Hall found, however, that he and his new boss were on entirely different wavelengths in terms of how they viewed SDD's mission. Don Lennox was another ex-McNamara whiz kid—one of the troupe of young and brilliant technocrats who had helped Robert McNamara remake Ford management (and would attempt the same at the Pentagon, with less distinguished results, when their boss became J.F.K. s Defense Secretary). He was a "friendly, direct, and well-meaning" financial expert, but profoundly at sea with the complexities of advanced product development. Where Hall anticipated that SDD would design and market an entirely new generation of office information systems, Lennox appeared to think the task involved nothing more than mixing and matching a few off-the-shelf components. The disparity between their visions became clear the day Hall reported to Webster for his first meeting with Lennox. Fully expecting to be granted a staff of 100 persons or more, he learned instead that he had been assigned a rump platoon of six ex-SDS engineers in El Segundo, along with four open positions to fill as he pleased.
Hiding his dismay, he returned to Palo Alto to get on as best he could. His first call was to Dave Liddle. "Come with me," he said, "and you can pull together an architecture out of all the good work you guys have done at PARC."
For Liddle, Halls invitation was an act of deliverance. Xerox had recently asked him to head up a research project on display devices in Webster. Even though this would be a promotion, he found the offer unenchanting. For one thing, he hated the diought of moving back East. Plus he thought of himself as a computer scientist, and the people at Webster were anything but. Finally, he was bored with display technology, which had been his field of study since his days at the University of Michigan.
The SDD job answered all those concerns. So while Hall filled out his meager roster by recruiting Ron Rider, Charles Simonyi, and Chuck Thacker to his last three open slots, Liddle dove into the task of drafting a technical road map to guide the new division.
"Harold was a smart guy, so he had some sense of which technologies were most appropriate to use," Liddle recalled. "But it was really up to me to assess them. And I got lots of opinions, talked to lots of people at PARC, and had different folks look it over."
The "Office Information Systems Architecture" as he called the document, formally set down all the elements of an integrated office information system as he and his PARC colleagues envisioned them. There would be personal workstations for every individual (fronted by high-quality bitmapped display screens) as well as communal machines, or servers, for printing and file storage. All were to be linked to each other by Ethernet with a capacity of ten megabits per second—more than diree times the power of PARC's Ethernet—and powered by industrial-strength versions of PARC's most advanced operating systems and application software. It was the work of PARC's magnificent first five years transformed into a commercial product. In short, as Liddle said, "It was son of Alto."
From that moment through to the public introduction in April 1981 of the Xerox 8010 office system, the "Star," this basic outline would never change. The Star would emerge as a superb feat of engineering and perhaps the most perfectly integrated office computer system of all time. Liddle planned on the development phase taking five years, but he also anticipated that the system's architecture would set a standard in the industry for at least another ten.
The vision animating the Star's designers, however, was one of the few things about SDD that would remain stable through the coming years. Five months after launching SDD, Don Lennox was reassigned. His replacement was Bob Sparacino, an executive with solid engineering credentials Xerox had imported from General Motors. Sparacino took an instant dislike to Hall and a month later Hall, astonished at how swiftly his paranoia had been fulfilled, was dumped. (He returned to Pake's staff.) Over the next three and one-half years SDD had three chiefs, none of them lasting more than a matter of months, until finally in 1978, the top job devolved to Liddle, who somehow had managed to keep his head down amid all the turmoil. As Metcalfe later joked: "For a while the most dangerous job to have at Xerox was to be David Liddle's boss."*
SDD, meanwhile, soon burst the restraints Lennox had placed on its size. The organization that presented the Star to the world in 1981—and
*On the day of Liddle's appointment Hall wrote him to observe that his three predecessors had lasted exactly six, twelve, and twenty-four months in the job. Accordingly, he predicted that Liddle would serve forty-eight. Four years later almost to the day, Liddle mailed him a copy of the note, clipped to an announcement of his resignation. "Harold," he wrote, "you were exactly right."
developed a basic system technology for a wide range of Xerox products—was no ten-person shop but a colossus employing 180 engineers in Palo Alto and another 100 in El Segundo. As the designated commercial outlet for PARC technology, the division also acquired an exalted sense of its stature as a flag-bearer for Xerox. This partially accounted for the Stars deliberately stately design. Its target users were not secretaries and clerks but their bosses, who were executives and professionals—an ambition that inspired skepticism among marketing experts of the time but accurately foretold the later evolution of the personal computer as an office device. (This ambition also drove the Stars architects to make the user interface as mouse-oriented as possible. A Xerox promotional brochure would state in 1981 that the Star was "designed specifically for professional business people with little or no typing skills.")
SDD's chiefs correctly understood that Xerox headquarters expected a product development program to possess a certain minimum heft. "Xerox had a hard time understanding anything that wouldn't be a $100-million business," observed one technology manager. Others feared, however, that in waiting for the division to unveil its fully featured product, Xerox might inadvertently miss out on myriad smaller, but still promising, opportunities.
SDD management accordingly made earnest, if infrequent, efforts to interest headquarters in staging less ambitious market probes. As head of the division in 1976, for instance, the former SDS executive Robert Spinrad attempted to persuade Jim O'Neill, the head of technology, to introduce a downscaled low-cost Alto for the office clerical market.
O'Neill responded that Xerox was uninterested in taking what he saw as a remote beachhead. It would be safer, he argued, to let others establish positions in the technical vanguard. Xerox would bide its time and overrun them later with a massive, concentrated attack. "If we put it out right now we'll tip our hand," he told Spinrad. "While we'll have an early success, others will look at us and come in with a well- engineered product that can be maintained better in the field. We'll just lose the big battle."
"My notion," Spinrad recalled, "was that we could build small and develop up. But I lost every one of those fights. There was no way the Xerox Corporation of that era was going to do anything but full-scale product development."
About a year and a half after SDD's founding, Dave Liddle tempted Bob Metcalfe back to Palo Alto. He did not find it a difficult sale, for Metcalfe had grown disaffected with his new employer, a subsidiary of Citibank that handled the giant banks electronic fund transfers out of a computer center in Los Angeles.
After seven months he had succeeded in weaning the operation from its aging custom-built card readers and onto Digital PDP-11s running interactive software. Unfortunately, he found his human colleagues less tractable than the machines. "I'd been promised that I would be made a vice president after six months," he recalled. But when he demanded that the company make good on its offer, his boss reneged on tire grounds that he was not yet thirty. "He said, 'I can't do that, you're just too young. It would really upset the applecart. It's no big deal.' I said, 'It's a big deal to me."
The friendship between Liddle and Metcalfe was anchored by a multitude of common traits. They were both tall, solid men with built-in swaggers, unashamed to throw their weight around. As ex-college jocks they worked out their frustrations on the field of play, often on each other. Metcalfe could regularly
beat Liddle at tennis, his game; but Liddle, who had briefly played varsity basketball at the University of Michigan in the mid-1960s, could whomp him decisively under the boards.
One time his varsity background enabled Liddle to score a decisive victory off Metcalfe. The latter, living high off the hog as a newly divorced bachelor in Los Angeles, had secured a pair of floor seats to tire L.A. Lakers games, close enough to the action for tire toes of his shoes to nuzzle the side line. He invited Liddle, who had long bragged of having played ball at Michigan with Lakers guard Cazzie Russell.
"We'd all say, yeah, yeah, you were at Michigan and Cazzie Russell was there too, yeah, sure," Metcalfe recalled. On this occasion, he and Liddle took dreir seats on tire floor of the Los Angeles Forum just as the Lakers came out for their warm-up. As Metcalfe watched in mute astonishment, Cazzie Russell made a beeline for Dave Liddle. "He came over and said something to the effect of, 'How you doin', Liddle, my man, its been a long time,' then he brought over another famous guy like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and it's, 'Meet my friend David I've been telling you about . . .' Well, thereinafter I believed Dave Liddle could never lie, because he had obviously not been exaggerating in the slightest about his relationship with Cazzie Russell."
When Metcalfe quit Citicorp in a huff over his withheld vice presidency, Liddle was ready to grab him on the rebound. Metcalfe, who had inspired awe at PARC by becoming the first well-known researcher to leave, now became the first to return (although technically he was returning to SDD, rather than PARC). The difference between his final PARC salary and his new wage of $37,000 amounted to the biggest raise anyone in the building had ever received. The strategy of extracting a raise from Xerox by working somewhere else for a spell was known ever after as the "Metcalfe promotion," a term that further gratified its honoree.
"I got twenty to thirty per cent from Citibank, then Liddle gave me another ten to fifteen per cent premium to get me back," he said. "But the problem was I knew people who were making much more, and they were people I didn't think were that much smarter than me."
Metcalfe's new job was primarily to upgrade Ethernet's capacity from three to ten megabits per second to meet the demands of SDD's formidable product plan. But he was also expected to ride herd, as a sort of contract administrator, on the designer of the Star's mission-critical central processor, Chuck Thacker.
As if his historically charged relationship with Thacker were not problem enough, on assuming his new duties in June 1976 Metcalfe discovered that the entire project was careening off the tracks. Structurally speaking, SDD was a mess. The division had two headquarters, one in Palo Alto and the other in El Segundo, where it had taken over a block of manufacturing facilities vacated by SDS. This arrangement burdened Liddle and his cavalcade of immediate superiors with two mutually resentful semi-organizations located five hundred miles apart—the northern contingent thickly seeded with PARC alumni and the southern branch staffed with reassigned SDS employees nursing old grievances against the fancy Ph.D.s in Palo Alto. No volume of e-mail or networked file sharing could quench the rekindled tensions, only the personal intercession of SDD managers shuttling endlessly back and forth by air.
The geographical rift was only one of numerous headaches. The project's schedule had slipped almost from Day One. Building the ambitious Star "was taking longer than everyone thought and it was harder than everyone drought," recalled Bob Belleville, a former Engelbart engineer who helped Metcalfe supervise Thacker's work. And there lay the main predicament. Thacker's processor design, which was dubbed "Dolphin," satisfied no one. It busted its specifications in almost every measure—too big, too slow, too hot, too expensive—as if Thacker, the minimalist paragon, had unaccountably succumbed to an alarming attack of biggerism.
Most of the blame, however, belonged to the specs themselves. SDD's ambition was to bundle together two separate technologies: office automation, including programmable word processing and networking; and high-quality digital copying and printing with high-speed lasers. Designing a processor to handle either task might have been manageable, but putting them together was like squaring the circle—simple on its face and impossible in practice.
"Chuck ended up designing a machine that wasn't very good for either purpose," remarked his friend Butler Lampson. "At a very early stage they should have said, 'This is impossible, we can't meet both of these requirements.' But instead he soldiered on and designed this thing which was kind of big and clunky for the office automation application and didn't have the power that was needed for the imaging application. It was a bust."
Moreover, Thacker was fighting his battle using the weapons of the last war. Because the new system's components were exponentially bigger and faster than the Alto's—that the Ethernet had tripled in speed only hinted at the size of the problem—his design plan was to take the original Alto processor and simply scale it up. In fact, what was needed was an entirely new architecture.
"The Alto was a machine that was a happy confluence of technologies," Belleville observed. "It was built at the right time. It took a mess of ideas and made them into a machine that was for the time extraordinarily powerful and cheap. But now the display was bigger and faster, and Ethernet was bigger and faster, and the disks were bigger and faster. The complexity rose very quickly and Thacker ran into a brick wall."
The central processors inability to keep up with its supercharged peripherals increased pressure on the rest of the system. One could never be sure the processor would be finished with one task in time to handle the next—data bits might stream in so fast from the disk, for example, that the processor, like a tennis player trying to return the volleys of a souped-up ball machine, might not be in position to receive them. In that event, the system would crash.
Thacker felt deadlocked. "You can trade off cost and performance and time to market in various ways," he explained. "But if you try to bind all three of them you may wind up in an infeasible part of the design space. That's what happened with the Dolphin. In order to cut the costs we cut the performance down quite a bit—and still couldn't meet the cost goals. It was still faster than the Alto and it had some things the Alto didn't have, like virtual memory and caches, but it was just too expensive."
Metcalfe pelted him with acerbic demands for progress while he tried to maintain a gruelling schedule. The pressure brought him to the edge of burnout. "My group had about fifteen people in it and half were in Palo Alto and half in El Segundo," Thacker recalled. "And I would commute two days a week to El Segundo. That just broke me."
To a great extent, Metcalfe was only passing on the same tension he received from above. "Xerox had these staff guys who would come in from Connecticut to check up on what we were doing," he recalled. "It was my job to stand up in front of these bastards and give them these presentations. I had the fun job. I'd say, 'Remember last time I told you how well it was going? Well, it hasn't worked out that way. Here's the unforeseen problem . . .' And this went on forever."
SDD had few options. If Thacker could not get the job done, the entire project was in jeopardy, for he was the ace processor designer and the font of knowledge piped direct from PARC. Yet there was only so far they could push him, for he was not technically an employee of SDD—just a contractor, formally on loan.
"Dave could not simply bang on Chuck's desk and say, 'Dammit, I'll fire you!'" Belleville recalled. During one morose staff meeting, "They were all worrying about whether Chuck would be hit by a truck, because he was the one developing the hardware for SDD. Right then Metcalfe joked, "What you guys don't realize is that I'm waiting in an alley driving the truck.'"
Against these great odds, Thacker's team finally produced the Dolphin. It was as problematic as everyone feared, for the fundamental issues had not been solved. All the design compromises made had still left it too big, too slow, too expensive. Weary and demoralized, Thacker returned to CSL, where he could work once again sheltered from the merciless pressure of commercial deadl
ines. As though in exchange, CSL provided one more favor for Liddle's division. This was the intercession, like the deus ex machina in a Greek tragedy, of Butler Lampson.
Lampson had become aware while Thacker was still struggling with the Dolphin design that SDD's hardware effort was hitting the wall. Thacker, Metcalfe, and Liddle were his friends and he could almost smell their panic. "I kibitzed with them quite a bit and I noticed at some point that the Dolphin wasn't going to be satisfactory. But they were in denial. I decided myself to go back to the roots of the Alto and give it another spin." This was classic PARC (and classic Lampson)—an unsolicited answer to an unasked question dropped casually over the transom.
For him the task of designing a substitute processor resembled a jazzman's noodling on a handy sax. The raw materials were his ability to take a fresh look at the problem, and the appearance of a new integrated circuit that had been announced by National Semiconductor Corporation. Because the chip was actually not yet in production, he based his work entirely on its written specifications. But the flash of insight that enabled him to overcome the obstacles that had stymied Thacker came when he realized that the Dolphin processor—like the Alto's—did not keep time with its own internal clock.
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