With the end of Elkind's assignment nearing, several CSL engineers visited Pake to ask him to find Elkind a new home. Taylor, wisely, laid low. But Pake was convinced he knew who was behind the move. "While Jerry was gone, Taylor really did settle in," he recalled. "And he did definitely consolidate his position."
The situation confronted Pake with an unappetizing prospect. He had come to rely on Elkind as a buffer between Taylor and the other lab chiefs. Sure enough, during Elkind's absence the tensions between the physicists and computer scientists had increased, aggravated by Taylor's oft-expressed view that only the computer labs (and specifically CSL) did any work worth financing at PARC. The surge of petty antagonism had all but destroyed Pake's dream of a multidisciplinaiy Utopia on Coyote Hill.
(The CSL engineer Jim Morris recalled being cornered at a party in town one night by a GSL physicist. "How does it feel to be working for a boss who doesn't have a Ph.D.?" the physicist gibed. "At the time I thought that was an asinine remark to make," Morris said, "but it did reflect the interdisciplinary pissing match that was going on at PARC.")
Pake himself had reached the point where he could barely stand the sight of Taylor, much less engage him in conversation. He disliked Taylor's individualistic management technique and was even more appalled by the feral dynamics of Dealer. On the whole, he was unpersuaded by the argument that good researchers should be able to take criticism in the same spirit in which they dished it out. The white- suited physicists and optical scientists on the ground floor of the building—his people—were every bit as uncompromising in their scientific standards as Taylor's, but they did not feel constrained to abandon all civility as CSL did.
The thought of dealing directly with Taylor as one of his laboratory directors made him blanch. Yet inserting someone new as Elkind's replacement as CSL chief might be taken as an intolerable insult by Taylor's coterie. Pake chose to buy time by sticking to the status quo, informing the lab that he had promised Elkind his old job back and owed it to the man to be true to his word.
Meanwhile the anti-Elkind talk left loyalists like Dan Bobrow deeply perturbed. Thoughtful, a bit naive, but optimistic that by bringing well- meaning people together in good faith he could find a middle ground satisfying everyone, Bobrow arranged for a group of CSL engineers to pay a formal visit to Elkind's task force quarters a short distance down the hill from PARC.
"I was trying to smooth things out," he recalled. "To me, Jerry was a superb manager who always asked good hard questions and was very supportive. I didn't see why he couldn't continue in his role, and Bob in his. I didn't realize how much of a power struggle there was behind the scenes or how deep the division was, in the sense that some people thought Bob was a listener and a pusher of their vision and that Jerry had his own views."
He was about to find out. Most of the other participants viewed the meeting not as an effort at reconciliation, but as the vehicle for an ouster.
The meeting opened in a strained atmosphere. Elkind was facing the most powerful members of his laboratory, including Lampson, Thacker, Mitchell, McCreight, Chuck Geschke, and Severo Ornstein. Their message, as McCreight recalled, was: "How about finding something else to do?"
"I'm pretty sure he'd been warned about why we were there to see him," Mitchell recalled. "I don't think this was completely out of the blue. He tried his best to be very calm. He didn't get mad and rail at us or anything. He tried to start it off with some bonhomie, trying to say, 'Gee, I'm glad to see you,' and everything. But man, you could see him shaking in his boots just under the surface, because he was being rejected. It was very hard for him."
Elkind listened, but did not capitulate. As the meeting broke up, he said: "It's up to George Pake to decide what should be done, and he invited me to come back to CSL."
Taylor's role in this challenge to Elkind's authority is hard to establish. He has always contended he had nothing to do with dispatching the delegation, and Elkind declines to hazard an opinion. "I don't have any idea whether Taylor encouraged those people to come," he said. On the other hand, Lampson, Thacker, McCreight, Geschke, and Ornstein were all among Taylor's "Greybeards," a sort of kitchen cabinet he relied on for technical and administrative advice. And it is far from implausible that after seven years as associate director—especially following Elkind s yearlong absence—Taylor might think he deserved to be de jure, not de facto, director of CSL.
Bobrow speculates that Taylor had finally recognized the limitations of being the power behind the throne. "When Jerry went off for a year," he said, "Bob got a sense of what it meant to actually have a throne."
In any case, Elkind did return to CSL as its director for a brief, uneasy period. "It was apparent that Bob had won the battle," Bobrow recalled.
All that remained was to find Elkind some face-saving retreat. Finally, when Jack Goldman parlayed the success of Futures Day into a chance to deploy the Alto as a "market probe" of the commercial acceptability of small computers, the path was clear. With Jerry Elkind appointed as its chief, the new Advanced Systems Division was authorized to put the Alto out into the world.
Elkind's transformation from the skeptic who vetoed Alan Kay's proposal for a small computer into proselytizer-in-chief of the Alto actually dated back to the first time he had seen Bravo running on an Alto screen, long before ASD's creation in January 1978. "I thought to myself, seeing the machines work and seeing the Bravo stuff, that it was just smashing."
The Taylor group's distaste for his management style notwithstanding, he had turned into one of the machine's hardiest champions. Now his enthusiasm was fired even more by the computer's commercial potential. Like Ellenby, Elkind was a bruised veteran of the 1976 battle between the Alto III and the Dallas-built 850 word processor. "A lot of us were feeling very frustrated," he said. "Like everyone, I was very anxious to get this stuff out."
The group he attracted to his new venture was a remarkable collection of talented malcontents. There were Ellenby and Tim Mott, who had felt the sting of headquarters indifference after Futures Day as well as the taste of power that comes from pulling off a hit performance on a lavish $l-million-plus budget. Another recruit was Charles Simonyi, who had made himself an undesirable at SDD by openly denigrating the biggerism of the Star. At ASD he found an entirely different culture and worked with renewed vigor, incorporating the Gypsy interface in a rewritten Bravo specifically tailored for the commercial Altos and known as BravoX.
Elkind took seriously ASD's mandate to develop outside markets by selective sales and leases of "pre-products." Taking over Ellenby's El Segundo-based Special Programs Group, he commandeered several projects they had already started, including one to produce word processors for Sweden's government-owned telephone company. The Swedes got Altos instead.
So, too, did the Carter White House, which awarded ASD a contract to create a document and file system for its information office. Altos running BravoX were installed in 1978, giving the otherwise ineffectual Carter Administration the distinction of being the first in history to use personal computers for word processing. The Senate and House of Representatives followed suit. "It turned out that if the White House was going to do it, then the House of Representatives and the Senate had to do it," Elkind remembered. "That was politics: As long as they all did it, they could all get the funding. If the White House tried to do it without the House and Senate, then they wouldn't get the money."
Other customers included the Atlantic Richfield Company in Los Angeles and the Seattle headquarters of Boeing Corporation. More machines went to Xerox divisions outside PARC, where demand was so fierce that Elkind, Pake, and a research executive from Rochester sat as a committee of three to allocate the scarce machines to employees of their own corporation.
For a short time Elkind's people reveled in the thrill of actually getting PARC technology out to the marketplace. "After we sold, like, twenty machines, we had this wonderful dinner in Palo Alto," Simonyi recalled. "I made this wo
nderful speech about how today it's ten machines, and next year it will be one hundred, and then ten thousand. Everybody was laughing from sheer hubris."
The inevitable crash landing awaited just over the horizon. As ASD placed more Altos out in the world, John Ellenby was receiving the all- too-familiar impression that he was hitting a brick wall. Rather than absorb the lesson that these were marketable products, Xerox management seemed largely to view ASD as a sort of stalking horse for the Star.
"It was a sacrificial thing," Ellenby said. "It was, 'Let's show some customers we're coming'—but it pissed off the customers that we didn't follow through with it." He compared himself more and more to a member of Eisenhower's expendable vanguard, like the decimated Canadians at Dieppe in 1944: "Market probes were good if they got follow-up. But you don't just go and land troops on a beachhead without a means of getting further inland or pulling them out."Adding to his frustration were the mounting signs that SDD was faltering. The Stars launch date was now off into the next decade, and not a sure thing even then. Ellenby saw a unique opportunity for Xerox to offer a computer product with proven market acceptance that could be ready in a matter of months. "Basically, I said if you really want to get some products out there quickly, then we can do it. We know people are willing to pay for these things because that has come out in the probes. We do need to perform the engineering that makes them high- quality, and we need to put in place the manufacturing. But we know how to do all that."
In late 1978 he consigned to paper a plan to manufacture an updated Alto out of electronic components available off the shelf, to be bundled with BravoX and a suite of SSL-developed office systems software known as OfficeTalk, as well as a black-and-white laser printer called the Penguin. The result was an inch-thick document whose title, "Capability Investment Proposal," aimed to stress the point that Xerox should implement the Alto program on a small scale, but with serious follow-through.
Drafting the proposal was only part of the battle, however, and a small part at that. Quite justifiably, Ellenby had doubts about how long it would take his report to wend its way up the Xerox chain of command. As it happened, the issue got taken out of his hands by a legendary corporate figure named Shelby H. Carter.
Then Xerox's national sales manager, Shelby Carter was the type of person who could not but bridle at Xerox's torpid decision-making. A Texan ex-Marine fighter pilot who pursued his quarry with the implacable force of a tornado and fashioned himself one of the greatest salesmen of all time (few customers dared disagree), Carter was a throwback to the old Xerox of relentless sales targets and blood-in-the-shoes pounding of pavement. Every bit as instinctive an inspirer of men as Bob Taylor, he preferred to work his magic among bigger crowds.
"He used to conduct what were known as Jet Squad Meetings," recalled David Kearns. "Carter would hop into the corporate jet and fly to two or three cities a day and stir up the troops. In New York City they might gather at Shea Stadium. Carter would stand on the pitcher's mound and deliver his spiel, and the salesmen in attendance would be spellbound. Then they would go out and sell copiers with an almost crazed intensity." On sales reps who met his exacting standards Carter would bestow the treasured memento of a Bowie knife mounted on a plaque. For many of them it meant more than a cash bonus.
By the late 1970s, however, Carters influence within the corporation was distinctly on the wane. With the possible exception of David Kearns, he could no longer command a rapt audience in the executive suite. The genetic code of the place had changed. "The hip-shooting Shelby Carters weren't listened to as much at meetings anymore," Kearns observed. "Carter would say, 'I have a hunch about this,' and everyone would respond, 'No way. We don't act on hunches.'"
One of Carter's hunches concerned the Alto. Convinced that a properly motivated sales force could sell the machine, big-time, he had placed a trusted lieutenant named Frank Sauer inside ASD to keep him up to date on the marketing program and to involve Xerox's Santa Clara sales office in the planning. One day Sauer slipped him a copy of Ellenby's proposal. Carter, who had been deeply involved in the Futures Day planning and appreciated Ellenby's talents as a result, "took a look and got pretty excited," Ellenby recalled. "He was a great believer in making things happen. So one day he happened to be sitting next to David Kearns at a New York Mets game and said, 'Hey, John's team is really up to something exciting. Don't forget these are the guys who did Boca Raton for you.' And Kearns said, 'Get me a copy right away.'"
The proposal thus skipped over several levels of management on its way to the top. This was a dangerous move. As much as senior executives liked to talk about tearing down the bureaucratic walls to get Xerox moving again, they remained very fussy about protocol. When word filtered down that the proposal had somehow reached Kearns, Ellenby was assumed to have deliberately leaked it to the chief executive—understandably, since his can-do style at Boca Raton had earned him the reputation of "a hot shot who got the job done regardless of other people's organizational feelings," as he put it himself. An "extremely pissed off' Elkind even threatened to fire him, Ellenby recalled.
Ellenby denied having had anything to do with sending the report upstream. But now that it was done, he remained unrepentant. He was fed up with Xerox and considered the proposal his last crack at achieving his goals within the organization. If it did not fly, he was ready to go off and start his own company. He also felt that the proposal would never have made it to top management any other way.
"Elkind would not have passed it to his boss, who would not have passed it to his boss," he said. "Xerox did not work that way."
He was right. Elkind said later he did not think Ellenby’s program could ever succeed within Xerox, even absent "the disruption of bouncing it several steps up the management chain"—especially with the Star still holding pride of place as the corporation’s designated spearhead in office systems. Carters impertinence had earned the Alto no friends. As Elkind predicted, the proposal met with nothing but resistance and hostility all the way along the management line.
Still, it might have succeeded had Kearns thrown some real weight behind it. This he was unwilling to do. Having reached down to grab the proposal as though to demonstrate he could be as entrepreneurial and spontaneous as the next man, he turned it over to a deputy for a routine appraisal.
The deputy, Robert Wenrik, tested it against the judgments of the usual suspects, including SDD and Bob Potter. Both found plenty to carp at, including the perennial issue of cost. In the end Wenrik shot down Ellenby’s work with a bureaucratically vacuous rejection letter. "We have concluded that Xerox will not adopt the proposal you have prescribed," it read; "however, we appreciate the thought you have given to the many issues covered in your proposal. . ."
"I kept a copy," Ellenby said one day many years later, withdrawing it from his files. "Its pretty interesting what he did say here, like 'Some of the challenges which you clearly identified are being pursued through the normal management channels, and should be resolved over the next few weeks . . 'Which was not the case, because they never were. And 'Your proposal assisted us in dealing with the problem more expeditiously than we normally might have . . .' I don't think that's true, I think actually the proposal delayed things, it was like throwing a wrench into the works.
"Then he goes on to say, 'I'm confident that you will continue your support to the challenges we face in Jerry Elkind's probe activity Knowing full well that Jerry wanted to fire me."
In January 1980, about one year after receiving Wenrik’s letter, Ellenby quit Xerox. Partially with the money he had earned in his corporate profit-sharing plan by staying the extra year, he founded a company called Grid Systems, which manufactured the world’s first laptop computers. The product line derived not from any work he had done at Xerox, whose lawyers had cautioned him sternly against recruiting any of his team members to his new company, but from flat-panel display and microprocessor technology he had learned from Ferranti. The dream of t
ransferring PARC's technology to the outside would have to wait. Ellenby, like so many others, had found it impossible to accomplish this as an employee of a company that treated his brand of aggressive advocacy purely as a threat.
"Dave Kearns took it upon himself to come out to PARC and spend a bit of time discussing my capability proposal after he saw it," Ellenby recalled. "He said, 'What will you do if I decide not to do this?'
"I said, 'I'll make sure my folks are well set and happy within their corporation because they like this corporation. But I'm going to have to leave, David, because I've burned too many bridges.'
CHAPTER 20
The Worm That Ate the Ethernet
One morning in 1978 dozens of PARC scientists arrived at work to discover their Altos were dead. At first this did not raise any alarm. The crash of an Alto was a common enough phenomenon and easily remedied: One simply reached over and pressed a reset switch Thacker had obligingly provided on the console. The machine then rebooted from a spare disk coded with a copy of the operating system or, if one was not available, remotely by Ethernet.
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