Once it was running, however, it made believers out of skeptics. Not the least important of these was Jerry Elkind.
Elkind had returned to PARC from his task force assignment in the late fall. Already uneasy at the necessity of reasserting his authority following a nearly six-month absence, he was even more put out to find that a full-scale skunk works had been launched behind his back to pursue a project whose value he questioned.
One peek into the basement workshop of Building 34 told him it might be too late to do much about it. Clearly the Alto had taken on a life of its own. But he also thought the important issues he had raised with Lampson, Thacker, and Kay remained unaddressed.
"Are we going to invest a major hunk of the lab's resources and a lot of money in developing five or six prototypes of something we're not sure will work?" he asked. For all that Thacker and Lampson assured him the finished product would be the epitome of cool, a glance at the schematics failed to ease his concerns—especially after he noticed the huge proportion of memory that would be devoted to maintaining the display.
"I don't think I had the skills to appreciate what could be done with it without seeing it work," he said later. "I certainly had questions about what the end result was going to cost and how many we could afford." He instructed Lampson to give him some answers, in writing.
Lampson's response was a December 19 memo entitled simply "Why Alto." In three and a half sharply reasoned pages he furnished the project all the technical and philosophical justification it would ever need. While acknowledging that some of the "original motivation" for the Alto came from Alan Kay, an SSL engineer, he also portrayed it as a machine of tantalizing potential for everyone in the Computer Science Lab. The Alto would be capable of performing almost any computation a PDP-10 (that is, MAXC) could do. It would be more powerful than the video terminal system Bill English was designing for POLOS, with better graphics. It would run all the office system software being written in various labs at PARC with power to spare. And it would render the costly Novas obsolete.
Lampson pointed out that at $10,500 per machine the Altos would cost barely half what PARC had spent per CSL member in building MAXC. (With a full complement of memory, as it turned out, the first few Altos cost closer to $18,000. After the original design was reengineered for efficiency and a high-volume manufacturing program was put in place, however, that dropped down to about $12,000.) Lampson considered himself on firm ground in stating that the machine would be cheap enough to enable PARC to afford one for every member of the lab.
"If our theories about the utility of cheap, powerful personal computers are correct," he concluded, "we should be able to demonstrate them convincingly on Alto. If they are wrong, we can find out why."
By early April the first prototype was ready to start computing. Thacker and McCreight together had worked out the priority by which sixteen essential computing tasks would contend for the processor's attention. This basically involved determining how quickly each task had to be completed before it failed, and how important it was for the rest of the machine. Transferring data between the disk and the memory was particularly critical, for instance, because without data in memory nothing else would work. Therefore disk operations earned the highest priority. Next came the display (actually three tasks—one to refresh the horizontal scan, one for the vertical, and a third to transfer display data into and out of memory). Any untoward delay here would mean rendering the screen unintelligible. Farther down the list came monitoring the local network (the Ethernet, being invented concurrently down the hall by Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs) and running the Alto's basic program, a variant of the Nova's.
Thacker and McCreight were so pleased with their task-switching scheme they started preparing a patent application, at which point they discovered to their great embarrassment that someone had got there first. The bearer of this jarring news was Wes Clark, who was the pioneer in question. Trim and lantern-jawed as ever, Clark served as senior consultant to the Computer Science Lab. During one of his regular consulting visits he had learned of the patent proposal. One day thereafter he showed up in the Alto workshop.
"This Alto stuff is pretty interesting," he observed, deadpan. "I wonder if, in a few words, you could say what the relationship is to the TX-2 and in particular to the task structure of the TX-2?"
Neither Thacker nor McCreight knew much about Clark's trailblazing thirteen-year-old machine. They looked at each other, perplexed.
"Well, ah, well, ah," McCreight stammered out, "not very well."
"Well, as it happens I have some copies of the TX-2 documentation here I could leave with you," Clark said. "Why don't I just come back and ask the question later?"
That night they pored over the papers in a state of shock. Clark's TX-2, they recognized, had used almost exactly the same task-priority scheme as the Alto.
The next day Clark returned to find the two engineers profoundly ashamed at not having read the literature earlier.
"Wes," said McCreight, "my only excuse is I was in the eighth grade at the time."
The first two prototype Altos took shape in the basement workshop of Building 34. They came into the world naked and blind, as helpless as hatchlings, for the hardware had been built so quickly that the software to run it was still months from completion and its essential programs had to be bootstrapped in from the nearest Nova.
Any semblance of helplessness dissolved, however, the moment the screen lit up. The sight of black letters, figures, and symbols displayed in sharp relief against its glowing white background burned itself instandy into one's consciousness. No one doubted that the Alto marked the omega to every thread of computer science that had come before and the alpha of a dazzling new world; and no one ever forgot the pure euphoria they felt the first time they saw an Alto running.
"It was like watching a baby waving its arms," recalled John Shoch. "Waving its arms as if to say, 'I'm alive! I'm alive!'"
CHAPTER 13
The Bobbsey Twins Build a Network
David Boggs was in his usual haunt—the basement workshop where he uncrated, assembled, and tested POLOS's newly ordered Novas—when he first laid eyes on the red-bearded stranger.
Burly and athletic, the man came down into the shop carrying a yellow reel of coaxial television cable like a fireman toting a length of hose. He sidestepped the piles of wood and particle board the Bose Conspiracy had piled up in a corner to build their fake 901’s; and manhandled the thousand-foot reel up to a workbench, on which he deposited an oscilloscope and a pulse generator. Then he started fumbling around with a soldering iron.
Boggs watched with curiosity. "I knew what he was doing," he said later. "He was going to be firing pulses down the cable and looking at the output through the scope." He also recognized, the way a horseman does a greenhorn who has never been in a saddle before, that this individual was no artist with a soldering iron.
Boggs, in contrast, had cut his teeth wiring ham radios while growing up in Washington, D.C., then had spent his college breaks wielding all manner of electrical implement to keep the local NBC television transmitter on the air. He padded over in his moccasins, his blond ponytail swinging to and fro, to offer the stranger a helping hand. It was the first time he and Bob Metcalfe would work together, but not the last. Over the next two years they would be so inseparable they would become known throughout PARC as the Bobbsey Twins.
Few would have cast them as plausible partners. Metcalfe hailed, as though at the top of his lungs, from Brooklyn and Long Island. He had graduated from Harvard and MIT—bitching every step of the way, to hear him tell it—with degrees in electrical engineering, business, and applied mathematics. Boggs was the quintessential introvert, an ascetic radiohead with an undergraduate degree from Princeton. Metcalfe was all sharp elbows, opinionated and confrontational, not above giving the caldron a stir if he did not sniff enough conflict in the air. Boggs kept to himself—in a conversation he spoke slowl
y and carefully, his eyes focused on the ground or off into space, as though scrupulously weighing every word.
Their aspirations appeared to be at odds, too. Metcalfe was embarked on a determined search for the main chance. (He would eventually leave PARC to start a multimillion-dollar networking company.) "The first time I ever heard the term 'venture capital,'" one colleague remembered, "I heard it from Bob Metcalfe." But Boggs always talked as though he would be content doing pure research all his life.
In sum, they seemed to have little in common beyond the Brooks Brothers button-down shirts they both favored (though Boggs preferred yellow and Metcalfe blue). They were the most eccentric partnership PARC ever knew, and the most productive. Working together in mysterious harmony they invented a new way for computers to talk to each other, the great digital party line known as Ethernet.
Brash and outspoken by nature, Metcalfe arrived in Palo Alto in June 1972 bearing a humiliating burden: Harvard had rejected his doctoral thesis.
This affront had capped a long and difficult relationship. Metcalfe had earned his dual bachelors degrees (electrical engineering and business) down the road at MIT. As a graduate school, he believed, Harvard could never measure up to Tech. "It's probably an idiosyncratic thing," he related acerbically years later. "But I hated Harvard. At MIT students got to do stuff and at Harvard they didn't. At MIT you learn by doing because you're an engineer. At Harvard they want you to be a scientist, and scientists would never soil themselves by doing things."
The difference had been driven home to him shortly after he started working part-time on the ARPANET. As an eager new grad student he offered to help Harvard get on the system by building the necessary interface between its PDP-10 and the IMP, one of the stand-alone machines that was every node's portal to the main network. This was not rocket science; he planned simply to duplicate the unit he had already built for MIT. But Harvard turned him down.
"They said, 'You're just a grad student, and we're going to have it done by a company named Bolt, Beranek & Newman,'" he recalled. "And BBN assigned the job to a part-time employee on their staff named Ben Barker, who turned out to be a grad student at Harvard, just like me."
But if the snub helped sour him on Harvard, it had no effect on his burgeoning enchantment with the ARPANET. Metcalfe was every bit as preoccupied as Bob Taylor with the idea of placing computers in direct digital conjunction. But he engaged in it at a level closer to the machine—he was less interested in what could be accomplished by linking computers than in how to actually move the bits from node to node. Finding new ways to make that happen would become his life's work.
While completing his studies at Harvard, he continued to work part- time on the ARPANET link at MIT. By 1972, when he was ready to take his doctorate, he was so securely bound into the ARPANET bureaucracy that he was chosen as a so-called "facilitator"—a sort of technical nursemaid who escorted IMPs to their new homes around the country to make sure they got properly hooked in and booted up. His connections made him a valuable property on the outside. "I was hot stuff because the ARPANET was hot stuff and ARPA was a major source of funding," he recalled. He spent that spring getting wined and dined by prospective employers, eventually landing nine job offers from supplicants that included BBN, Doug Engelbart, and a number of leading universities. The best offer—no surprise—came from Jerry Elkind and Bob Taylor at PARC. Not only was it the most money ($19,000, beating everyone else by several thousand dollars), "but it was the cleanest, most straightforward deal in the world, a high-paying job in a beautiful place with no teaching responsibilities. There was no tenure bullshit and no students, and you got to work with Butler Lampson and Alan Kay and Chuck Thacker."
Metcalfe returned to Cambridge to pack with his wife and suffer dirough his one remaining academic obligation, the defense of his doctoral thesis before a faculty committee. He expected it to be a breeze, insofar as his diesis was a study of how networks transmitted data in discrete digital packets and he had just spent two years with his head buried in IMP circuitry. The committee, as it happened, was waiting for him with a sock filled with wet sand. He went into the committee room for his oral defense and received his answer on the spot: His thesis was "insufficiently theoretical," the committee ruled. All his laborious discussion of physical systems? Good enough for MIT engineering, but this was Harvard science. In other words, he should add some formulas with Greek symbols, and try again later.
Metcalfe was stunned by the rejection. He thought he knew what the real problem was: Not that his work was "insufficiently theoretical," but that he had spent all those years hanging around the MIT campus instead of carrying water for some Harvard professor who happened to be on his thesis committee. Bob Metcalfe had thumbed his nose at Harvard, and it was payback time. "My thesis advisor should never have let that happen," he said later. "But I wasn't playing ball with him, so he didn't play ball with me."
In any case no amount of fulmination would solve his immediate dilemma. He had accepted a job from PARC with the understanding that he would arrive properly garlanded with a Harvard Ph.D. Apprehensively he called Taylor from home to deliver the bad news.
"He didn't even hesitate," Metcalfe recalled. "He said, 'Just come on out and finish your thesis here.' That felt very, very good."
Bob Metcalfe's personality added a tart new ingredient to the CSL stew. He was a one-man deflation brigade, ever poised to puncture the bravado of his talented peers. Let someone boast at Dealer of having implemented some cool program in just two or three hours of stringently applied brainpower and Metcalfe was likely to remark, "Really? Then what were you doing sitting next to me in the lab for ten hours last night?"
"And by the way," he recalled some twenty-five years later. "I didn't do it nicely. I was not a nice person."
His favorite target was Chuck Thacker.
It is hard to gauge what produced the bad chemistry between Metcalfe and Thacker. Some thought it a clash of like egos—except that a similarly elevated self-esteem characterized pretty much everyone else in the lab and not everyone paired off like raging mastodons. "It was just random interpersonal chemistry," Metcalfe said later. "I have a Ph.D.; he doesn't. He's a world-class processor designer; I'm not. And I'm not an easy-to- get-along-with person and neither was he, so I was on his case all the time and he was on my case all the time. It's not that he's not a good guy He is a good guy. But we just didn't get along."
Some even believed the animus might reside mostly in Metcalfe's imagination, for Thacker never made as much of it as he did. Indeed, some of their colleagues were unaware that there was any bad blood between them at all. Yet even Taylor recognized that Metcalfe/Thacker was the yang to the yin of Metcalfe/Boggs, a relationship whose iciness would resonate for years. Thacker and Metcalfe, he said later, were locked in what he called a Class One disagreement.
"That's when two people disagree and neither can explain to the other person's satisfaction that other persons point of view," he said. "A Class Two disagreement is when each can explain to the other's satisfaction the other's point of view. Class Two disagreements enable people to work together even when they disagree. Class One is destructive. Most disturbances and international crises and most of the pain and suffering and difficulty in the world are based on Class One disagreements. Thacker and Metcalfe could never reach a Class Two disagreement, and they've been enemies ever since."
Metcalfe believed he had earned Thacker's undying enmity within days of his joining PARC by identifying a memory fault in MAXC long after Thacker had declared the machine finished. This was the incident of the so-called "Munger." Metcalfe's inaugural assignment was to connect MAXC to the ARPANET. This should not have been a hard job for someone of his experience. But for some reason MAXC was giving him a hell of a time. Every time he tried to launch the connection, the damn machine crashed. He checked and rechecked his work until he finally became convinced that the problem was MAXC itself. The machine, he decided, was s
uffering from a memory bug.
As MAXC's principal designer, Thacker would not hear of it. Not with the fail-safe system of error correction and memory diagnostics he had implemented. Summoned down to the basement room where MAXC hummed away under the powerful draft of high-capacity air conditioning, he conducted his own tests for the newcomer from Harvard and MIT. As far as he could tell, everything ran flawlessly.
"The machine is reliable," he declared.
"So Chuck left," Metcalfe said. "He insisted MAXC was absolutely fine and chalked up the problems to me, a guy he didn't think much of in the first place."
Therefore Metcalfe devised his own test. Calling it "Munger" was his way of enjoying a private joke at Thacker's expense. The word derived from "mung," MIT hacker slang that meant "Mash Until No Good" and signified the making of large, permanent, and (generally) malicious changes to a computer file. Metcalfe's non-destructive Munger simply fed a random stream of bits into MAXCs memory and read them out again. If the sequence mutated along the way by so much as a single bit, the program would clang a bell on a teletype nearby and log the discrepancy. Metcalfe fired Munger up and waited to see what would happen. He did not have to wait long. Literally within seconds the teletype went off like a fire alarm.
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