Like the wheel or the gothic arch, BitBlt was one of those discoveries that was non-intuitive in advance, obvious in retrospect, and ultimately adaptable to an infinity of uses. For the first time text could scroll up or down—or across the screen—at lightning-fast speed. You could draw a square and fill it with a hounds-tooth pattern, then push it across the screen until it disappeared off the side. Or make a copy of some part of the screen, save it, and display a new image in its place. This was the key to overlapping windows, for a part of the screen that was temporarily hidden (one window beneath another, for example) could now be called swiftly back into view, as though a page hidden halfway down a stack of papers was pulled out and transferred to the top. "You now had the illusion of a separate layer of screen display, which people weren't doing before," Ingalls said.
Kay's group labored to make this striking new capability more than merely an intriguing oddity. They worked BitBlt operations into their developing user interface until the actions of creating and manipulating multiple windows, each one running a different program, seemed exactly as effortless as shuffling papers on a desk. Then, in February 1975, they let CSL know there were a few things they wanted to show them.
The team prepared for the demo like actors auditioning for a shot at Broadway. Taylor's engineers could be a harsh audience, scornful of programs that placed glitz above speed and efficiency. That was why CSL's ideal was still Bravo, which responded to commands instantaneously and was as exciting to look at as a page from the phone book.
When the moment arrived Ingalls seated himself at an Alto in the bean- bag room. Lampson, Thacker, Deutsch, and most of the rest of CSL were there, along with a few engineers from the other labs. Ingalls started by creating a few windows and loading them with various programs: One held a drawing, another a block of Smalltalk code, the third a lengthy block of text. His cursor wandered over the metaphorical desktop with fluid ease, pausing to draw a line here, add a word or phrase there. As his audience watched in rapt fascination at a display that had become as supple as a living creature, Ingalls almost forgot himself. "We were just going along, giving our demo, not thinking about the fact that we were doing something nobody had ever seen before." He was deep into a routine cut- and-paste editing task when he heard a voice shout, "Hey!"
Ingalls paused. Peter Deutsch was on his feet, pointing at the screen. "Did you just do what I thought you did?" he said.
Only then did Ingalls realize what had happened. In the midst of the edit he had instinctively pressed the middle button of his mouse. As if from nowhere, a small rectangle had appeared on the screen listing several commands. Ingalls had selected "cut" and released the button, whereupon the tiny rectangle instantly disappeared (along with the selected text to be deleted). It was something they called the "pop-up menu," the forerunner of a device common to almost every Windows or Macintosh program today. "It flashed and disappeared," he recalled. "That was really a wonderful moment, and it was all done in a half a second."
In the instant it took for the menu to pop onto the screen and off again, the entire audience comprehended not only the power of BitBlt but its practical application in a world of average users. "Everyone in that room walked out in a daze," recalled Smokey Wallace, who had been hired from Englebart s lab to help design a commercial office system using PARC technology. He recognized immediately that what he had just seen would be an indispensable element of anything he could put on the market. The very next day he showed up in Ingalls's office. "Tell me all about BitBlt," he said.
The PARC user interface, with its overlapping windows, mouse clicks, and pop-up menus, had entered computing history. More than twenty-five years and many engineering generations later, it remains the indisputable parent of the desktop metaphor guiding the users of millions of home and office computers. "From that moment on," Wallace said, "nobody ever looked back."
CHAPTER 16
The Pariahs
Dick Shoup had it down to a routine. He would pedal his bicycle up the tree-lined hill to the front of Building 34, lever open the door of the main entrance with his foot and pedal through without disembarking, then proceed straight down a narrow hallway, the tires of his bike whishing softly on the worn carpeting like wind through a sparse wood. Finally he would roll to a stop next to the graphics lab.
If only his work inside that room could proceed with as few impediments. But no: Dick Shoup had invented a technology that would stand the science of video on its ear, and he was close to getting fired for it.
The machine was called Superpaint. It deserves a place in history as the only invention too farsighted even for PARC's Computer Science Lab. And all because it thought in color.
The notion that an excess of ambition could make a talented inventor into a pariah at CSL sounds preposterous on its face—more like something that would happen to a Gary Starkweather in a place like Webster, and the very antithesis of what should have happened at PARC. Yet every organization of human beings eventually comes to cherish its own orthodoxies, and PARC was no different. When a group pursues a goal with
the single-minded tenacity the Computer Science Lab possessed under Bob Taylor, the potential for intolerance is even greater.
"It was hard to be a renegade in that lab," Shoup said years later with a regretful sigh. "You could be a maverick, but only a maverick of a certain kind. And I guess I was just the wrong kind." '
He had not started as an outsider. Quite the contrary. One could scarcely imagine a more lace-curtain computer science pedigree than Dick Shoups: Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon and employment after graduation at Berkeley Computer Corporation, followed by selection by Bob Taylor as one of the elite six to join PARC upon BCC s demise. In the small society of the Computer Science Lab, this was the closest thing to coming over on the Mayflower.
You would have to know Shoup very well before discerning the heretic's soul underlying those sterling academic bloodlines. One clue was his interest in things that struck even some of PARC's free thinkers as a little outré, like his Transcendental Meditation group, which gathered every morning in a PARC commons room to do its thing to the voice of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on mail order tapes.
"Dick was a little different from everybody else," related his friend Alvy Ray Smith. "He's sort of a crusty guy, and he's not political, and he's very stubborn, and I think this is why he's as good as he is."
Had he known how stubborn, Bob Taylor might not have given Dick Shoup such a long leash at the very outset of his PARC career. Shortly after Shoup got to CSL Taylor welcomed him into his office to discuss what he wanted to do. Shoup did not have the clear-eyed convictions of his colleagues Lampson, Deutsch, and Thacker. Instead he saw so many fascinating paths laid out before him that he was stymied by the need to pick only one. Finally Taylor drawled: "Why don't you take a year to figure out what you want to do?"
With Taylor this offer was never as open-ended as it might seem at first glance. He figured that great computer scientists left to their own devices (and subtly guided by the Impresario's hand) would invariably find their way to the grail of interactive distributed computing. But Shoup took his new boss at his word. Within a month or so he had decided to pursue a course of research in video computer graphics.
On the surface his choice sat squarely within the mainstream of Taylors vision. After all, Taylor had underwritten through ARPA the first computer graphics "center of excellence" at Utah and hired two of its graduates, Bob Flegal and Jim Curry, as his very first recruits to CSL. Nor was it entirely random on Shoup’s part. His interest in video went all the way back to his high school days in western Pennsylvania, when he spent weekends repairing TV sets for his small-town neighbors.
Adapting video raster displays to interactive computers, he knew, raised a host of intriguing technical issues crying out for further study, especially if one desired to do interesting things with the image. One would need a way to store a whole frames worth of digital data in memory at a time
, for example. The technology to do so was known as the frame buffer. What Shoup proposed was nothing less than the biggest and most flexible frame buffer anyone had ever seen.
Simply defined, a frame buffer is a box holding a hell of a lot of memory. More precisely, it is a grid in which the memory is arrayed to correspond with a video frame, so that one or more bits of memory account for every "pixel," or "picture element," on the display. Activate the bits of a frame buffer in any given pattern and the exact same pattern should appear on the screen. Connect the buffer to a computer and you can rearrange those same bits—and the corresponding image—according to any algorithm you can devise, the way you might rearrange colored marbles in a partitioned box.
With the assistance of Flegal, Curry, and a French graphics expert named Patrick Beaudelaire, Shoup spent more than a year devising and assembling his memory giant. The first prototype of Superpaint went operational in Building 34 on April 10, 1973, just a few days after the Alto, which was being built in a basement room directly under his ground-floor video lab.
While Cookie Monster was marching across the Alto screen to the delighted gasps of the PARC faithful and their visitors, Dick Shoup was seated alone before a black-and-white video camera, holding up an index card on which he had scrawled, "It works, sort of." The system recorded the image of his face and the card in buffer memory in accurate detail— save for the bright red-orange of his droopy mustache and collar-length hair—and stored it on a conventional computer disk as a pattern of bits. ("It survives to this day," he said in 1998.)
Within a few months he had added a kaleidoscopic variety of video inputs, including live television, videotape, and videodisc, as well as hardware and software to allow him to alter the images he grabbed from the screen. The finished product was the first fully video-compatible frame buffer ever built. It was also a vector apart from the computer his colleagues had assembled in the basement. Where the Alto fit under a desk, Superpaint occupied two cabinets, each standing five feet tall and holding thirty-three memory cards. Its nearly two and a half million memory bits (in semiconductor chips worth about $100,000) meant that each pixel in a video frame with a resolution of 486 by 640 pixels could be addressed by eight bits. The system required two separate display monitors, one to show the image to be manipulated and the second a menu of electronic "paintbrushes" with which it could be altered in color or pattern. "No question about it, this was a big chunk of hardware," Shoup recalled fondly.
Superpaint was a uniquely agile and adaptable graphical tool. One could "grab" a frame from a videotape, disc, or directly off a television screen and manhandle it by changing its colors, flipping or reversing the image, bleeding it across the screen, even animating it. The key was the ratio of eight bits per pixel, which allowed the user to tune every dot to any one of 256 color values. You could freeze a random frame from a taped episode of, say, Star Trek, overlay it on the buffer as if you were tracing a line drawing on a blank canvas, and recolor Spock's hair green by assigning new values to the appropriate pixels.
Yet Shoup’s fascination with color and video drew him away from what Taylor viewed as the Computer Science Lab's principal mandate. Shoup had participated in the MAXC project like any obedient member of the CSL team; but by the time the rest of the lab shifted its attention to the Alto he had withdrawn into his personal world. Taylor was distinctly displeased at the course things were taking.
"Bob felt the whole lab needed to be working in one direction," Shoup recalled. It was not simply that he was working on his own; more critically, it was felt that the basic premise of Superpaint would never fit in with CSL's goal to build the "office of the future." It was one thing to study how digital bits could be manipulated to create an image—the direction CSL had taken since the day they mapped Cookie Monsters face to the Alto screen. To his colleagues Shoup was working backwards, starting with video images and reducing them to their digital components: What could an office system ever do with that?
"Everyone on that side of the house was interested in documents," Shoup recalled. "Documents are pretty much black marks on white paper. Color meant TV, and that was some other world."
The tension between Shoup and the rest of the lab intensified through the end of the year and into early 1974, as pressure mounted on CSL scientists to focus their efforts almost entirely on Alto-related projects. It seemed that the only thing keeping the simmering disagreement from turning into a full-scale break was the absence of a catalyst. Then, as if on schedule, a man arrived at PARC who really did seem to come from some other world.
Alvy Ray Smith was the quintessential 1970s dropout. A native of New Mexico, he had been a New York University computer professor until abandoning his promising academic career to drive a white Ford Torino cross-country in pursuit of the muse of abstract art. He and Shoup had first encountered each other several years earlier when Smith, an expert in the arcane mathematics of massively parallel computers, was putting together a conference panel on modular computers and someone recommended he contact Shoup, whose dissertation at CMU had covered the same territory.
They embarked on a lifelong friendship, based in part on their shared fascination with the unconventional. "Dick was always willing to talk about all kinds of other things than science," Smith recalled. "Music, art, parapsychology, out-on-the-edge stuff." When Smith abruptly quit his professorship in 1974 and headed for California to paint, it seemed only natural that he would surface at the home of his old friend Dick, looking for a place to spend the night.
PARC then was at a peak of creative ferment. Every day some new feat of engineering appeared, virtually demanding to be shown off to anyone with a free moment. And here was Alvy Ray Smith, curious as a cat, at large with time to spare. Shoup fairly tingled with anticipation as he drove to the research center the next morning. Seated next to him was the one man he knew possessed the temperament to "get" Superpaint. Sure enough, the machine hit Smith like a lightning bolt between the eyes.
"He came in the door and got completely entranced," Shoup remembered. "He just deep-ended right into it." For the next several days and nights the bewitched artist scarcely left the lab for more than an hour or two at a time. "I realized this was what I had come to California for," Smith recalled. "You could just see it was the future."
The time-honored technique of daubing paint on canvas suddenly seemed hopelessly antiquated. Smiths new obsession was to get his hands on Shoup s machine and never let go. Shoup favored the idea, figuring he needed someone like Smith on the premises to make up for his own lack of artistic skill ("I was a visual thinker, but never much of a visual artist," he said). Attempting to secure Smith a place on PARC's permanent staff, Shoup argued that Smith's artistic talent and solid scientific credentials uniquely qualified him to help develop Superpaint's full potential, like a test pilot pushing a new fighter plane to the edge of the envelope.
Among the higher-ups with their hands on the budget, this was a no sale. No one had thought to provide in PARC's head count for an artist in residence, much less a rootless hippie like Alvy Ray Smith. Still, one thing you could say about PARC was that its rank and file was infinitely resourceful at finding ways to stretch the rules. After the personnel office refused to hire Smith as a temp or a contractor, Alan Kay came up with the idea of getting him into the building virtually as a piece of furniture— executing a purchase order for his services for a couple of thousand dollars. "I didn't care how they did it," Smith said. "I didn't want a tide or salary or anything. I just wanted access to the equipment."
In no time he became a fixture in Building 34. If Dick Shoup was a maverick who blended in, Alvy Ray Smith was one who was hard to miss. Big and broad-shouldered, given to loud shirts, with a luxuriant mane of jet-black hair and a flowing hippie beard, he proclaimed the genius of Superpaint in a booming voice to anyone who was willing to listen and many who were not.
Taylor, ominously, viewed him skeptically from the start. Perhaps it was h
is claim to superior farsightedness, which Taylor took as a personal affront. Or perhaps the reason was tiiat Smith seemed to have a singular talent for pressing his buttons, as he demonstrated on his very first day at PARC.
Smith was in the video lab, tinkering with Superpaint, when Taylor came up behind him, evidently intent on making sure the newcomer understood that this machine was considered to be out of the mainstream. He watched silently as Smith laboriously tuned the color settings, then asked, "Don't you find this too hard to use?"
Smith wheeled on him, shocked at the veiy idea. One might just as well ask a painter if he found it too hard to wield his brush. "No, I don't find it too hard," was his impatient rejoinder. "Don't you get it? This machine is revolutionary!"
Tayl or walked off with a grunt, unhappy at being lectured in his own lab about what was and was not revolutionary. He had never before been reproached as a reactionary, and it stuck in his craw.
Nor was the significance of the exchange lost on Smith. "From that day on," he said, "I realized my friend Dick was in an unfriendly environment."
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