Dealers of Lightning

by Michael Hiltzik

  Wave concluded that the Star was so good and latent demand so strong that customers would clamor for the technology regardless of price. To the monopoly-minded executives of Xerox, this was familiar and gratify­ing territoiy. A machine that could be sold or leased for any price—it was the 914 all over again!

  The SDD engineers therefore considered themselves free to create absolutely the best office system they could imagine. Blinded by the almost religious fervor that seizes software and hardware developers set loose in a boundless design space, they shoveled every sophisti­cated function they could contrive into the Star without giving a moment's thought to the one real-world player whose opinion was crit­ical: the buyer.

  "The techies were given their head to make the best system they could," Spinrad lamented years later. "There were no constraints of any substance put on us as to the cost of the product, as far as I remember. But what the Wave studies missed was that there were other things com­ing along they didn't recognize."

  This was an understatement. In 1975, or even 1979, one might have argued that the Star's technology would place it in a class by itself, that it would blow away every other office machine on the market on its way to becoming an instant de facto standard. In 1981 the same argument was dangerously presumptuous. For at a secret skunk works in Boca Raton, a couple of miles from where Xerox had held its spectacular company pic­nic, an IBM team had slapped together a machine that would annihilate the market for big, integrated office systems.

  IBM launched its Chess machine, renamed simply the Personal Com­puter, in August 1981, a scant four months after the Star. Judged against the technology PARC had brought forth, it was a homely and feeble crea­ture. Rather than bitmapped graphics and variable typefaces, its screen displayed only ASCII characters, glowing a hideous monochromatic green against a black background. Instead of a mouse, the PC had four arrow keys on the keyboard that laboriously moved the cursor, character by character and line by line. No icons, no desktop metaphor, no multi­tasking windows, no e-mail, no Ethernet. Forswearing the Star's intuitive point-and-click operability, IBM forced its customers to master an abstruse lexicon of typed commands and cryptic responses developed by Microsoft, its software partner. Where the Star was a masterpiece of integrated reliability, the PC had a perverse tendency to crash at random (a character flaw it bequeathed to many subsequent generations of Microsoft Windows-driven machines).

  But where the Star sold for $16,595-plus, the IBM PC sold for less than $5,000, all-inclusive. Where the Star's operating system was closed, accessible for enhancement only to those to whom Xerox granted a coded key, the PC's circuitry and microcode were wide open to anyone willing to hack a program for it—just like the Alto's.

  And it sold in the millions.

  The introduction of the IBM PC changed the business computer market the way Hiroshima changed the world's conception of battle­field weaponry. The PC demonstrated that the business user would gladly forego graphical bells and whistles and seamless system integra­tion and would tolerate a large dose of flakiness in order to save on price. IBM proved correct everyone who had warned that the Star was too big, too complicated, too expensive—too good.

  How serious a blow the IBM PC represented to large-scale systems like the Star would become increasingly evident over the next year, as the Star's sales lagged behind Xerox's projections and the PC's sur­passed IBM's.

  The Star was to enjoy just one more moment of triumph. In December 1981 the Japanese version was introduced at the Tokyo Data Show by Fuji Xerox, the company's Japanese partner, with Liddle in attendance along with Bill English and his engineering partner Joe Becker, who had created the Japanese display system. The price was 4 million yen per workstation, or about $16,000. The acclaim was even greater than its domestic cousin had received in Chicago eight mondis earlier.

  "The presentation aimed at the most dramatic effect; it seemed to dis­embowel the other exhibitors," wrote the correspondent of the Japanese computer journal ASCII. "Comparing Star with Japanese computer makers' office computers in the 4-million-yen class, their capabilities are as different as clouds from mud."

  Clouds from mud Upon hearing the phrase from a Japanese inter­preter reading the review aloud, Dave Liddle burst out with a delighted laugh. "Boy," he said, "you can't do any better than that!"

  The exodus from SDD picked up steam after the Star introduction. One day Bob Belleville got a call from Steve Jobs, who badgered him into quitting by yelling, "Everything you've ever done in your life is terrible, so why don't you come work for me?" Massaro and Liddle left in 1982 to found Metaphor Computer. Metaphor soon brought out a workstation that resembled the Star on the surface, but ran on a lightning-fast Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the same one that would soon turn up as the heart and brain of the Apple Macintosh. A dimly remembered name now, Metaphor experienced great success for more than five years, until it was bought out and its nameplate retired—by IBM.

  As for the Star, it lived on for many years as the crowning glory of a niche market, a specialty product and a legend, somewhat like the fancy futuristic cars—time machines, so to speak—which Detroit auto makers manufacture for the big car shows but seldom actually get on the road. Instead of sales in the hundreds of thousands, as Xerox once dared antic­ipate, only about 30,000 Stars were ever ordered.

  By 1989 the architecture that Liddle once foresaw lasting ten years was already a relic. That year Computer magazine published an article by sev­eral of the machine's original designers entitled, "The Xerox Star: A Ret­rospective." Among its features was a roll call of lessons the team had learned from bitter experience: "Pay attention to industry trends.... Pay attention to what customers want. . . Know your competition."

  Blinded by their own technology, the Star's designers had been almost entirely unaware of the coming revolution of cheap PCs—the equivalent of scaled-down Altos, as opposed to the scaled-up Star. They did not see it coming until the moment IBM announced its blockbuster. At that point it was too late."It was a disaster beyond words," Belleville said later, "because the world was already different."

  CHAPTER 26

  Exit the Impresario

  Bill Spencer’s introduction to PARC was jolly enough. On the day he assumed leadership of the Integrated Circuits Lab, his new colleagues welcomed him with a green cake: It was St. Patricks Day 1981.

  But the charm rapidly paled. As he got to know the place better, he grew appalled at the working atmosphere at 3333 Coyote Hill Road. The lab that a few short years before had been the most exciting research venue in the country, if not the world, now appeared to be in the grip of some malignant virus. Whole departments shunned each odier, except to fight over resources and belittle each other’s work. Everywhere you looked you found people harboring mysterious grudges and grotesque suspicions.

  The most routine personal transactions were like minefields. Not long after his arrival Spencer, believing that he ought to be in touch with his "customers"—that is, the other labs at PARC that would be using his chips—sent out an e-mail message inviting several lab chiefs to a friendly meeting to toss around ideas. Everyone accepted.

  A few days later Bob Taylor graciously offered the Computer Sci­ence Lab commons as a venue for the get-together. A gratified Spencer sent out another round of messages informing his guests of the new location. The next few hours brought a cascade of cancel­lations.

  Bewildered, he picked up the phone and dialed Lynn Conway, the first respondent.

  "What's going on?" he asked. "Why aren't you coming?"

  "It's CSL," she responded. "I'd be physically assaulted if I went in there."

  "That's ridiculous!"

  "Think what you want," she replied simply. "But I won't set foot in that lab." The meeting never took place.

  The more Spencer investigated, the grimmer he found the situation. Pake's strategy of isolating Taylor by sundering PARC in two had exacer­bated the schism, not resolved it. "At every staff meeting power grabs and dispu
tes over resources dominated the discussion," he observed. "Com­puter resources, office space, budget—you name it, they fought over it. It was so acrimonious and divisive that the center had ground to a halt while people spent all their time defending their turf."

  The contention was general, but Taylor appeared to stand at its center. His claims on PARC's resources, based on his presumption that any work done outside his lab was scarcely worth doing at all, forced the others to dig in against any change that threatened even tangentially to shift the balance of power. Further roiling the atmosphere were rumors that he was shopping the Computer Science Lab as a wholesale package to a Xerox competitor (speculation focused on Hewlett-Packard, which was building a research center on a Palo Alto hillside just over the ridge from Coyote Hill). Taylor always steadfastly denied the story, but the suspicion never entirely waned.

  Yet to blame Taylor entirely for the dysfunctional atmosphere would be unjust. To a certain extent the internal conflicts grew out of the ineluctable life cycle of a creative institution. In one form or another the same tension had been present almost since PARC's founding; for most of the first decade it simply had been channeled more fruitfully.

  "Up until 1977 or so the lab conflicts seemed more dynamic and actually productive in stimulating healthy competitiveness and innova­tion," Lynn Conway observed. As projects matured, people moved on, and outside organizations assumed the exciting work of bringing PARC's innovations to market, there was less of substance to fight about within the walls. And as is known to veterans of all intramural politics—whether they take place on a university campus or inside a corporation—the less at stake, the more vicious the battle.

  At PARC the excitement had faded but the pressure cooker remained. The internecine competition took on a reflexive quality, as though people were going through the motions. Severo Ornstein recalled a telling inci­dent soon after CSL spun off its graphics programs into a separate lab under Chuck Geschke and John Warnock. "These were guys we had worked very cohesively with," Ornstein recalled. "But not two weeks later I heard someone in the hallway refer to them as 'they.' Chuckling, I thought, 'This is how wars start.'"

  Xerox's indifference to PARC's work also deserves some of the blame for nursing these unproductive conflicts. Futures Day had underscored how divergent were the vectors between parent and offspring. More depressing miscues followed, such as the clash of expectations over "Interpress."

  Interpress was a programming system that aimed to reconcile the dif­ferent image resolutions of computer screens and laser printers. This dif­ference often resulted in documents that looked perfect on an Alto dis­play, but emerged as gibberish on the higher-resolution printers—which of course made a mockery of Bravo s WYSIWYG feature. After years of painstaking work and several intermediate versions, Geschke, Warnock, Bob Sproull, Lampson, and others had at last invented a so-called page description language allowing printers of any type to output a document that accurately reproduced its on-screen representation, regardless of the incompatibilities between display and laser. But the difficulty of per­suading Xerox to integrate Interpress into its laser printers and odier typographical products made the process of actual invention look like a cakewalk.

  "We spent months traveling around to all the divisions within Xerox and back to corporate selling this idea," Warnock recalled. The program was extensively rewritten to meet objections by the various divisions.

  Finally, in 1982, the company agreed to make Interpress a standard com­ponent of its entire program line—but refused to announce or release it until every product could be re-engineered to take advantage of it. The upshot would be an unendurable delay.

  "I knew that would take at least five to ten years, and really it was just never going to happen," Warnock recalled. "Chuck Geschke and I had a conversation in his office and said, 'You know, we need to go do something else, because we've spent two years of our lives trying to sell this thing and they're going to put it under a black shroud for another five.' You were seeing PCs get announced, and Apples, and you kept asking yourself, 'When is all this great stuff going to see the light of day?' And you'd think about the Xerox infrastructure and the process it would have to go through to get into products, and it became sort of depressing."

  A short time later he and Geschke resigned to start their own com­pany, Adobe Systems. After a couple of false starts they settled on a business plan that would ultimately turn Adobe into a $l-billion-a-year enterprise: the refining and marketing of a new "typesetting," or page description, language, along the lines initially developed in Interpress. This language was Postscript, a typesetting system first bundled with Apple printers. Postscript allowed computer-generated documents to be printed on laser printers, linotype machines, and virtually every­thing in between. In its later versions it proved able to handle graphics and color with amazing fidelity. Within a few short years it became the de facto standard of computerized typesetting, and a dominating rival of Interpress itself—yet another technology that broke free from clois­tered PARC to flourish on the outside.

  Thus conflicts that might have been channeled into helping a new product reach market got turned inward instead. But Spencer, who arrived at a point when PARC's most impressive achievements were already behind it, had not lived through these battles with the corpo­rate mindset. He found it difficult to view the internecine tensions as anything other than childish squabbling. In any case, none of the quar­reling had been resolved by late 1982, when George Pake asked him to succeed Hall as head of the half-PARC "Science Center."

  To Pake's surprise, Spencer turned him down. The bifurcation of PARC was untenable, he said, and he would not be interested in manag­ing one half of a house divided against itself. He did, however, offer to step in as PARC director—if and when Pake saw fit to reunite the two halves.

  Pake agreed without hesitation, even with relief. He had found it painful to watch the bickering continue even after the partition. More­over, he admired Spencer not only for his skills as a technical administra­tor but for his apparent ability to co-exist with Bob Taylor. Spencer and Taylor played tennis together every Saturday, their wives and children were friendly, yet Pake could see no sign that Spencer had bought into the CSL orthodoxy. He dared hope that after more than ten years he had finally found the one man on Earth who could keep Taylor in his place.

  There was much about Taylor that Bill Spencer respected. In all his years in research he had met few managers so adept at running small or medium-sized teams. Taylor's method of forging personal bonds and keeping up a jealous defense of his own role as laboratory autocrat was one Spencer thought would fail miserably in a large lab. But there was no denying it worked marvelously inside CSL.

  "He never traveled," Spencer recalled. "He would come in every day at ten in the morning, park his BMW in the same space every day, and pick up his badge from the security guard. He would go in his office, break out a Dr Pepper, and for the next eight to ten hours individually touch every member of his lab. As a consensus manager he was extra­ordinary."

  Professional problems, personal crises, interpersonal spats—what­ever the issue—Taylor's people came to Taylor. "Bob's office was like the hub of a wheel. Through the day each of them would come in there. The question could be anything. 'Can I go to the bathroom?' 'Is it time for me to go to lunch?'"

  One day Spencer witnessed an incident that seemed to sum it all up. He was sitting and chatting in Taylor's office when a member of the CSL staff poked his head in to mention that he was going out for a game of tennis. As Spencer recalled, "Taylor said, 'I see you've got a new can of balls there. You're not good enough yet to play with new balls. Here's a can of old ones. Use these, they'll be better for you.'

  "Now, here's a thirty-five or forty-year-old man, a Ph.D., and he needs Bob Taylor to tell him how he's going to play tennis!"

  After Spencer became PARC director the troublesome consequences of Taylor's all-encompassing paternalism got driven home. One of the most
serious problems he faced was CSL's inability to resolve its members' disputes with the other labs, no matter how triv­ial. As he settled into his new office, Spencer started to bridle at the amount of time he spent mediating quarrels that should have been set­tled further down the line. "Whenever a CSL guy had a problem with anyone else there was no one he could take it to but Taylor, and Taylor would never deal with it. So every time there was a problem it ended up in my office. And I said, 'This is not a workable situation. I will not solve the problems of fifty individuals in that lab.'"

  He also recognized more strongly than ever the other deficiencies in Taylor's management style. Taylor's vaunted "flat" management struc­ture, which meant that every researcher in the Computer Science Lab reported to him rather than to an intermediate level of management, had outlived its usefulness. In the old days it had served the purpose of ensuring that all the researchers pulled together in pursuit of a coher­ent vision (with the exception of renegades like Shoup and Bobrow). But it had also stifled creativity and—more important from the point of view of PARC management—prevented the center from spotting and nurturing management talent among the CSL staff. If any of the researchers possessed the skills to be the next Bob Taylor, no one would ever find out.