The interview was with Bill English. As usual, English was in desperate search of engineers to help him and Bill Duvall complete POLOS. Fairbairn spent three years entangled in POLOS hardware implementing the terminal system, which meant bringing together the TV display, keyboard, and mouse. (The ergonomic design of the latter consumed him for weeks. "I spent a lot of time on the cord. A normal cord would cause the mouse to move if you took your hand off. Then I found a wound cord that stayed put, but constantly unraveled. We ended up spending an incredible number of hours looking for the right insulated cord.")
Bert Sutherland, who was more willing than Taylor to tolerate independent projects in his lab, but wielded an even more ruthless hatchet when they did not work out, canceled Sierra and POLOS within weeks of each other in 1975—the former because of its impracticality, the latter because it was finally and unmistakably overtaken by the Alto. His two ace hardware designers were still looking for their next projects when Mead showed up a few months later. Whether it was their enforced idleness or their experience in building systems whose sheer size had gotten out of hand, both were captivated by his discussions of how to handle machine complexity.
"Lynn Conway and I," Fairbairn remembered, "were the ones who said, 'This VLSI is hot shit.'" They immersed themselves in the new technology, Fairbairn commuting weekly from Palo Alto to his parents' home in Los Angeles so he could sit in on Mead's classes at Caltech.
Mead was similarly seduced by PARC's atmosphere of pure invention. Having spent years on campus and also been involved in commercial start-ups, he viewed PARC as a unique hybrid of both without the downside of either. "There was a lot more teamwork than in academia," he said. "It was about getting things done, not about publishing papers."
Nor was there the agitation to get product out the door he had observed at hard-charging enterprises like Intel. Instead he found himself surrounded by the enthusiasm for learning as an end in itself that drives people to come early to their labs and stay late into the night. Mead considered himself a pathologically early riser, but he could never remember a morning at PARC on which he was the first one in the building. "I'd get in at six in the morning," he said, "and Alan Kay would already be there."
He was even more profoundly impressed by the power of the integrated computing environment they had invented. "It was really obvious to me that this whole thing with the network and Altos and the file and printer servers was dynamite, and that it was going to be the way computing got done."
For the next year Caltech and PARC educated each other. Mead transferred his theories about microelectronics and computer science, and Conway and Fairbairn paid him back by developing design methods and tools giving engineers the ability to create integrated circuits of unprecedented complexity on Alto-sized workstations. The science of VLSI was developing exactly as Mead had predicted. Systems that previously could be realized only as shaggy mats of diodes and wire strung on six-foot metal racks were getting reduced to filigreed etchings on the silvery surface of a silicon wafer—and they worked. They were approaching the goal of modularity, in which circuits that once required a square yard of schematic diagram could be reduced to a single compact chip for a computer designer to plug into a machine, like a simple building block from which a child can build a model skyscraper.
"This headed us in the direction of designing and building bigger, better, more elegant things," Conway said. "Everybody's ambition was cranking up month by month."
They were a noisy group, given to loud and sometimes angry debates in the hallways that reminded people of a Dealer in full cry. Conway and Mead made for prickly teammates, sometimes collaborating, sometimes quarreling openly about how to organize and explain a technology moving ahead at breakneck speed. "Carver and I were both highly crazed by all this," Conway recalled. "We'd compete and conflict with each other and there was so much noise around the project that it didn't seem completely sane."
VLSI also left some of their colleagues behind. The Computer Science Lab still held to the party line that VLSI was an untested technology and would remain so until there was proof the chips could be manufactured and exploited on a commercial scale. Mead was accustomed to such skepticism and on the whole untroubled by it. "At the time, the common wisdom was that if you make these things smaller and faster they'll just melt," he recalled. As early as 1971 he had written a paper predicting that the tiny chips would soon be part of every telephone, washing machine, and car. Nothing he had yet seen on the technical landscape suggested he should revise his opinion.
But Conway and Fairbairn were more sensitive to how their work was viewed by others at PARC. She felt CSL was not giving them the benefit of the doubt. "They didn't seem to recognize that we were principled scientists who had our own self-check on things."
She was right: CSL was profoundly dubious. "I didn't like what Lynn Conway's group was doing and I didn't think it was very productive," Lampson complained, troubled to see valuable PARC resources draining down a speculative rathole. Adding to the pain, Xerox was again tightening up the budget just as CSL was hoping to launch a few new initiatives.
"There was a zero-sum game in PARC resources and we thought there were all kinds of great opportunities for things we might do," he recalled. 'We wanted to get into databases and things like spreadsheets which we had completely ignored in the past. We wanted to do a lot of work on user interfaces and programming environments, all sorts of things. We did what we could, but it seemed clear that with more resources we could do a lot more."
Conway started to feel that something had to be done to fight off CSL's criticisms. Sutherland was a strong defender of her work, but by nature he was not a confrontational individual. If the computer lab—particularly Lampson, who commanded management's respect—continued to carp at the money being spent on the hazy potential of VLSI, who knew how long she could survive at PARC? Especially since the power of the technology did not leap out at first glance. Compared to commercial integrated circuits, the schematics of VLSI looked simple and amateurish on the surface, because they employed novel, unfamiliar design techniques that had never been employed in building earlier generations of integrated circuits.
While discussing this one day with Mead and Fairbairn she realized the problem was not just scientific, but cultural. VLSI had not been around long enough even to generate textbooks and college courses—the paraphernalia of sound science that, she was convinced, would force everyone else to take it seriously.
"We should write the book," she told Mead. "A book that communicates the simplest, most elegant rules and methods for VLSI design would make it look like a mature, proven science, like anything does if it's been around for the ten or fifteen years you normally have behind a textbook."
Mead was skeptical. They had no publisher and, given that they normally worked in two locations five hundred miles apart, no easy way of collaborating.
That's where you're wrong, she replied. What was the aim of all the technology that surrounded them at PARC, if not to facilitate just the project she was proposing? They had Altos running Bravo, a network to link long-distance collaborators, and high-speed laser-driven Dover printers to produce professional-looking manuscripts.
"With all that," she said, "we can do it, and get it out there fast, and it'll look just like a regular textbook."
Their collaboration that summer on what became the seminal text of the new technology was only one of Conway's efforts to distill and spread the VLSI gospel. The same year she agreed to teach a guest course at MIT (using the first few chapters of the still-maturing textbook), then printed up her lecture notes for instructors at an ever-enlarging circle of interested universities. By mid-1979 she was able to offer an additional incentive to a dozen schools: If they would transmit student designs to
PARC over the ARPANET, PARC would arrange to have the chips built, packaged, and returned to the students for testing.
That summer her offer came t
o the attention of Jim Clark, then an untenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.
Clark had no prior expertise in integrated circuit design. "He'd never even worked in silicon before," Conway recalled. But his expertise in computer graphics came from well within PARC's universe: He had received his doctorate at the University of Utah, where his thesis advisor was Ivan Sutherland and his research funding had come from ARPA.
At Utah and later at Stanford, Clark was driven by the impulse to push the technology of graphics beyond the limits of existing hardware. As one of his Stanford students later recalled of a meeting in 1979, "The first day I went to speak to Jim, he pointed to a picture of an airplane he had up on the wall. 'I'm going to make this move,' he said."
Like no one PARC had seen since Bob Metcalfe, he was also driven to explore all the commercial possibilities of his work, academia be damned. ("I love the metric of business," he told an interviewer in 1994. "It's money. It's real simple. You either make money or you don't. The metric of the university is politics.")
Clark understood at once that the computing efficiency VLSI offered was the key to expanding the potential of computer graphics. That summer he essentially relocated to PARC, taking over a vacant office next door to Conway's and steeping himself in VLSI lore. Within four months he had finished the Geometry Engine chip, the product of that summer's total immersion.
Perhaps more than any other project, Clark's chip fulfilled Conway's quest to give VLSI credibility. Not only did it launch computer graphics as a profitable segment of high-powered computing, it showed that the unprecedented complex circuits could be designed rapidly, and then manufactured in huge quantities that would work flawlessly in an industrial context. The technology eventually matured into today's generation of Motorola and Intel microprocessors, which run most of the world's desktop computers, as well as a wide range of special-purpose circuits. Carver Mead's prediction did come true. VLSI did turn every telephone, washing machine, and car—and thousands of other workaday appliances as well—into tiny computers. (Clark's expectations were fulfilled too: Silicon Graphics Inc. made him a multi-millionaire.)
Carver Mead performed one more service for PARC after completing of the VLSI text with Lynn Conway. This was a visit he paid to Stamford to warn Xerox of the dangers of squelching the inventiveness at PARC.
The mission grew out of a conversation he had one day with Pake and Bert Sutherland. "I told them Xerox has got to get itself together," he recalled, "because there's no way a big company can take advantage of things moving this fast. People will get frustrated and start their own companies. Pake said, 'You should talk to the people at corporate headquarters.'"
Meads familiarity with new-technology companies such as Intel won him a respectful audience from McColough and Kearns. "I spent a delightful morning with those guys," he said. "I told them, 'You'll never have a better shot. If people leave because they don't see anything happening, that'll be like a bomb going off inside PARC. The only question is whether you participate and enable it, or let it happen for someone else.'"
"What do you suggest?" Kearns asked.
"Set up a venture capital arm," Mead advised. "Smell out the technology, find it, incubate it. Take an equity position in things as they happen, otherwise it'll all be gone and you won't have any part of it."
What he proposed would become standard operating procedure in American business twenty years later under the label "intrapreneuring"—a way to nurture innovation outside the dead hand of a corporation's entrenched bureaucracy. In 1979, however, Xerox management regarded the concept as too elaborate to take seriously. That day over lunch Kearns confided to Mead that tradition's hold on Xerox was almost too powerful even for him, its president and heir apparent to the chairmanship.
"Let me tell you a story about big companies," Kearns said. Xerox employed a group of engineers to tear apart every new machine coming off the production line. Their goal was to figure out the most likely problems that would crop up under the stress and strain of daily operation, develop routines to fix them, and warn the design engineers of their mistakes. Yet every new model incorporated the same design blunders as the last. Finally the service engineers took matters into their own hands by designing their own machine. This was the Model 3100, a proposed desktop copier which, with its high reliability and decent resolution, was the closest thing Xerox could offer to compete with the Japanese models devouring its customer base. Yet instead of winning praise and rewards from the company, the bootlegging research engineers were widely vilified for interfering in the design process.
"You know what?" Kearns told Mead. "I spend most of my time trying to keep the rest of the company from killing those guys."
Mead shook his head. No company so riven by tribal conflicts would ever bring itself to welcome the exceptional gifts of PARC. He returned to California with a mixed message, if a prescient one, about the likely fate of the powerful technologies he had himself used to such wonderful effect. He was sure they would sooner or later be developed and marketed for the world. But he was almost equally sure that when this happened, Xerox Corporation would be standing glumly on the sidelines.
CHAPTER 22
The Crisis of Biggerism
One day Alan Kay sat alone in the conference room of the Systems Science Lab, feeling a powerful urge to trash Smalltalk and start over from scratch.
For some time he had watched uneasily as his own group succumbed to the software equivalent of biggerism. With every iteration of Smalltalk—they were now on the fourth version, Smalltalk-76—he felt the language had become more elaborate, more sophisticated— and farther removed from his original vision of a system easy enough for children to learn.
But Smalltalk-76 was only the latest blow to Kay's dream of a transparently simple programming language. The first, sadly, had been delivered by the children themselves. They had stopped learning.
The flush of triumph Kay and Adele Goldberg felt from teaching the Jordan kids how to program had barely worn off before they realized they had accomplished far less than they thought. While ten or a dozen kids had shown genuine aptitude and creativity in programming, these turned out to be the cream of an exceptional subset, pupils from the gifted track of one of the best school systems in the country. Most of the Jordan kids still struggled with the most rudimentary concepts as though they were programming in Greek.
Kay realized he had expected too much from the start. No matter how lucid the software interface or natural the commands, programming still presented difficulties to children—not to mention to many of the nonprofessional adults at PARC he had tried teaching as well—that could only be surmounted in one of two ways: by intuition (a gift granted to a precious few), or by being told the answer. He finally capitulated to reality that day in the SSL conference room, as he sat pondering a whiteboard on which he had scribbled out the code for a simple problem that had left his subjects confounded. With a shock he realized it was full of ideas obvious only to diose who were, like himself, already steeped in the techniques and culture of computing. "I counted the number of non-obvious ideas in this little program. They came to 17," he recollected. "And some of them were like the concept of the arch in building design: very hard to discover, if you don't already know them."
He was disheartened to discover that what had seemed at first to be a spectacular breakthrough with a group of preadolescents was nothing more than the "hacker phenomenon" at work: "For any given pursuit, a particular five per cent of the population will jump into it naturally, while the eighty per cent or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural." It was also painfully evident that maintaining the learning curve of even the most talented kids demanded a tremendous effort by teacher and student—even here in Palo Alto, an ideal setting that would be impossible to reproduce on a large scale.
Perhaps the instinctively understandable programming system he sought was a chimera after all. As Adele kep
t reminding him, "It's hard to claim success if only some of the children are successful."
He was forced to wonder whether his very approach had been misguided. He had been convinced that teaching lads to program at an early age would permanently shape their thought processes. His real ambition had been to provide them with a singular window on human enlightenment. Yet his experiments led him to a contradictory conclusion. Programming did not teach people how to think—he realized he knew too many narrow-minded programmers for that to be so, now that he considered the question in depth. The truth was the converse: Every individual's ingrained way of thinking affected how he or she programmed.
And was it not the same in every other field of human creativity? "A remarkable number of artists, scientists, philosophers are quite dull outside of their specialty (and one suspects within it as well)," he said later. "The first siren's song we need to be wary of is the one that promises a connection between an interesting pursuit and interesting thoughts. The music is not in the piano, and it is possible to graduate Juilliard without finding or feeling it."
Suddenly he felt a powerful desire to throw out all the old tools and start afresh. Scarcely four years after he had first outlined his ideas to the Learning Research Group, he was ready to make another run at the grail of simplicity. Drawn toward a new vision of Ideaspace, he brought the entire group to Pajaro Dunes for a three-day offsite in January 1976 to chart the new journey. Re-infused with enthusiasm, he even gave the retreat a theme-—"Let's burn our disk packs," an allusion to the big yellow Alto storage disks on which they kept Smalltalk's master code.
Dealers of Lightning Page 37