If Steve Jobs harbored an enduring mistrust of big companies, Apple Computer was scarcely a blip on the radar screen of most PARC engineers. They were Ph.D.s who had worked on some of the biggest computing projects the world had ever seen; Apple was a bunch of tinkers. The "personal computers" of the day were hobbyists' kits, contraptions with names like the Altair and the Commodore PET that arrived in pieces for sixteen-year-olds to drip solder on until something started to work, usually to their own amazement, so they could spend hours staring at the blinking red lights that served as output displays. What a joke! Blinking lights had gone out with the Whirlwind computer in the 1950s; they were as relevant to PARC's definition of computing—Altos with graphics programs and bitmapped displays—as were relics of the Flint Age. The general opinion on Coyote Hill was that Apple's customers were a waste of time. They were not very sharp, they were self-taught, and their machines were toys.
Such, at least, was the reaction of people who had never met Steve Jobs. Those who had made his acquaintance came away with a stronger, and often less favorable, impression.
The Jobs of this period—call it the "pre-Armani era"—wore scruffy like a badge of honor. He was perpetually clad in blue jeans, with a black beard that never seemed to grow in. His thin lips seemed locked in a knowing smirk. Ever since he was twenty years old and worth zero on paper he had worn his pride and contempt nakedly. Thwart him, and it scarcely mattered whether you were an eighdi-grade dropout or a Ph.D. in electrical engineering; he would trash your arguments like they were so much chaff in the blades of a thresher.
Jobs's associates had a label for his unyielding confidence in his own vision and judgment. They called it his "reality distortion field." He lived securely within his worldview and seemed to exist chiefly for the purpose of imposing it on others. He had a way of seeming at once intolerably brash and older than his years. Those were the qualities that enabled him to hold the experienced investors of XDC rapt by relating the story of how he had founded Apple. Those, and the fact that at the age of twenty-four he was the chairman of a company already worth $70 million.
A small handful of PARC engineers, like Larry Tesler, had not allowed their preconceptions about Apples customers or Jobs's personality to cloud their perception of where these little computers might lead. Rather than shun the growing underground of youthful hackers, Tesler dove in. For a year or two he had been attending such cultural events as meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, where young Altair and Commodore users met to trade their tiny software programs and swap lore. He was no stranger to Apple, having gone out with a woman who worked for the company. "I'd been to an Apple picnic as her date in 1978, when there were thirty employees," Tesler recalled. "It was at Marineworld in Redwood City and the entire staff, with kids, fit around four picnic tables."
Tesler thought PARC orthodoxy had blinded it to this alternative culture. He also thought he understood why. PETs and Apples were not the pedigreed offspring of the academic time-sharing tradition like the Alto and almost every other machine PARC had built. They had sprouted from an entirely different technology, that of the silicon microprocessor, the so-called "computer-on-a-chip" developed by Intel and Motorola (Apple would long be designed around the Motorola chip, while IBM-compatible PCs, which came later, would be based on the Intel version). As he had lectured Bob Metcalfe during the Notetaker's design phase, he believed PARC could learn from the kids. In fact, had to. If PARC did not change its attitude, he felt, it was going to look back one of these days and discover it had been passed by.
Tesler's opinion was well enough known on Coyote Hill that one day in late 1979 Harold Hall summoned him to a secret meeting in his office. Tesler arrived to find himself part of a tidy little gathering that included Bill Gunning and Roy Lalir, a Xerox functionary who had been dispatched by Abe Zarem to keep a solicitous eye on Jobs. They explained that they were seeking advice on how to manage an entry into the personal computer market and had heard Tesler might be an ideal source.
"You see," Lahr revealed, "we've invested in Apple."
"I said, 'That's great,'" Tesler recalled. "Lahr and Gunning explained that Xerox couldn't build computers cheaply enough to compete because its cost structures were very high. 'If we built a paper clip it would cost three thousand bucks,' they complained. I agreed."
Then they informed Tesler that their scheme was to get Apple to build computers for Xerox.
"Under what kind of arrangement?" he asked.
"We don't know yet," Lahr replied. "But they took our money on condition they could see what was going on at Xerox PARC. They didn't really need the money because everyone wanted in on Apple. But they let us invest."
Tesler's enthusiasm for giving Apple a look inside PARC placed him in a distinct minority on Coyote Hill, especially within the Systems Science Lab, where much of the Smalltalk software was still officially closely guarded.
The lab fragmented into opposite camps, their membership largely based on how one assessed the chances that Xerox might eventually get around to bringing out the technology on its own. Tesler, who had all but given up, saw no reason not to show Apple everything they had. Adele Goldberg, who still cherished the hope that they might yet bring Smalltalk to market under the Xerox banner—or at least that Xerox might let them keep some control over the work they had slaved over for so many years—had a different view. She felt adamantly that disclosing PARC's intellectual property to a team of engineers capable of understanding it and, worse, exploiting it commercially would be a mortal error. "I wanted a deal to happen," Tesler observed. "Adele was trying to kill one."*
*Goldberg maintains that Tesler is incorrect in portraying her as specifically opposing a Xerox deal with Apple, as she was unaware of any arrangement between the two companies until the day of the second Jobs demo. (Goldberg, personal communication.)
It was not that Tesler wanted Smalltalk to be widely published and Goldberg wished it kept secret. The issue was the more complex one of who should see the technology and under what circumstances. Goldberg, for example, was happy to demonstrate Smalltalk to legitimate corporate clients who were prepared to help support the group's research by paying for further development.
That had been the case about a year earlier, when she and Tesler ended up in opposing camps over a demo to another enterprise that expressed interest in Smalltalk. This was the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA had sent a team of engineers to PARC under dre auspices of Xerox's Special Information Systems division, which sold customized systems to the federal government.
Goldberg was gratified by the CIA's interest in her work. She viewed the agency as a traditional Xerox paying customer of the sort that routinely got Smalltalk demos over the years, and one whose representatives further seemed "remarkably interesting and innovative." The agency's manifest curiosity about Smalltalk and the Dynabook could not help but give those technologies and their inventors added credibility within Xerox, she figured—and at the very least, she said later, the CIA people touring PARC had needs that fit perfectly with the Dynabook's capabilities for ordering and communicating information.
By contrast, the liberal-minded Tesler treated the CIA visit as a chance for Berkeley-style agitprop. The day of the agency demo he came to work wearing a trenchcoat, dark glasses, and a fedora pulled down over his brow. Then he spent the day hanging around the PARC commissary and conference rooms glowering at the visitors, much to the amusement of his own co-workers.
Tesler thought Apple was different because it was unlikely to put Smalltalk to nefarious use; Goldberg thought it was different because it was likely to become a Xerox competitor rather than a customer. In any case, one thing that became clear early in the debate was that the decision of what and how much to show Jobs's team did not rest with PARC. The engineers could decide how to stage the demo, but Xerox headquarters had decreed that one way or another, it was going happen.
***
Jobs later maintained that he harbo
red few expectations about what he would be shown at PARC when he arrived with his team one day early in December. "I thought it would be an interesting afternoon," he said. "But I had no real concept of what I'd see."
What he did see was as bowdlerized a show-and-tell as the Learning Research Group knew how to deliver. Jobs saw the Alto, mouse, Bravo, and several other CSL technologies, as well as a limited number of innocuous graphical applications in Smalltalk.
"It was very much a here's-a-word-processor-theres-a-drawing-tool demo of what was working at the time," Goldberg recalled years later. "No harm done, no problem. What they saw, everyone had seen. The conversation they had with us, everyone had. There was no reason not to do it, it was fine."
Jobs left, apparently content with his sanitized tour. He quickly discovered, however, how much information had been denied him. Two days later he and his entourage returned, primed for a second demonstration. Bemused, Hall ushered them into a conference room to get a better idea of what they hoped to learn. Goldberg had not yet arrived for work, so Tesler and Diana Merry from the Learning Research Group sat in. The parley was a rocky one. Jobs sat fidgeting while Apple's hard-nosed president, Mike Scott, engaged in a round of executive-speak with Hall.
"We were having this veiy beat-around-the-bush conversation that went on for about four or five minutes, which for Steve Jobs is like seven eternities," Tesler recalled. Suddenly the hyperactive Jobs blew his top.
"Let's stop this bullshit!" he cried, leaping from his chair. "There's no point trying to keep all these secrets. We'll never accomplish anything if we don't talk to each other." Turning to Scott, he ordered, "Scotty, tell them what we want!"
Scott gave an exasperated gesture, as if he knew that any attempt now to settle Jobs down would be pointless. He took a deep breath, but before he could get a word out Jobs interrupted, 'We need to tell them about the Lisa!"
The Apple group looked stricken. 'Well, tell me why we can't!" Jobs exclaimed. "These guys think we're going to make the Xerox computer, which would cost ten thousand bucks to build. But we all know we want them to help us with the Lisa!"
The PARC team listened in astonishment. Lisa was a name that had never come up before. Even Lalir seemed perplexed. Finally someone asked, "What's Lisa?"
After an uncomfortable silence, an Apple engineer explained with resignation, "Lisa is an office computer we've designed with a bitmapped screen and a simple user interface. We think some of your technology would be useful in helping make the machine easier to use."
Tesler was fascinated, and not only because his own daughter's name was Lisa. Apple had obviously developed this project in great secrecy— so great that it had come as a bolt from the blue to its own babysitter, Roy Lalir. "It completely threw in the air Lahr's idea of what this meeting was all about," he recalled with great amusement. Tesler also knew the Apple team was correct: The Smalltalk interface, parts of which they had not yet seen, would make computers easier to use. He was even a little pleased that Apple had now forced the issue. Why not show them Smalltalk? If Xerox was not going to market a personal computer, why should all the Learning Research Group's work simply go to waste?
While this drama was still playing out, Adele Goldberg arrived for work, only to learn that Steve Jobs was back on the premises. She was neither amused nor intrigued, but incensed.
"I come in to work and diere was Steve Jobs and the entire Lisa programming team, ten of them or so, in the conference room. No warning. Two days later. Then Harold Hall came out in the hallway with Roy Lalir to explain to me that I'm supposed to give them a second demo."
"Look, Adele, it's no sweat," Hall said. He reminded her that PARC could show Jobs more than he had already seen without necessarily showing him everything. There were two grades of Smalltalk demo at PARC—classified (for corporate bigwigs and other specially cleared VIPs) and unclassified. "Tell Tesler to just give Jobs the regular unclassified briefing," Hall said. "It'll dazzle him and he'll never know he didn't get the confidential disclosure."
Goldberg was mollified, but just barely Begrudgingly, she admitted that if the demo kept to Hall's specifications, there would be little harm done—if. But who knew what else the savvy Apple engineers might pick up during another hour or two on the premises, and how much more they might insist on being shown? Deep down she was frustrated that Apple had been permitted to wheedle its way into the building in the first place. She blamed Hall and Lahr equally for lacking the technical savvy to understand the risks of showing Apple—especially its professional programmers—anything at all.
"We had never, ever given a private programming lesson to another company's engineering team," she said later. "And no one informed me of any reason to do so."
As she feared, however, the unclassified demo was still not enough. Almost as soon as Hall returned to his office, his phone rang. On the line direcdy from Stamford was a livid Bill Souders, the head of Xerox's business planning group. Souders informed Hall bluntly that Jobs was to be shown whatever he wanted to see, up to and including all of Smalltalk. "You will give Mr. Jobs the confidential briefing!" he barked.
Hall was mystified. Bill Souders, who knew even less than he did about software and programming environments, could not possibly understand the importance of PARC's proprietary technology. Hall could only assume that Jobs had somehow discovered on the spot that he had been conned—possibly Tesler or someone else on the team had unwisely let drop that he was receiving another subpar briefing—and taken a piece out of Roy Lahr. Lahr presumably blitzed his complaint directly to Abe Zarem, who fired up the big guns in Connecticut to shell PARC into capitulation. Whatever the process, it had occurred with lightning speed. Hall marveled at how high up in the Xerox hierarchy Apple's influence seemed to reach.
Still, Hall was nothing if not a faithful follower of the corporate chain of command, no matter how many of the links were time-servers and idiots. The important thing, he recalled, was that Souders's "authority was unmistakable and he used the military imperative language. It was exactly as in 1943 in basic training when I was told, 'You will pick up that cigarette butt!'"
Obligingly, he passed word to the demo team that they were to give Jobs and his engineers the full-dress treatment. Goldberg was stunned. Her worst nightmare was unfolding: The hard-won understanding about what Apple could and could not see was about to be breached. Turning red and teary with rage, she told Hall, "That's nuts! It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
That was for starters. Hall and Lahr escorted her into Hall's office to try to calm her down. It was an uphill struggle that lasted, by her estimation, about three hours.
"I finally said to Harold, 'You are making a really big mistake,'" she recalled. " 'You are throwing away something that this company itself hasn't had a chance to even consider using. And you'll have to order me to do it, because I'm not walking in there voluntarily.'
"And that's what he did."
Merry and Tesler had spent the intervening time trying to keep Steve Jobs distracted with more of the plain-vanilla demonstration. They had just about had it with his constant wheedling when, suddenly, Adele Goldberg arrived back on the scene. "I can still see her," Merry recalled. "She was in pigtails and her face was red as a beet. And she was holding one of our yellow disk packs with Smalltalk on it."
The demo began. A full-dress Smalltalk show-and-tell was a sight to behold. There were educational applications Goldberg had written and software development tools by Tesler. Merry demonstrated her galley editor, a nifty program with animation capabilities built in so that a user could incorporate text and pictures into a single document. Almost every program had capabilities that had never been seen in a research prototype anywhere, much less in a commercial system. "There was lots to Smalltalk," Tesler remembered. "You could see it thirty times and see something new every time."
What was interesting—or to Goldberg, ominous—was the intensity with which the Apple engineers paid attention. Bill Atkinson, a
brilliant programmer who would later put his distinctive stamp on the Macintosh, kept his eyes on the screen as though they were fixed there by a magnetic field. He was standing so close that as Tesler conducted his assigned portion of the demo he could feel Atkinson's breath on the back of his neck.
Atkinson had clearly come prepared. "He was asking extremely intelligent questions that he couldn't have thought of just by watching the screen," Tesler recalled. "It turned out later that they had read every paper we'd published, and the demo was just reminding them of things they wanted to ask us. But I was very impressed. They asked all the right questions and understood all the answers. It was clear to me that they understood what we had a lot better than Xerox did."
Given this rare psychic encouragement, the Learning Research Group warmed to their subject. They even indulged in some of their favorite legerdemain. At one point Jobs, watching some text scroll up the screen line by line in its normal fashion, remarked, "It would be nice if it moved smoothly, pixel by pixel, like paper."
With Ingalls at the keyboard, that was like asking a New Orleans jazz band to play "Limehouse Blues." He clicked the mouse on a window displaying several lines of Smalltalk code, made a minor edit, and returned to the text. Presto! The scrolling was now continuous.
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