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-Heroes of the micro revolution A look at the think tank where many feel it all began BY MARTIN PORTER

HEN Apple introduced its aura of almost Olympian proportions in whose past is so much more celebrated W last winter, memo­ the microcomputer industry. than its present. Talking about the past ries were stirred in scientists The numerous features that originat­ isn't popular at any facility in an indus­ who have seen the ed there are now widely exploited in the try where last year already seems like the grow up over the past ten years. marketplace by firms like Apple and Bronze Age. While the press extolled Mac's , where outstanding innovations-its mouse, high-resolution alumni migrated as they scattered The Golden Age of PARC graphics, icons-the unit is actually throughout the industry. Other P ARC The personal computer business of reminiscent of a machine that predates scientists are making their marks else­ 1984 was very much in gear at P ARC ten personal computing altogether, the where as well: Convergent Technol­ years ago.The golden age of PARC oc­ Alto. Although the Alto was not as per­ ogies, , GRiD and DEC. Even curred from 1971 to 1976. Then Xerox, sonal as today's products in size or cost, though co-author fat from a decade of enormous growth it was a prototype for distributed pro­ never worked there, he commented that and profits, gave the youngest and most cessing. It also set the stage for such sub­ P ARC is a national human resource. His talented computer scientists in the world sequent innovations as the local area net­ statement is often repeated these days, a blank check and an opportunity to de­ work (LAN), , (a even by Xerox executives who make sure fine the paperless office of the future. combination of a you know they are only joking. The Mansfield amendment in 1969 had and a graphics package), bitmap display Today, however, Xerox isn't eager to dried up all nonmilitary Department of and overlapping windows. talk about its premiere R&D facility Defense money, pinching tight research Alto and these corollary features orig­ programs at universities. An indepen­ inated where many other oftoday's lead­ Martin Porter is a contributing editor of dent lab like PARC could only benefit. ing-edge technologies have their roots: PC magazine. He writes frequently about It became known as the best computer Xerox P ARC. It is no suprise that the electronics for several publications. science department in the United States. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center has an Bob Taylor is given credit for assem-

76 Computers & Electronics bling the staff at the characters, and had a touch-sensitive lab. He had been the administrator of the screen. It would come bundled with Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects word processing, Smalltalk and even a Agency (ARPA), the U.S. space agency video game or two. that preceded NASA. He is remembered Alto appeared then as an interim as the man with the money at ARPA in . There had been previous at­ the 1960s, when some argue the true tempts at building personal computers golden age of computing occurred. At as early as the the 1960s at MIT's Lin­ PARC he collected people the way a coln Labs. What set Alto apart from ear­ connoisseur might collect Tiffany glass. ly attempts was the emphasis its design­ While he couldn't print money, he was ers put on communication with the · able to offer creative freedom without silicon beast and on developing its pressure: no rush to get .a product to . market, no need to teach classes of un­ The story of how the Alto was finally dergraduates, no push to politic for put together varies, depending on whom tenure. you talk to. The two most common sto­ Taylor hand-picked the entire team. ries, though, incorporate a bit of anti-es­ Smalltalk author recalls that Alan Kay conceived of Dynabook, tablishment defiance: Either it was the hiring period for any new employee the forerunner of Alto. built-in three months in the spring of took days and involved extens.ive evalua­ 1973- to disprove a research manager's tion of what that person could add. "Ev­ gramming inspiration in the middle of statement that it couldn't be done or it ery new person was a celebration," here­ the night from the video game precursor, was bootlegged against his wishes while members. In fact, it was a commonplace Space War. "There was simply nothing he was out of town. Either way, the Alto in the industry that out of the top 100 we couldn't do," he recalls. was never designed as a marketable item, PhDs in computer science in the country According to , a PARC but as a prototype upon which the scien­ each year, General Motors got the most, alumnus who went to work at Apple in tists could test out their software and followed by Bell Labs, but Xerox PARC 1980, "The main thing driving PARC hardware ideas. Even after several thou­ was the realization that in 10 or 25 years sand machines were built and installed you would be able to get a lot of power throughout PARC, at other Xerox facil­ into a low-cost product." Taylor and his ities, and then in offices of the Federal staff also ·realized that personal comput­ Government, the machine remained out ing, not time-sharing or data processing, of production. was the wave of the future. The basic system of the original Alto According to , now at included a video display and a three-but­ Microsoft but at P ARC the author of the ton mouse in addition to a standard key­ editor, the dream that was real­ board and finger keyset, 2. SM byte disk, ized at P ARC was that humans would interface, a.nd 64K 16-bit semi­ be able to communicate with computers conductor memory expandable to 256K. through graphics rather than through It looked like a sleek and contemporary text, simply by pointing. with a dishwasher-sized Communicating with computers in CPU built under its counter. It wasn't the most "human" way was what led quite Alan Kay's Dynabook, but it was a many of the researchers to consider their start. Alto stations more as personal secretar­ ies than as personal computers. As an in­ The PARC Legacy Char1es Simonyi wrote the joke some signed their memos "B. A. For Xerox the most important out- Bravo editor while at PARC. Ear," a name formed from the initials for Bravo and Alto and the code name Ear got the I 0 best. of the P ARC laser printer. In fact, the PARC was guided by Taylor's idea elusive B.A. Ear has been credited in that a think tank needed to be more a fer­ university dissertations on the work of tile medium and less an institution. It PARC. was mainly a matter of getting good peo­ ple in and leaving them alone, according Enter Alto to PARC alumnus Alan Kay. "You just At a summer ARPA symposium Kay had to mix together the right combina­ first conceived of Dynabook, the long­ tion of minds, and the result would be term project that bore as a first fruit, scientific dynamite." Alto.· Kay had seen one of the first plas­ Kay remembers Xerox PARC in the ma panels at a lab at the University of Il­ early as a place populated by wild - linois. When he joined PARC that image eyed scientists in their twenties. They became a prototype for a lap-size com­ were left to "follow their noses" without puter, very much like the popular TRS- a marketing executive looking over their 80 ModellOO, but even more like a Con­ shoulders. They spent hours ruminating vergent Technology Workslate with a Larry Tesler left PARC to go about the future in a lounge scattered bigger screen. The dream machine could to Apple and direct the Lisa Project. with bean bag chairs and sought pro- go on line, could store several million

September 1984 77 II XeroxPARC come of PARC was laser printing: It has 1980. Ethernet, which is one of 250 sys­ issue of over 2 million shares of stock. It already become a business bringing in tems licensed from Xerox, transports in­ is now shipping about 400 new $250 million a year for the company. It is formation in "packets" along coaxial per month. In all it has shipped 15,000 of expected to grow further with a new gen­ cable. the connections since it began manufac­ eration of low-cost laser printers next Establishing some sort of network turing them in March 1981. Most recent­ year. For the computer industry, howev­ with the Alto had been one of the earliest ly 3Com announced it will be the suppli­ er, PARC was a source of new products, design aims ofthe P ARC research team. er of hardware to go into a Xerox ideas and inspiration. Dan Bricklin re­ Communication among computers for Ethernet for the IBM PC and its calls, "a lot of people were turned on by resource sharing was advanced by compatibles. that place even if they never worked ARPA, in fact. The Ethernet was de­ One of Metcalfe's classmates, John there." signed in consort with the Alto in 1973 Ellenby, also went from PARC to a Bringing new technology to real life and eventually interlinked the Altos more commercially oriented company. within PARC and ultimately Now he is in charge of GRiD's Com­ within the en- pass, an $8000 high performance lap computer; at PARC he had been in charge of taking Alto II to the buyer. A test market of the plan was nixed by Xe­ rox corporate in favor of the Xerox Star in 1980. The Star utilized Alto ideas, par­ ticularly icons, but has so far been a mar­ ketplace dud. Although Ellenby, like many, maintains that Xerox probably missed the boat in several product areas, he feels that the public underestimates the contribution that laser printing has had on the company. "Xerox was pio­ neering a whole new business. The fact that they didn't know it themselves is rather sad." Larry Tesler left PARC to work for Apple in 1980. There he directed the Lisa project, which brought to fruition much of his work at PARC. At PARC he had devoted his main efforts to making Smalltalk a productive programming en­ vironment, as well as to improving such user interfaces as the mouse (which was not developed at PARC but by Doug Engelhart at Stanford Research Insti­ tute), and to making the use of graphics, icons and menus more convenient. The bitmap display, which Tesler has devel­ oped at Apple, coordinates every screen dot from a single chip and offers in­ creased control and definitions. "It was something whose value Xerox PARC demonstrated on a relatively inexpensive computer (Alto costs about $20,000) and Apple just bought it to a much low­ er-priced computer (Macintosh costs Metcalfe invented Ethernet and founded 3Com Corp. about $2500). The style of that was developed first as Smalltalk, we the aim of the researchers at P ARC. In tire Xerox Corporation. imitated. That includes using a mouse, fact, in the pursuit of marketplace reali­ Today Ethernet is generally agreed to overlapping windows and a command ties several of the more prominent be the industry standard for local area language relatively free of modes. Later P ARC alumni left to start businesses of networks. The use of LAN is becoming the Star systems came out and we bor­ their own or join more product-oriented an established business startegy, with rowed the use of icons ... However, a companies. In their new settings they re­ companies as diverse as DEC and Apple alized, in products and markets, poten­ using the Ethernet standard. Ethernet tials of ideas that had germinated at has brought modest revenues to Xerox PHOTO OF CHARLES SIMONYI BY CLYDE KELLER PARC. and serves as the basis of the company's PHOTO OF ALAN KAY BY NEIL REICHLINE Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ether­ newest Xerox team office systems PHOTOS OF LARRY TESLER net, for instance, founded 3Com Corpo­ . approach. · AND BOB METCALFE BY MIKE CARR ration, which supplies Ethernet local Metcalfe's company, 3Com, though, area networks for IBM PCs and compat­ is catching more fish in its Ethernet. ible computers, after he left P ARC in 3Com went public in early April with an (Continued on page 11 0)

78 Computers & Electronics XeroxPARC (Continued from page 78) lot of people adopted ideas from PARC. products, he acknowledged his debt to their work more relevant to the Xerox Apple just put enough money behind it P ARC and its impact on Apple prod­ bottom line. In the spring of 1983 Xerox and invested in driving its cost down to ucts. He has also collected former appointed a new P ARC director, Wil­ something everybody could afford." P ARC employees, including Larry liam Spencer, a Bell Labs veteran who is Charles Simonyi also admits that Tesler, who went to work at Apple in particularly oriented in turning the lab companies like Microsoft, where he 1980 and Alan Kay, who arrived by an toward the marketplace. works, and even the entire industry owes indirect route. After his years at P ARC, Taylor hasn't retired. He, with mem­ a lot to P ARC. He credits P ARC's con­ Kay went first to Atari, where his job bers of the original P ARC team, is in the tribution not to how unique the scien­ meant "politicking, keeping my finger in process of establishing a new computer tists were but to the special circum­ the dike and following my nose." Even research facility in Palo Alto, with an­ stances they were given. "Other people as a chief scientist at Atari, Kay had a other corporate parent, DEC (Digital have held the same dream but didn't hard time trying to rationalize the need Equipment Corporation). have the freedom to develop it in a lab­ for basic computer research. The "bean Though details are few, it appears that oratory." Now he prefers to speak about counters," as he likes to call accoun­ DEC, a company that has a solid stand­ the present: "What's going on now is a tants, had the final word. At Apple he ing in personal computers and is well-err­ lot more exciting. The innovations that can expect a difference, especially be­ trenched as the minicomputer leader, were once introduced by academics and cause Jobs seems eager to resurrect the needs the ideas that only a think tank ex­ at facilities like P ARC now come from magic of Xerox PARC in developing its pert and talent collector like Taylor can the industry." newest line of 32-bit machines. offer. While Taylor is relunctant to talk NewPARCs New Gardeners at PARC about a center that isn't even completely P ARC not only inspired new prod­ The golden age at P ARC officially built, he did put the new DEC center and ucts and new ideas; it also has spawned ended when a new research management P ARC in a long perspective: "If you're similar environments at other compa­ entered and Bob Taylor left last. Others going to try and connect the present with nies. , Apple chairman and had taken their leaves in the late 1970s the past, I would suggest going back to cofounder, visited PARC in 1979 and when corporate headquarters in Stam­ the ARPA days. The whole thing bas was inspired enough to invest in the Lisa ford, Connecticut, took a more active in­ been a continuum. PARC is not any­ and Mac technology. In the publicity terest in P ARC operations. Scientists at thing special in that continuum. It was that accompanied the debuts of these P ARC started to feel pressed to make just a midway point." <>

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