Metcalfe himself did not realize the extent to which his offspring had become a indispensable part of PARC's lifestyle until one day shortly after EARS was launched. After accidentally disabling the ether by removing a piece of hardware he noticed "one after another of my colleagues popping up, wondering why the network was down." Sneakernet, obviously, was dead.
Two more important events happened that same year. On March 31 Metcalfe filed for a patent on Ethernet in his own name and those of Boggs, Thacker, and Lampson, each of whom had contributed a critical element of the technology. It was awarded (and assigned to Xerox) two years later.
Second, he resigned. Metcalfe had worked at PARC for three years, about as long as he had expected to. Industry headhunters were calling. "I was contemplating moving on and I was also contemplating staying," he recalled. Before deciding he sat down with his immediate boss, Jerry Elkind.
"What would make you stay?" Elkind asked.
"I said, Well, Jerry, if I did stay, how long would it take me to get your job?'" Metcalfe recollected. "Elkind thought about it. He said, 'Well, gee, you're a member of the research staff, and then you'll be a senior member of the research staff, and then you'll become a consulting member of the research staff'. . . And basically Jerry Elkind, who was twenty years older than me, said it would take me about twenty years to get his job. I told him that wasn't what I had in mind."
Anyway, the decision had already been forced upon him. His wife of seven years asked for a divorce. Simultaneously he was offered a job in Los Angeles by Citibank, which was planning to redeploy its aging electronic fund transfer system onto new computers. "So here's this job at Citibank where I'm to get a thirty per cent raise and an office with a view of Catalina Island and a chance to live in L.A., which was appealing at the time. So I bolted."
Metcalfe's departure rattled the PARC staff like a tremor on the San Andreas fault. This was not only because he was the first top computer scientist to quit PARC since its founding five years earlier. More important, his resignation provided the first hint that while they had buried themselves in their research Camelot, a whole new world had sprung up outside—and that it would welcome them and their knowledge.
What they could not know was that in a very short time Metcalfe would be back.
CHAPTER 14
What You See Is What You Get
This is the story of how three sheets of lined yellow paper and three misfits spawned an industry.
The industry is desktop publishing, which today allows millions of ordinary persons to turn out newsletters, magazines, and books as though they were professionals; and allows millions of professionals—writers, editors, and publishers—to do their even more sophisticated work faster and easier.
The three sheets of yellow paper belonged to Butler Lampson. Covered with functions and algorithms written in his neat, angular hand, they represented his first pass at designing a text editor—a word processing program, if you will—for the Alto, which at that point did not have one.
The three misfits were Charles Simonyi, who one day happened upon Lampson’s scribbles and asked what they meant; and Larry Tesler and Tim Mott, who had been assigned to help Xerox's textbook subsidiary find a way to make the editing and rewriting of manuscripts somewhat less tedious and time-consuming than the laying of bricks.
Together they achieved what Lampson later termed "one of the most successful collaborations in the history of PARC" (and that is a history rife with spectacular partnerships). The trio gave the Alto its "killer app"—the application that burned its unique virtues indelibly into people’s minds—as well as the program that first showed professionals outside PARC how the personal computer might improve their lives.
These programs were called Bravo and Gypsy. Their development consumed more than three years, starting with the moment when Simonyi reached out his hand for Lampson s three yellow pages and said, "Can I take a look?"
With his mop of straight brown hair and his deep-set blue eyes, Simonyi might have stepped directly out of a Jacques-Louis David portrait of the young Napoleon. The similarity did not end there. Like Napoleon, Simonyi was a young man who rarely lacked the self- assurance to tell his elders where they were wrong and he was right. They also both came to prominence as outsiders: As Napoleon had come to the French revolutionary army from the rugged Mediterranean island of Corsica, Simonyi had crossed to the United States from the socialist hell of 1960s Hungary.
The elder son of a Budapest professor of electrical engineering, Simonyi had first encountered a computer at the age of fifteen. This was a Soviet-made contraption called the Ural II. The Ural was one of five computers in the whole country and a time machine of a unique variety. "All the action on this computer was directed through the console—it was truly a hands-on, one-on-one experience," Simonyi recalled. "It was exactly like the personal computer of fifteen years later, because it was just you and the machine and no one else."
The Ural could have been the model for the computer in every science fiction film of the 1950s and 1960s. The size of a large room, it was driven by thousands of vacuum tubes glowing with an eerie orange light. The operators console was like the keyboard of an old-fashioned cash register—six columns of numbered switches and an enter key on the right, all operated by a mechanism with substantial Soviet heft. "All this was very exhilarating because there was a lot of noise associated with it," Simonyi recalled. "Every time I hit the switch it clicked very firmly. Whenever I cleared it, all the keys released at once with a great 'Thunk!'"
Housed at a Budapest engineering institute, the Ural bedeviled its operators by blowing out at least one tube every time it was switched on. The only remedy was never to turn it off, which meant hiring someone to babysit the behemoth all night after everyone went home. Through his father, Simonyi wangled the job for himself. With the help of a mentor on the university faculty and the endless, empty nights available for full-time experimentation, he soon taught himself all there was to know about programming in Octal, the base-8 system on which the Ural was programmed. His first programs were designed to fill in "magic squares," giant grids of numbers in which all the columns and rows add up to the same sum. Years later he could still remember how he would spend hours punching buttons on the machine to create magic squares eighty cells wide by eighty cells deep, then arrive home in the morning "with an incredible headache and giant rolls of paper printouts."
After about a year a Danish computer technician he met at a Budapest trade fair offered him a job. Simonyi was sixteen. All that prevented him from leaving the country on a temporary pass was the Hungarian military's craving for draftees. "The way I went around them was that I was underage, so they couldn't draft me, and if you were in college you got a deferment. So I got myself admitted to the university and told them if you don't let me go to Denmark I'll go to university and you won't get me. If you let me go, I'm coming back in one year, and then you'll have me."
Of course there was no question of his going back. This was 1966. Everywhere in Hungary memories of the aborted revolution of 1956 were still painfully fresh. "One thing that shocked me when I got to Denmark," he recollected, "was that the houses didn't have bullet holes in them." Back home his father lost his job in retaliation for his son's defection. "But he had a lot of political problems anyway, so this was just on top of it. Plus it was calculated in—either that I would have an unhappy life or he would have one more political problem. My parents agreed. My dad was practically pushing me to go."
About a year and a half later Simonyi left Denmark for the United States. Because his situation at home was deemed not to have been perilous enough to warrant political status, he arrived on a student visa, which prohibited employment. "So I told the authorities that due to extraordinary circumstances I had to take up work. The extraordinary circumstances were that I was running out of money." The job he found was at Berkeley Computer, where he encountered the troika of Thacker, Lampson, and Taylor and survived th
e one and only corporate bankruptcy of his life.
Following BCCs collapse, Simonyi had tagged along with Mel Pirtle to his next job, which was to supervise the building of the Illiac IV on an ARPA contract at Ames Research Center, a NASA facility just south of Palo Alto. Illiac was a vast, overdesigned attempt at a large-scale system that some called the first supercomputer and others called computing’s Vietnam. (It never became fully functional, despite the expenditure of millions of dollars.) Simonyi tended toward the latter view, which is not to say he found the program entirely worthless. Aside from what it taught him about computer architecture, as a government program Illiac at one point saved him from being permanently evicted from the United States. This occurred when he left the country for a couple of days one January to visit West Germany—his first chance in seven or eight years to see his father, who was giving a lecture in Hamburg. In his excitement he overlooked not only his overcoat but the rule that once the holder of a student visa leaves the country he must reapply for permission to come back.
"So Friday evening at four o'clock I went to the embassy to say, 'Hey, my plane's leaving in one hour, would you please give me a visa.' They took one look at me and said no. I called Pirtle right away and the wheels started to turn. They opened the embassy on Saturday, just to give me the visa stamp."
Ever since his first labor-intensive experience with the Ural, Simonyi had been fascinated by the art of programming. By 1972, when he rejoined his BCC mates at PARC, he had come up with a less trying methodology, which he labeled "meta-programming" and made the topic of his Stanford doctoral thesis. Meta-programming involved a team leader's drafting a detailed blueprint for a program using a highly abstract language, and handing this over to assistants for the actual coding of the software. The idea, as Simonyi described it with his characteristic bluntness, was to improve everybody's productivity by giving the smartest programmer the freedom to think in broad strokes while a couple of overworked assistants reduced his ideas to code that the machine could understand. In essence, Simonyi was programming the programmers.
His first experiment in the process, which involved hiring two undergraduates from Stanford as these intellectual menials, he called Alpha. Around the time he was ready to conduct a second experiment, he found himself in Lampson's office, studying the three canary-colored pages.
"What is this?" he asked.
"We need a text editor for the Alto," Lampson replied. "Nobody's working on it, so I thought I'd start."
Lampson was being slightly disingenuous. The Alto did not just need a text editor—it needed everything. The machine had been around for nearly a year and, quite clearly, the novelty of Cookie Monster had begun to wear off. "Some people didn't really see the potential of Alto," Lampson recalled later. "We were trying to draw more people into it, because obviously the thing is useless without software. For the first year or so after it existed it wasn't very interesting because it didn't have very interesting software." The yellow sheets were Lampson's way of jump-starting the process.
Highly intrigued, Simonyi ran his eyes over Lampson's formulas. He fancied himself a great programmer, which he was, having learned the art on one of the most recalcitrant computers ever built. But he was also aware, as he said later, that "it's not enough to be a great programmer; you have to find a great problem."
This looked like such a problem. Editing text on a graphical screen seemed easy at first glance, but it was rife with hidden difficulties and unexplored potential.
"I thought we were on the cusp of a paradigm shift," he said later. "I could see books in their entirety flowing in front of you, virtual books and everything. In retrospect it seems so obvious. Uh-uh, it wasn't obvious to anyone. This stuff was in the future then. But it was suddenly clear to me that with the combination of Xerox and this machine, word processing was going to be a key application. I took it and decided to make it happen, because it looked very sweet." Since it would be the second experiment undertaken for his doctorate Simonyi moved one step down in the alphabet, and called it Bravo.
Beyond supplying his three yellow sheets, Lampson s contribution to the making of Bravo exemplified his way of casting his influential net over dozens of PARC projects simultaneously. Having outlined the program's basic building blocks for a like-minded collaborator, he let Simonyi do most of the heavy work, but stuck around to be his guide, mentor, and sounding board—as though implementing his own even more elevated form of meta-programming.
"What Butler contributed was the will," Simonyi said later, "and what I contributed was that I agreed with him. I certainly discussed everything with him. I was the active person driving it and I drove it by asking him questions."
Among Lampson's fundamental ideas was a critical algorithm for holding an entire document efficiently in memory through the use of "piece tables." These had been first developed by a programmer named Jay Moore. Instead of treating each letter or character in a text as an individual bit in memory, the piece table algorithm viewed a document as an arrangement of text blocks (or "pieces"). Inserting a sentence in the middle of a document converted the file from one piece to three—call them A, B, and C, corresponding to the insert and the blocks preceding and following it. These did not have to be contiguous in memory, as they were on the screen; it was only necessary for the computer to memorize a map—the piece table—that would allow it to find all the pieces in data storage and assemble them in the proper order for display or printing.
It is self-evidently easier to handle a document file divided into a few large pieces than one in which every character has to be manipulated individually, just as it is easier to carry a dozen eggs home in one box than to cradle them individually in one's arms. The result was a tremendous savings in computing resources. Even if the writer wanted to do something drastic like transpose the end and beginning of the document, the pieces stayed where they were. Only the piece table changed, so the system would know that the pieces henceforth had to be read not as A-B-C, but as C-B-A.
Minimizing the movement of bits within memory allowed users to create more complex documents—as long as a piece would be stationary, why not make it heavier, so to speak? As he refined and enhanced Bravo, Simonyi figured out how to encode such characteristics as fancy typefaces, odd margins, and page numbers. Eventually he had Bravo polished to the point that it could reproduce a document on the Alto's bitmapped screen almost exactly as it would appear printed out. The user could see displayed underlining, boldface, italics, and fonts of various styles and sizes—a capability that became known by the signature phrase of the comedian Flip Wilson's sassy character Geraldine: "What You See Is What You Get," or WYSIWYG, pronounced "wizzy-wig."
Simonyi was right in predicting that nothing would underscore the Alto's unique virtues like a powerful and flexible word processing program. Bravo was the all-purpose answer to the question of what a personal computer did: It magnified the productivity and creativity of every user.
"It was the killer app, no question," Simonyi recalled. "People would come into PARC at night to write all kinds of stuff, sending letters, doing all personal correspondence, PTA reports, silly little newsletters, anything. If you went around and looked at what the Altos were doing, they were all in Bravo." PARC personnel with access to the Altos found their popularity soaring on the outside. Friends writing Ph.D. theses would beg for permission to come in and type their work into the system. Then they would hit a button and get a gorgeously printed copy from the lasers.
But Bravo still had serious shortcomings. It looked every inch like a program written by engineers for engineers: The commands were complicated, difficult to learn, and prone to being misapplied. The marvels of WYSIWYG notwithstanding, the screen image appeared flat and uninviting to the ordinary user. Critics derided the display as little more than a "glass teletype" that failed to take advantage of the Alto's brilliant graphical capabilities. If Bravo were truly to be embraced by users outside PARC and the confrat
ernity of research scientists, it would need a more creative and accessible user interface, a screen format that would render the program and its daunting menu of commands and capabilities intelligible to the average person.
It was not by accident that Lampson and Simonyi had given the interface short shrift. They figured they would have their hands full getting the program to work, much less making it look pretty. "When we built Bravo," Lampson recalled, "we made an explicit decision that we would not work on the user interface. We said, that's going to be too hard and we don't have the resources."
Fortunately, down the hall in the Systems Science Lab the two other misfits of this story had been approaching the issue of text editing from the opposite direction. Larry Tesler and Tim Mott were deeply involved in the design of just such a user interface. What they did not have, but CSL now did, was a decent word processing program to hang it on.
Almost from the moment Larry Tesler joined PARC as a recruit from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, he felt out of place. His main job was to write software for POLOS, the "PARC On-Line Office System," which was Bill English's scheme to reengineer Doug Engelbart's interactive multimedia system using the superior resources that Xerox money could buy. The work was being handled by a group of engineers English had raided from Engelbart, and they went at it with all the quasi-religious enthusiasm they had once felt working for the great man himself.
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