"Maybe so, but our computers are worth ten to twenty thousand dollars in parts alone and they sell theirs for a hundred bucks. We're trying to do a cheap portable computer and we only have room for twenty-five chips on each board."
"Then you'll never do Ethernet," Metcalfe replied. "You'll have to wait for the Ethernet integrated circuit, which is at least five years away."
"We can't wait," Tesler replied.
Then he recrossed the street and set about proving Metcalfe wrong. Tesler and Fairbairn compressed the Ethernet design as you might wring out a damp sponge, working it down to twenty-four chips by shunting more of the work to software than Metcalfe thought possible. The result was a board that just barely kept up with the three-megabit-per-second PARC Ethernet—but that did fit inside the Notetaker. ("Metcalfe loved it," Tesler recalled. "But he was already working on the ten-megabit Ethernet for SDD, so it wasn't relevant to anything he was doing.")
***
The Garage rolled out the first Dorados in 1978 to conspicuous acclaim. "The Dorado was the only really great computer that PARC built," judged Ed Fiala, who had played a role in every previous CSL hardware project. Where the Alto had been slow even for its time, the Dorado was a speed demon by any contemporary standard. "All the funky old Alto software ran on the Dorado so fast I got headaches from not waiting," Jim Morris recalled. "Suddenly I realized that for the first time, I'm the bottleneck."
For a Time Machine, the Dorado was also relatively inexpensive. Moore's Law was beginning to make its power known in earnest: The machine cost only about $50,000 in parts while delivering the computing resources of three powerful Digital Equipment Corporation VAX-11/780 workstations, which sold for $500,000 each in 1980.
The machine's power almost shook its creators' faith that they were building something for individuals to use. "It was difficult to think of the Dorado as a personal machine, since it consumed 2,500 watts of power, was the size of a refrigerator, and required 2,000 cubic feet of cooling air per minute," Thacker said later. Yet that, after all, was the essence of the Time Machine. Potent as the Dorado was, he was still confident that something on the same scale would be available on a desktop to the individual user within five or ten years, and he was right.
Meanwhile the CSL's programmers plunged into work that had been stymied by the Alto's limitations of speed and memory. Deutsch, Teitelman, and several others had already compiled a "wish list" of desirable features of an ideal programming system. To their delight, Dorado was powerful enough to incorporate them all into a system they called "Cedar."
Cedar combined the best features of Mesa and Smalltalk. It offered the former's industrial strength and clarity, which allowed programs written by one person to be understood and elaborated on by others, without giving up the latter's graphical flexibility or its nifty features such as "garbage collection"—a sort of housekeeping function that used memory more efficiently by automatically clearing memoiy space occupied by data a program no longer needed.
For all its performance enhancements, the Dorado did have a few significant flaws. For one thing, it could not coexist in an office with a human being. The machine’s voracious appetite for electricity made it radiate heat like a barbecue pit, while the fans created an unimaginable din. In an attempt to make the machine quiet enough for an office, the designer tried housing it in a case so bulky it was nicknamed the "armored personnel carrier." But the sound-insulating material stuffed inside only made the system run hotter, which made the fans work harder, which created more noise and heat in an endless, vicious circle.
"They were such an efficient heater in the office that the guy just about had to work in his underwear," recalled Charles Sosinski, a PARC technician. Eventually they hit upon the solution of removing the Dorados from the offices altogether, stowing twenty machines together in a single, very well air-conditioned room from which they were linked by cable to the terminals, keyboards, and mice in individual offices.
But these technical problems never quelled the furious demand for the swift and robust machines.
"People would say, 'I could get my work done in an hour, and it would take me all day on an Alto,'" Sosinski remembered. For the first time since a couple of prototypical Altos nicknamed Bilbo and Gandalf emerged from CSL's basement shop, there were not enough computers at PARC to go around. Even after full-scale production began, the Garage was able to turn out no more than ten or fifteen Dorados a year; in 1982 there were still only thirty in existence. Some junior scientists, especially those outside the favored halls of CSL, were reduced to reliving the bad old days of time-sharing. "It was very hard to get Dorados for quite a long time," recalled Diana Merry. "When we were writing Smalltalk-80 I would have to come in late at night, because that was the only way to get one to work on."
Almost simultaneously with the Dorado, the first Notetaker prototype was completed. Kay immediately termed it a triumph. What it lacked in the Dorado's overwhelming power it made up for with a sort of bantam-scale elan.
The Notetaker ran a compact version of Smalltalk-76 and boasted an ingenious physical design that would be shamelessly mimicked by the first generation of so-called "luggable" computers six years later. When closed the computer looked like a plump plastic attache case. One opened it cross-seetionally, like a cracked-open egg, by flipping two latches. The screen and disk drive were set in the larger piece, facing the user when the box was laid flat on a table. The keyboard was part of the second, smaller section, connected to the first by a flexible cable.
Bolted back into one piece, the Notetaker could be carried, albeit with great effort. Lifting it by the built-in handle strained the plastic case until it warped. "We used to say it ran at five herniations per block," Kay joked. To avoid rupturing the case and dumping ten thousand dollars' worth of components on the ground like groceries out of a wet paper bag, Tesler and Fairbairn built a rolling cart that also allowed them to slide it, just barely, under the seat of an airliner. One day Fairbairn, bringing the prototype to Rochester for a show-and-tell, fired it up on its batteries in mid- flight, therefore becoming the very first person to operate a personal computer on an airplane—the first of a legion of electronic road warriors wired to their work at 35,000 feet.
The Dorado and the Notetaker shared one other distinction. They were the last major projects undertaken at PARC by the scientists of its first generation. Between 1978 and 1982 the Dorado almost entirely replaced the Alto as the computer of choice inside PARC, and elicited numerous expressions of interest from customers on the outside. But no assembly line other than the low-volume Garage was ever approved by Xerox. Come 1983, a series of dramatic events would strip the Dorado of its design team and render it a technological orphan.
The Learning Research Group manufactured ten Notetakers and tried in vain, as usual, to interest Xerox in the product. Tesler spent the better part of a year flying around the country displaying the prototype to division executives. But whatever influence PARC ever had in Stamford or Rochester had visibly drained away. "Xerox executives made all sorts of promises," Tesler said. " "We'll buy 20,000, just talk to this executive in Virginia, then talk to this executive in Connecticut.' After a year I was ready to give up."
Soon after the last Notetaker was built, Alan Kay announced that he was taking a long-promised sabbatical. For Kay the project's exhilaration had already yielded to his familiar feelings of despair. The Notetaker was enticingly similar to the old cardboard model he had once used to illustrate the Dynabook. But his unquiet nature was to focus not on how close it came but on where it fell short. His outward glee at creating a new machine masked his real disappointment at how its compromises on weight and size had once again "squeezed out the end-users for whom it was originally aimed"—that is, the children.
Southern California beckoned. He had a new girlfriend, Bonnie MacBird, who he had met while she was researching a screenplay about computer wizards and who lived in Los Angeles. (After endless tinkerings
by Hollywood executives this screenplay became the movie Tron, which came out in 1982, two years after Kay and MacBird were married. "We like to say the marriage turned out a lot better than the movie," he said.) He announced he was temporarily relocating to L.A. to take organ lessons. He never returned to PARC.
Adele Goldberg took over the group after his departure. She was the logical choice, like Ingalls a champion implementer, as she proved by shepherding the next version of Smalltalk to completion—Smalltalk-80. A few years later with Dave Robson, another team member, she wrote the definitive Smalltalk textbook.
But the Learning Research Group was a veiy different place without Kay, its font of ideas. "It was like getting our heart cut out when he left," Merry recalled. "It wasn't too long after he left that we had another Pajaro Dunes offsite. I remember that being veiy sad, the first Pajaro Dunes when Alan wasn't diere. We missed him very badly. It really was in many ways the end of a lot of the good stuff."
The rest of them hung on for another couple of years, finishing old projects. Some started looking for new challenges. Larry Tesler, fed up by his fruitless quest to interest Xerox in the Notetaker, was awaiting only a sign of when and where he should go.
That sign appeared one day in 1979, when a Silicon Valley legend in the making walked through PARC's front door.
CHAPTER 23
Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell
Thus we come to Steven P. Jobs.
The Apple Computer co-founders visit to PARC, from which he reputedly spirited off the ideas that later made the Apple Macintosh famous, is one of the foundation legends of personal computing, as replete with drama and consequence as the story of David and Goliath or the fable of the mouse and the lion with an injured paw. It holds enough material to serve the mythmaking of not one corporation but two, Xerox and Apple. If one seeks proof of its importance, one need look no further than the fact that to this date no two people involved in the episode recollect it quite the same way.
For a chronicler of PARC this presents a unique difficulty. No anecdote from PARC's history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. The collective memory of the Jobs visit and of its aftermath is so vivid that some former PARC scientists are no longer sure whether they were there themselves, or just heard about it later. PARC engineers and their guests from Apple disagree with each other (and among dremselves) about who delivered which portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado; and whether Steve Jobs was desperate to get a look at PARC's technology, or so dubious about anything produced by a big corporation that he had to be wheedled into going in the first place.
Some of these discrepancies result from the demo's patchwork nature. "Nobody knows everything that happened, because there's nobody that was there all the time," says Larry Tesler, who was present for more of it than most.
Nobody, that is, except Adele Goldberg, who nevertheless agrees with Tesler that it is difficult for almost anyone to have a lock on the demo's ultimate truth. She thinks of the Jobs demo in terms of the story about the eight blind men and the elephant, each one stroking a different part of the same animal: "It's unbelievable to me the number of eyes on this elephant in people's memories. It just astounds me. Sometimes I just have to go, 'I'm right! Because I was the only one there all the time!'"
Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple's mythmaking rather than PARC's. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs's peerless perspicacity as Xerox's obtuseness. The author who wrote, "You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery . . . the slickest trick of all was Apple s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center" perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at what really happened.
Yet it is possible to resolve all these accounts and reconstruct a stoiy that has never before been told in its entirety. To take the most obvious questions first: There were two separate demonstrations, not one, and the second covered all the most secret material. They occurred in December 1979. The computer was almost surely an Alto and the principal demonstrators were Goldberg, Tesler, Dan Ingalls, and Diana Merry. Steve Jobs was initially skeptical of what PARC might have to offer but allowed his engineers to convince him otherwise. As for Jobs's acuity, he later admitted that he was shown three mind-bending innovations at PARC, but the first one was so dazzling it blinded him to the significance of the second and third.
Perhaps most important, the Steve Jobs demo was not a random event or a stroke of luck for Apple, as it has sometimes been portrayed. Apple's engineers knew what they were after. They had taken great pains to plan for the moment, and they arrived at PARC fully prepared to ask the right questions and interpret the answers. The seed of the famous Job’s demo, in fact, had been carefully planted eight months earlier.
The occasion was a meeting on April 2, 1979, in an office building at 9200 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The host was Xerox Development Corporation, a unique little fiefdom that operated with great independence from the headquarters in Stamford.
Steve Jobs, the quintessential countercultural entrepreneur, was there to offer the corporate behemoth of Xerox a deal. He knew Xerox desired to invest in Apple, which would soon go public in one of the most eagerly anticipated stock offerings of the era. Jobs was wiling to let the company in on the ground floor in return for access to Xerox technology—just what technology, he was not yet quite sure—and to Xerox's marketing knowledge.
This was the sort of pitch the principals of Xerox Development Corporation were used to hearing. Formed for the purpose of making strategic investments in small technology companies, XDC existed as a sort of personal playground for a brilliant but rather irksome executive named Abraham Zarem. Xerox had acquired Dr. Abe Zarem the same way it got Max Palevsky: by purchasing his company. In his case it was Pasadena-based Electro-Optical Systems, which, as its name implied, did research in leading-edge optical technologies, including lasers. When Xerox bought EOS in 1962, Joe Wilson predicted that within a decade most of the corporation's profits would come from such new technologies. That never happened, but the acquisition did turn Zarem into Xerox's single largest shareholder, a distinction he held until dislodged by Palevsky seven years later. By then Xerox, disenchanted with Zarem's costly and fruitless attempts to transform EOS into a major government contractor, was searching for a way to keep him happy but distracted. The answer was to create a venture unit and place him in charge. Thus was XDC born.
For all his faults, Zarem was an experienced hand at the difficult process of moving technology from the laboratory to the commercial marketplace; that was how he had made EOS into an attractive acquisition target in the first place. By 1979, seeing that the same familiar issues had sprung up around PARC's work, he resolved to stick his nose in. His idea was to turn the technology over to a young, hungry company with a modest cost structure—one that would not dither endlessly about whether a promising innovation would fit into its tradition-encrusted product line but would simply march ahead (while paying Xerox royalties). A company, say, like Apple.
The idea was not wholly implausible. Apple was coming on strong. Started in the proverbial Silicon Valley garage by Jobs and his high school classmate Steve Wozniak, Apple had successfully negotiated the transition in its product line from kit versions of Woz's little personal computer to a more versatile version, the Apple II. This machine was unique in the hobbyist market. It came already assembled, with a keyboard (although it required a separate monitor). Shortly after Jobs's appearance before Zarem's group, Apple started bundling it with VisiCalc, a unique software program known as a financial spreadsheet—a "killer app" that would single-handedly turn the Apple II into a popular businessman's tool.
With fewer than forty employees in 1978, Apple was already one of the most sought-after investments among the small community of speculative private investors know
n as venture capitalists. When the company raised $7 million in "mezzanine" financing during the summer of 1979, traditionally one of the last private offerings before a company sells stock to the public, the sixteen buyers included some of the most prominent institutional investors in the country. Xerox would almost surely have been shut out, had not one of Jobs's advisors finally won a long-standing argument.
The advisor was Jef Raskin, a talented computer engineer and artist who had joined Apple to help design the Apple II. Raskin knew that the Apple founders' low opinion of big business was the product of Wozniak's experience as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where his proposal for a personal computer project had been rebuffed by his bosses. The incident "ever after remained part of their psychological motivation," Raskin recalled. "Jobs repeatedly told me (and anybody else he could get hold of) that a large corporation like Xerox couldn't do anything interesting."
But Raskin had friends working at PARC. At their invitation, he had watched dazzling new technologies take shape on Coyote Hill Road.
Around the time the mezzanine financing was being assembled, he won Jobs over. When Xerox asked to be included in the deal, Jobs made his pitch: In exchange for an invitation to PARC, he would sell the corporation 100,000 private shares at $10.50 each. XDC agreed to fork over the $1.05 million, and one of the unlikeliest—if shortest-lived—alliances in high technology history was forged.
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