The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

  With his twinkling eyes and lively mustache, Kay came to be seen as a disruptor, which he was. He took impish pleasure in pushing the executives of a copier company to create a small and friendly computer for kids. Xerox’s corporate planning director, Don Pendery, a dour New Englander, embodied what the Harvard professor Clay Christensen has labeled the innovator’s dilemma: he saw the future filled with shadowy creatures that threatened to gnaw away at Xerox’s copier business. He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of “trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”60

  For his 1972 Rolling Stone piece on the emerging tech culture in Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand visited Xerox PARC, causing agita back east at corporate headquarters when the article appeared. With literary gusto, he described how PARC’s research had moved “away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.” Among the people he interviewed was Kay, who said, “The people here are used to dealing lightning with both hands.” Because of people like Kay, PARC had a playful sensibility that was derivative of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. “It’s a place where you can still be an artisan,” he told Brand.61

  * * *

  Kay realized that he needed a catchy name for the little personal computer he wanted to build, so he began calling it the Dynabook. He also came up with a cute name for its operating system software: Smalltalk. The name was meant to be unintimidating to users and not raise expectations among hard-core engineers. “I figured that Smalltalk was so innocuous a label that if it ever did anything nice, people would be pleasantly surprised,” Kay noted.

  He was determined that his proposed Dynabook would cost less than $500 “so that we could give it away in schools.” It also had to be small and personal, so that “a kid could take it wherever he goes to hide,” with a programming language that was user-friendly. “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible,” he declared.62

  Kay wrote a description of the Dynabook, titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” that was partly a product proposal but mostly a manifesto. He began by quoting Ada Lovelace’s seminal insight about how computers could be used for creative tasks: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” In describing how children (of all ages) would use a Dynabook, Kay showed he was in the camp of those who saw personal computers primarily as tools for individual creativity rather than as networked terminals for collaboration. “Although it can be used to communicate with others through the ‘knowledge utilities’ of the future such as a school ‘library,’ ” he wrote, “we think that a large fraction of its use will involve reflexive communication of the owner with himself through this personal medium, much as paper and notebooks are currently used.”

  The Dynabook, Kay continued, should be no larger than a notebook and weigh no more than four pounds. “The owner will be able to maintain and edit his own files of text and programs when and where he chooses. Need we add that it be usable in the woods?” In other words, it was not just a dumb terminal designed to be networked into a time-shared mainframe. However, he did envision a day when personal computers and digital networks would come together. “A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) to the home.”63 It was an enticing vision of the future, but one that would take another two decades to invent.

  To advance his crusade for the Dynabook, Kay gathered around him a small team and crafted a mission that was romantic, aspirational, and vague. “I only hired people that got stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea,” Kay recalled. “A lot of daytime was spent outside of PARC, playing tennis, bike riding, drinking beer, eating Chinese food, and constantly talking about the Dynabook and its potential to amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.”64

  In order to take the first step toward realizing the Dynabook, Kay proposed an “interim” machine. It would be about the size of a carry-on suitcase and would have a small graphical display screen. In May 1972 he made his pitch to Xerox PARC’s hardware bosses to build thirty so that they could be tested in classrooms to see if students could do simple programming tasks on them. “The uses for a personal gadget as an editor, reader, take-home context, and intelligent terminal are fairly obvious,” he told the engineers and managers sitting in beanbag chairs. “Now let’s build thirty of these things so we can get on with it.”

  It was a romantic pitch confidently delivered, as tended to be the case with Kay, but it did not dazzle Jerry Elkind, the manager of PARC’s computer lab. “Jerry Elkind and Alan Kay were like creatures from different planets, one an austere by-the-numbers engineer and the other a brash philosophical freebooter,” according to Michael Hiltzik, who wrote a history of Xerox PARC. Elkind did not get stars in his eyes when imagining children programming toy turtles on Xerox machines. “Let me play devil’s advocate,” he responded. The other engineers perked up, sensing that a merciless evisceration was in the offing. PARC’s mandate was to create the office of the future, Elkind noted, so why should it be in the business of child’s play? The corporate environment lent itself to the time-sharing of corporate-run computers, so shouldn’t PARC continue to pursue those opportunities? After a rapid-fire series of such questions, Kay felt like crawling away. When it was over, he cried. His request that a set of interim Dynabooks be built was denied.65

  Bill English, who had worked with Engelbart and built the first mouse, was by then at PARC. After the meeting he pulled Kay aside, consoled him, and offered some advice. He needed to stop being a dreamy loner and instead should prepare a well-crafted proposal with a budget. “What’s a budget?” Kay asked.66

  Kay scaled back his dream and proposed an interim-interim plan. He would use $230,000 that he had in his budget to emulate the Dynabook on a Nova, a footlocker-size minicomputer made by Data General. But the prospect didn’t really thrill him.

  That is when two stars from Bob Taylor’s group at PARC, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker, popped into Kay’s office with a different scheme.

  “Do you have any money?” they asked.

  “Yes, about $230K for Novas,” Kay replied. “Why?”

  “How would you like us to build your little machine for you?” they asked, referring to the interim Dynabook that Elkind had shot down.

  “I’d like it fine,” Kay allowed.67

  Thacker wanted to build his own version of a personal computer, and he realized that Lampson and Kay also had the same general goal in mind. So the plot was to pool their resources and proceed without waiting for permission.

  “What are you going to do about Jerry?” Kay asked about his nemesis Elkind.

  “Jerry’s out of the office for a few months on a corporate task force,” said Lampson. “Maybe we can sneak it in before he gets back.”68

  Bob Taylor had helped hatch the plan because he wanted to push his team away from building time-sharing computers and devise instead “an interconnected collection of small display-based machines.”69 He was thrilled to get three of his favorite engineers—Lampson, Thacker, and Kay—collaborating on the project. The team had a push-pull dynamic: Lampson and Thacker knew what was possible, while Kay set his sights on the ultimate dream machine and challenged them to achieve the impossible.

  The machine they designed was named the Xerox Alto (although Kay stubbornly continued to refer to it as “the interim Dynabook”). It had a bitmapped display, which meant that each pixel on the screen could be turned on or off to help render a graphic, a letter, a paintbrush s
wipe, or whatever. “We chose to provide a full bitmap, in which each screen pixel was represented by a bit of main storage,” Thacker explained. That put a lot of demands on the memory, but the guiding principle was that Moore’s Law would continue to rule and that memory would get cheaper in an exponential way. The user’s interaction with the display was controlled by a keyboard and mouse, as Engelbart had designed. When it was completed in March 1973, it featured a graphic, painted by Kay, of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster holding the letter “C.”

  Alan Kay (1940– ) at Xerox PARC in 1974.

  Kay’s 1972 sketch for a Dynabook.

  Lee Felsenstein (1945– ).

  The first issue, October 1972.

  By keeping children (of all ages) in mind, Kay and his colleagues advanced Engelbart’s concepts by showing that they could be implemented in a manner that was simple, friendly, and intuitive to use. Engelbart, however, did not buy into their vision. Instead he was dedicated to cramming as many functions as possible into his oNLine System, and thus he never had a desire to make a computer that was small and personal. “That’s a totally different trip from where I’m going,” he told colleagues. “If we cram ourselves in those little spaces, we’d have to give up a whole bunch.”70 That is why Engelbart, even though he was a prescient theorist, was not truly a successful innovator: he kept adding functions and instructions and buttons and complexities to his system. Kay made things easier, and in so doing showed why the ideal of simplicity—making products that humans find convivial and easy to use—was central to the innovations that made computers personal.

  * * *

  Xerox sent Alto systems to research centers around the country, spreading the innovations dreamed up by PARC engineers. There was even a precursor to the Internet Protocols, the PARC Universal Packet, that allowed different packet-switched networks to interconnect. “Most of the tech that makes the Internet possible was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s,” Taylor later claimed.71

  As things turned out, however, although Xerox PARC pointed the way to the land of personal computers—devices you could call your own—the Xerox Corporation did not lead the migration. It made two thousand Altos, mainly for use in Xerox offices or affiliated institutions, but it didn’t market the Alto as a consumer product.II “The company wasn’t equipped to handle an innovation,” Kay recalled. “It would have meant completely new packaging, all new manuals, handling updates, training staff, localizing to different countries.”72

  Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, “The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”73

  At a lavish Xerox corporate conference in Boca Raton, Florida (where Henry Kissinger was the paid keynote speaker), the Alto system was put on display. In the morning there was an onstage demo that echoed Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and in the afternoon thirty Altos were set up in a showroom for everyone to use. The executives, all of whom were male, showed little interest, but their wives immediately started testing the mouse and typing away. “The men thought it was beneath them to know how to type,” said Taylor, who had not been invited to the conference but showed up anyway. “It was something secretaries did. So they didn’t take the Alto seriously, thinking that only women would like it. That was my revelation that Xerox would never get the personal computer.”74

  Instead, more entrepreneurial and nimble innovators would be the first to foray into the personal computer market. Some would eventually license or steal ideas from Xerox PARC. But at first the earliest personal computers were homebrewed concoctions that only a hobbyist could love.

  THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS

  Among the tribes of the Bay Area in the years leading up to the birth of the personal computer was a cohort of community organizers and peace activists who learned to love computers as tools for bringing power to the people. They embraced small-scale technologies, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and many of the tools-for-living values of the Whole Earth crowd, without being enthralled by psychedelics or repeated exposures to the Grateful Dead.

  Fred Moore was an example. The son of an Army colonel stationed at the Pentagon, he had gone west to study engineering at Berkeley in 1959. Even though the U.S. military buildup in Vietnam had not begun, Moore decided to become an antiwar protestor. He camped out on the steps of Sproul Plaza, soon to become the epicenter of student demonstrations, with a sign denouncing ROTC. His protest lasted only two days (his father came to take him home), but he reenrolled at Berkeley in 1962 and resumed his rebellious ways. He served two years in jail as a draft resister and then, in 1968, moved to Palo Alto, driving down in a Volkswagen van with a baby daughter whose mother had drifted away.75

  Moore planned to become an antiwar organizer there, but he discovered the computers at the Stanford Medical Center and became hooked. Since nobody ever asked him to leave, he spent his days hacking around on the computers while his daughter wandered the halls or played in the Volkswagen. He acquired a faith in the power of computers to help people take control of their lives and form communities. If they could use computers as tools for personal empowerment and learning, he believed, ordinary folks could break free of the dominance of the military-industrial establishment. “Fred was a scrawny-bearded, intense-eyed radical pacifist,” recalled Lee Felsenstein, who was part of the community organizing and computer scene in Palo Alto. “At the drop of a hat he would scurry off to pour blood on a submarine. You couldn’t really shoo him away.”76

  Given his peacenik-tech passions, it is not surprising that Moore gravitated into the orbit of Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth crowd. Indeed, he ended up having a star turn at one of the weirdest events of the era: the 1971 demise party for the Whole Earth Catalog. Miraculously, the publication had ended its run with $20,000 in the bank, and Brand decided to rent the Palace of Fine Arts, an ersatz classical Greek structure in San Francisco’s Marina District, to celebrate with a thousand kindred spirits who would decide how to give away the money. He brought a stack of hundred-dollar bills, harboring a fantasy that the rock- and drug-crazed crowd would come to a judicious consensus on what to do with it. “How can we ask anyone else in the world to arrive at agreements if we can’t?” Brand asked the crowd.77

  The debate lasted ten hours. Wearing a monk’s black cassock with hood, Brand let each speaker hold the stack of money while addressing the crowd, and he wrote the suggestions on a blackboard. Paul Krassner, who had been a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, gave an impassioned talk about the plight of the American Indians—“We ripped off the Indians when we came here!”—and said the money should be given to them. Brand’s wife, Lois, who happened to be an Indian, came forward to declare that she and other Indians didn’t want it. A person named Michael Kay said they should just give it out to themselves and started handing out the bills to the crowd; Brand retorted that it would be better to use it all together and asked people to pass the bills back up to him, which some of them did, prompting applause. Dozens of other suggestions, ranging from wild to wacky, were made. Flush it down the toilet! Buy more nitrous oxide for the party! Build a gigantic plastic phallic symbol to stick into the earth! At one point a member of the band Golden Toad shouted, “Focus your fucking energy! You’ve got nine million suggestions! Pick one! This could go on for the next fucking year. I came here to play music.” This led to no decision but did prompt a musical interlude featuring a belly dancer who ended by falling to the floor and writhing.

  At that point Fred Moore, with his scraggly beard and wavy hair, got up and gave his occupation as “human being.” He denounced the crowd for caring about money, and to make his point he took the two dollar bills he had in his pocket and burned them. There was some debate about taking a vote, which Moore also denounced because it was a method for dividing rather than uniting people. By then it was 3 a.m., and the dazed and confused crowd h
ad become even more so. Moore urged them to share their names so that they could stay together as a network. “A union of people here tonight is more important than letting a sum of money divide us,” he declared.78 Eventually he outlasted all but twenty or so diehards, and it was decided to give the money to him until a better idea came along.79

  * * *

  Since he didn’t have a bank account, Moore buried the $14,905 that was left of the $20,000 in his backyard. Eventually, after much drama and unwelcome visits from supplicants, he distributed it as loans or grants to a handful of related organizations involved in providing computer access and education in the area. The recipients were part of the techno-hippie ecosystem that emerged in Palo Alto and Menlo Park around Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog crowd.

  This included the catalogue’s publisher, the Portola Institute, an alternative nonprofit that promoted “computer education for all grade levels.” Its loose-knit learning program was run by Bob Albrecht, an engineer who had dropped out of corporate America to teach computer programming to kids and Greek folk dancing to Doug Engelbart and other adults. “While living in San Francisco at the top of the crookedest street, Lombard, I frequently ran computer programming, wine tasting, and Greek dancing parties,” he recalled.80 He and his friends opened a public-access computer center, featuring a PDP-8, and he took some of his best young students on field trips, most memorably to visit Engelbart at his augmentation lab. One of the early editions of the Whole Earth Catalog featured on its end page a picture of Albrecht, sporting a porcupine brush cut, teaching some kids to use a calculator.