Dealers of Lightning 104
| Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age | |
| author | Michael Hiltzik |
| pages | 448 |
| publisher | Harper Business |
| rating | 7.5 |
| reviewer | jnazario |
| ISBN | 0887309895 |
| summary | A worthwhile read for hackers and their managers, alike. |
PARC, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, was created after Xerox bought the research heavy SDS, (Scientific Data Systems), in the late 1960s. Almost immediately the seeds are being planted for a research arm of Xerox. Great minds are obtained in the process and in the same year the ARPANET becomes functional. The timing couldn't have been better.
What quickly emerges is the story of a large group of people, led by great minds and personalities like Bob Taylor and Charles Thacker. Strong of mind and personality, these are bright, visionary people who know what they want to do and how they will have to go about it. No hesitation, the bigger problems are things like How do you bring the right people together? And once there, what do they need?
Taylor brought together the best and brightest he could find, which is to say he got some of the best minds on the planet.
At every stage of the story, Hiltzik captures the mood, the emotion and the environment. In the early stages, he describes how this wondrous world was hatched out of determination and willpower. Xerox looked on during this early stage, perhaps a bit apprehensively, but also expectantly.
With a lot of freedom to tinker, a strong group of physicists and computer scientists were assembled and began building some of the greatest stuff in the world. By the time the 70s are over, Hiltzik's story is thick with the tension of researchers who design without products in mind and with management which attempts to see the value proposition in everything coming out of PARC.
Hiltzik's tour includes stories of how Ethernet was built, how the first personal computers were created and networked, how WYSIWYG applications emerged, and how so much else was created. He spends a lot of time discussing the invention of the laser printer, originally a dream of an idea by outcast physicist Gary Starkweather. Fighting sneers and doubt all along the way, he persisted and created the laser printer. But management only saw a threat to their core business of toner transfer copiers and the outrageous price of the device. However, they did patent the technology and that one invention alone paid for the entire PARC venture.
Several inventions seem so basic that you have to wonder how a company as apparently adept and bright as Xerox failed to capitalize on. Desktop publishing, which seems like a natural outgrowth of a document-processing company like Xerox, was born at PARC but discarded. Color printing as well was dismantled by Xerox. Other ventures, such as the personal computer and the Smalltalk language, seem obvious as unnatural fits for Xerox.
This is the crux of the book, and why it is such a valuable read for both engineers and management alike. For engineers, it is important to get a feel for how management operates, how they best appreciate ideas as marketable products. The same goes for managers, who often don't appreciate the value of research ideas; in this history, Hiltzik shows how that even when things were on the brink of falling apart for Xerox, management was able to continue its course, hoping the rest of the world would be content to buy only a handful of large-scale copiers.
Ultimately the book's epilogue gets it right, more or less. Xerox didn't fumble their future, though they did fail to understand the value of several of PARC's achievements. This is a hotly debated topic for many who feel that Xerox could have easily demanded hefty sums from Apple, IBM, and Microsoft or simply gone to market first with a mass-market personal computer.
The geek in me loves this book for so many reasons. Hiltzik's book is in the same spirit as The Soul of a New Machine and Fire in the Valley -- it's presented in a really thrilling way. The historian in me loves the modern history of the computer science community, and loves to see how the spirit of PARC has migrated to Apple, SGI, Microsoft, and beyond.
All in all I am very glad I read this book. It's inspirational, interesting, and of course relevant to what I do. A highly recommended book.
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Sounds like... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with the GUI (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes folks, they used research on children to determine that people process information visually. I dare say, having been one of those kids that picked everything up immediately, I approach problems very differently as an adult.
Re:Managers were already dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
I think their biggest mistake was not liscencing all those great ideas.
One of the greatest books of all time... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think we were all very lucky... (Score:2, Interesting)
A great many companies (Sun, Apollo etc.) benefited either directly or indirectly from their work, and over the years we have all benefited.
In the early 80s I worked on a couple of projects that certainly had their roots there. One was interfacing a laser printer (Seimens) to a batch processing mainframe (where the biggest problem was whether the unions would allow non union labor to use it). The other was the ICL (sort of defunct UK equiv. to IBM) port of Unix to the Three Rivers Perq. Fun times back then (must be getting old).
Re:The problem with the GUI (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose you could argue that a GUI is a sort of visual language. Or does that sound stupid?
Xerox PARC is not the most friendly place. (Score:1, Interesting)
I hiked around the U.S. last summer, and found myself in Palo Alto, and thought I would just go see the place for myself. After some kind bus drivers helped me out, I walked up to the front door and walked in. I explained that I was college student, majoring in Engineering, and had read and heard about all the wonderful things that had come out of the place, and that I just wanted to see it and wanted to know if they did tours.
They blew me off totally. She said that they don't do things like that, they are a business and people there Important Things To Do, and treated me like I was either an idiot or industrial spy. That was just the receptionist. She sent email to someone who worked there and they called my cell phone and explained to me why I would be wasting there time, and that time is money, and while many cool things were done there, I should just go away.
In my opinion, if the spirit of scientific inquiry is so boxed up there, they may have been productive in the past but they can't be doing anything now.
For what its worth, I spent the rest of that day on Stanford's campus, and had a much better time, and found lots of friendly people doing cool things.
Re:Do companies do research anymore? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm with Siemens Ultrasound Division (formerly Acuson), and we still lead the way in the medical ultrasound technology. We invented computed sonography, doppler imaging, native tissue harmonic imaging, etc. We still have a research group that does nothing but come up with new amazing stuff. Like PARC, we won't develop all of the ideas into a marketable product, but we have some stuff in the pipeline that will amaze the medical world when it's released.
Enough about me. A lot of big corporations have pure research departments. As long as the tech corporation hasn't been taken over by the "stock price is everything" mentality of the dot.bombs, it will still have a research department. Think IBM, BASF, etc.