that the ID photographs on others had been artfully pasted over with the heads of Mickey Mouse or the face of George Washington cut from a dollar bill, they never said so.
But the atmosphere at CSL and SSL subtly and permanently changed. In a sense the Rolling Stone flap catalyzed a process that was bound to take place anyway. With MAXC behind them and the computer labs' head counts approaching critical mass, it was time to recognize that their work was too innovative and important to be any longer the grist of carefree gossip. It was time for them to abandon the childishness of prodigies. They were engaged in a greater quest.
At the same time, however, "Spacewar" carried the seed of the
PARC mystique farther beyond its boundaries than ever before. Before its publication the centers fame extended only to the limits of an insular circle of computer pros. Then came Alan Kay, sharing with Stewart Brand’s hip and impressionable readers his assessment of his colleagues as "really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity. The people here all are used to dealing lightning with both hands."
These were bold words when Kay uttered them to Brand in the fall of 1972. Once PARC unveiled its newest machine a few short months later, they would sound like an understatement.
CHAPTER 12
Thacker's Bet
The race to build the Alto began one beautiful day in September when Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson showed up at Alan Kay's office door.
"Alan," they said, "do you have any money?"
"Sure," he replied. "I've got about $230,000 in my budget. Why?"
"How would you like us to use it to build your little machine?"
"I'd like it fine," Kay replied. "But what's the hurry?"
"Well, we were going to do it anyway," Lampson replied. "But Chuck's just made a bet that he can design a whole machine in just three months."
For Kay, the appearance of his two colleagues from down the hall marked the end of a long, difficult summer.
The year had started with a glimmer of optimism. Kay had the feeling he might finally be within striking distance of turning some of his great ideas into reality. He had reworked his Dynabook concept into something he called "miniCom," a keyboard, screen, and processor bundled into a portable, suitcase-sized package. Meanwhile, the software aces he had brought together as PARC's Learning Research Group had turned his outline for a simplified programming language into real code, to which he gave the characteristically puckish name "Smalltalk." (Most programming systems "were named Zeus, Odin, and Thor and hardly did anything," he explained. "I figured that 'Smalltalk' was so innocuous a label that if it ever did anything nice people would be pleasantly surprised.")
Kay's team had already demonstrated Smalltalk's implicit power by running rudimentary but dazzling programs of computer-generated graphics and animation on a video display system built by Bill English's design group. Kay himself was a compulsive promoter, producing a steady stream of articles and conference abstracts, often illustrated with his own hand drawings of children in bucolic settings playing with their Dynabook, to proclaim the death of the mainframe and the advent of the "personal computer."
By the spring of 1972 he was ready for the next step. Having drawn on Seymour Papert's LOGO for some of Smalltalk's basic ideas (although the two languages worked much differently under the surface), Kay was anxious to give it a Papert-style test ran. That meant giving children, its idealized subjects, a shot at performing simple programming tasks on miniComs. He figured he would need about thirty of the small machines, to be built by the Computer Science Lab's crack hardware engineers.
The only thing left to do was persuade CSL to take the job.
That May at a CSL lab meeting, Kay made his pitch. As the lab staff lounged in front of him in their beanbag chairs, he laid out the argument for building the world's first personal computer. He understood this would mean pushing the envelope on display technology—the smallest screens used at PARC were still the size of household television sets, although systems in which digital bits controlled "pixels," or dots on the display screen, had been tested by numerous researchers in the building. They would have to spend thousands of dollars on semiconductor memory to drive the miniCom's high-performance graphical display, but they all knew the price was destined to fall sharply. In fact, there was hardly anything in the blueprint that would not be commercially accessible to the average user widiin ten years. And wasn't that why they were here— to build the most capable system they could imagine, so far ahead of the curve that they could figure out what to do with it by the time the rest of the world caught up?
"We know everything," he told his audience. "We know exactly how big the pixels are, we know how many pixels we can get by with, we know how much computing power we need. The uses for a personal gadget as an editor, reader, take-home context, and intelligent terminal are fairly obvious. Now lets build thirty of these things so we can get on with it." He regained his seat, confident as always of having made an incontestable case.
Then Jerry Elkind took the floor.
At CSL Elkind held the purse strings. No large-scale hardware project like Kays could be undertaken without his say-so. But Jerry Elkind and Alan Kay were like creatures from different planets, one an austere by- the-numbers engineer and the other a brash philosophical freebooter. Let others have stars in their eyes—Elkind was not the type to be beguiled by Kay’s romantic glow. As a manager he responded to rationales on paper and rigorous questions asked and answered, not hazy visions of children toying with computers on grassy meadows. He was a tough customer, demanding and abrasive. He asked too many questions and, mores the pity, they were often good ones. As Jim Mitchell once remarked, "Jerry Elkind knows enough to be dangerous."
At this moment he pronounced the words that most CSL engineers had learned to dread as his lass of death.
"Let me play devil's advocate," he said.
He proceeded to pick apart Kay's proposal in pitiless detail. The technology was speculative and untested, he pointed out. To the extent that the miniCom was geared toward child's play, it fell outside PARC's mandate to create the office system of the future. To the extent that it fell within that mandate, it was on entirely the wrong vector.
Perhaps Kay had not noticed, but PARC had not yet finished exhausting the possibilities of time-sharing. That was the whole point of building MAXC, which was after all a time-sharing minicomputer. As Kay recalled later, the sting still fresh: "He essentially said that we had used too many Green Stamps getting Xerox to fund the time- shared MAXC, and this use of resources for personal machines would confuse them."
And what about the issue of PARC's overall deployment of resources, Elkind asked. A major office computer program was already well under way in Kay's own lab. Had Kay given any thought to how his project might fit in with that one?
Elkind was referring to POLOS, the so-called "PARC On-line Office System," which was Bill English's attempt to reproduce the Engelbart system on a large network of commercial minicomputers known as Nova 800s. He was correct in stating that POLOS ranked as PARC's official entry in the architecture-of-information race. This was so in part because English had cannily put a stake in the ground with a round of purchase orders for the Novas, which committed Xerox to following through. The small, versatile machines were already proliferating at SSL like refrigerator-sized Star Wars droids.
But Kay considered POLOS irrelevant to his project. POLOS was explicitly a big-
system prototype, an expensive luxury model as far removed from the homey, individualistic package Kay had in mind as a Lincoln Town Car is from a two-seat runabout. But under Elkind's condescending assault Kay's customary fluency deserted him. He sat mute while Elkind patronizingly dismissed his life's work as a quixotic dream.
"I was shocked," he said later. "I crawled away." Once outside the room and beyond the hearing of his audience, he succumbed to his ordeal and broke down in tears.
A few days later, back in the Systems Science Lab, Kay sought out Bill English. To the extent Elkind thought of English and Kay as rivals for PARC resources, he was mistaken. In truth, English had become something of a father figure for Kay, whose academic training at Utah had left him with the impression that one acquired research funds simply by calling up ARPA and asking for money. Shortly after they both arrived at PARC, English had taken it upon himself to introduce Kay to such elementary corporate concepts as research budgets. ("I'm afraid I really did ask Bill, What's a budget?'" Kay recalled of the first lesson English ever gave him.)
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