Dealers of Lightning (28 page)

Pendery "really didn't understand what we were talking about," Kay
recalled. Instead he was "interested in 'trends' and 'what was the
future going to be like' and how Xerox could 'defend against it.'"

In the course of one frustrating encounter Kay blurted out the line des­tined to become his (and PARC's) unofficial credo. "Look," he said, "the
best way to predict the future is to
invent
it!"

But PARC had come face to face with a force of nature, the corpo­rate instinct for self-preservation. While Kay urged upon Xerox the
virtues of patience and trust in scientific serendipity, Pendery pressed
for a definition of its vision that could be reduced to paper and pre­sented in a boardroom. Finally he got it. In mid-1971 George Pake
sent up to headquarters a half-inch-thick folder containing seven docu­ments, each written by an individual PARC scientist—scarcely sixty
pages altogether. Someone had cheekily labeled it "PARC Papers for
Pendery and Planning Purposes." In lab shorthand they were hence­forth known as the "Pendery Papers."

Not since Vannevar Bush had forecast how we might think in his essay
for
The Atlantic
had such a comprehensive vision of technology and the
future been set down in writing. The Pendery Papers were at once a sur­vey of the most promising technologies on the horizon and a road map for
PARC's ten-year exploratory journey. Some of the forecasts overshot
their marks. Kay, for instance, anticipated (perhaps wishfully) portable
flat-screen displays at nominal cost by 1980. Jim Mitchell, writing on
future office systems, envisioned error-free and infinitely customizable
software, transmitted from vender to buyer over network connections,
running flawlessly on a full spectrum of incompatible machines (as of this
writing still a hazy dream). But on the whole the package stands with
Bush's as a remarkable feat of scientific prognostication. Mitchells office of the future was one in which uncompleted memos,
letters, and reports would exist solely on computer, to be printed out only
when a final hard copy was needed. ("Much of the current 'paper push­ing' in today's offices will be replaced by people spending a large portion
of their time using a computer via some personal terminal.") He forecast
the propagation of electronic mail and divined its unique ability to allow
people to "communicate and manipulate information simultaneously,
without the necessity of physical proximity." The floppy disk would
replace the file cabinet as the principal repository of documents and
information.

Dick Shoup, reporting on integrated circuit technology, anticipated the
development of "smart" appliances such as toasters and alarm clocks
equipped with simple but powerful chips. John Urbach's paper on "archival
memory" described digital photo-optical media resembling today's CD-
ROMs and compact audio discs. "There seems little reason to store sound
in analog form," he wrote, observing that acoustical information is easily
reduced to bursts of digital bits—thus consigning the LP record to the
dustbin more than fifteen years before it actually met such a fate.

To be fair, many of the startling innovations posited by the Pendery
authors were ringers: They were only modest extrapolations from tech­nologies well-known throughout the research community, if not among
the broad public. Mitchell's description of tomorrow's text-editing and
office systems drew heavily from Doug Engelbart's 1968 demonstra­tion. Shoup's survey of integrated circuitry scarcely ventured much
beyond devices that were already on the market or known to be under
active development. Still, futurists have no obligation to venture solely
into the realm of magic and crystal balls; sometimes a clear vision of
what lies around the next bend will do. As things stood, the Pendery
Papers were important for PARC and Xerox in three ways.

The first was that they implicitly embraced the immense but still widely
unappreciated power of Moore's Law. The term appeared nowhere in
the Pendery Papers, but its significance permeated every page. The
implication of Moore's article had been that technologies impractical in
1965 would be commonplace within a decade or two. In the Pendery
Papers PARC informed Xerox that the devices on the drawing board
today would be marketable in ten years, so it was time to get ready.

"This was their version of the old hunters saying, 'Never aim at the
ass end of a duck,'" remarked George White, Jack Goldman's assistant,
who served on Pendery's task force. "PARC was telling us that if you
want to invest in research at Palo Alto you've got to get way ahead.
Otherwise, by the time the ripening and maturing process from your
research comes through events will have overtaken you."

PARC further understood that Moore's Law would pack its greatest
wattage in the visual interaction between computer and man. Virtually
every paper touched on this topic and some dwelled on it at length (Kay's
was devoted entirely to display technology). It was as though the lab had
finally absorbed the lesson Bob Taylor had been pressing on it for more
than a year: The computer is a communications device in which the dis­play is
the whole point.

The third benefit of the Pendery Papers inured to PARC alone. "It was
a matter of setting the primary focus for the lab," recalled Peter Deutsch.
"Even though in our guts nobody believed that you would be able to put
a portable computer on every desk ten years from now, that was what was
said by the industry trend and the curves of various things. You'd be able
to put something equivalent to MAXC on everybody's desk in ten years."

One might argue that the Pendery Papers were another example, like
Strassmann's veto of the PDP-10, of how a hectoring from headquarters
proved itself to be a blessing in disguise. They named their file of white
papers after their tormentor from the home office, but they wrote it for
themselves. With dazzling audacity Mitchell, Kay, Urbach, and the oth­ers had fixed on their destination. Now it was up to all of them, working
together, to blaze the path that would take them there.

PART II

Inventors

If anyone symbolized
the gulf separating
the inventors
of
the future in Palo Alto
from the Xerox
development
drones
back East, that person
was Gary
Starkweather.

Starkweather
was
highly trained in an
arcane
subspecialty
of physics,
but he did not look like anyone's idea
of a master
physicist.
With
his
stocky
frame
and friendly, guileless
features, he
more resembled your
neighborhood phone lineman. But to his
colleagues
at
PARC he
was
a
special catch.
He
was the scientist outcast, the man who got
branded
a
renegade by his bosses at Webster simply for proving that the novel
tech
nology
of
lasers could be used to "paint" an image onto a xerographic
drum with greater speed and precision than ordinary white light.

Instead
of garnering praise and encouragement he was ordered to
abandon his research and threatened with the loss of his lab assistants.
His
bosses hinted that his future at
Xerox
would be bleak if he failed
to
redirect his energies back to the pressing issues oflenses and white light.
'We
had almost reached the point of maximum disconnect," he recalled,
when it
was
finally recognized that the only place for him was that mad­house out in Palo
Alto.

And there at
PARC
he invented the laser printer, the success of
which contradicts the canard that Xerox never earned a dime from the
Palo Alto Research Center. It is one of the ironies of the story that
despite Jack Goldman's tireless efforts to keep PARC insulated from
Webster's copier-duplicator mentality, the most profitable product
PARC ever produced sprang from the mind of a Webster man.

Not that they ever thought of him that way at
PARC.
"Gary Stark­weather had been thrown out of Webster," Alan Kay remarked with
manifest approval. "We considered him one of us."

For all his considerable skills at manipulating light, Gary Stark­weather's career in optics began more or less on a whim. In 1960, hav­ing just received his bachelor's degree in physics from Michigan State
University, he faced a limited spectrum of career options. "The choices
were I could go into nuclear power, which was a hot thing in 1960, or I
could go into optics. And I looked at nuclear and said, I don't think so.
I wasn't sure how people would live with the problems, because when
nuclear fails, it fails big. So I went into optics." It was a lucky choice.
Just a year or so into his master's studies at the University of Rochester,
the entire field blew wide open.

At Hughes Research Laboratory in Malibu, Theodore Maiman had
coiled an electronic tube around a cylinder of pink ruby polished at either
end to a mirrored sheen. He touched off a flash of electrons within the
coil, exciting the ruby into firing an instantaneous burst of single-
wavelength red light from one end. The science of optics was never the
same.

Before the laser's appearance, light was a crude implement. Optical
scientists could knock it about with lenses and mirrors and sort it into
its constituent wavelengths with prisms. But these processes bore all
the delicacy of surgery performed with a jackhammer. By contrast, the
laser cut like a scalpel.

White light generated thermally
—
by bulbs and electric arcs—
comprises all the colors of the spectrum, oscillating at different wave­lengths and consisting of photons generated out of phase with one
another. Under such conditions light inevitably scatters and diffuses over
distance, like ocean waves spending themselves on the beach. Maiman's
ruby device, however, emitted a beam immune to the scattering effect. It
had spatial coherence (all the light in the beam was the same wavelength)
and temporal coherence, meaning that its photons were in phase. The
laser could be "tuned," like a radio antenna, to be so bright and fine that
a beam shined from the Earth could visibly illuminate a spot on the
moon.

Optical scientists welcomed the new technology as a tool for making
the theoretical concrete. Hypotheses of the existence of certain photo­electric effects and other phenomena could now be tested in the lab. At
the University of Rochester Gary Starkweather abandoned his original
masters topic in classical optics, refocused his attention on lasers, and
received his degree for a thesis exploring holography, the laser-aided cre­ation of three-dimensional images. With great anticipation he brought
his knowledge back to Xerox's Webster lab, where he had worked his way
through school, only to be instructed to stop talking like a madman.

For a company whose vast corporate fortune depended on the manip­ulation of fight, Xerox remained resolutely behind the curve in exploiting
Ted Maiman's discovery. Everywhere Starkweather turned at Webster he
saw projects coming to naught because they employed light sources too
feeble. Whenever he pointed out that the laser packed 10,000 times the
brightness of a conventional light source he encountered sneers, espe­cially when he suggested that the new devices might play a role in xero­graphic imaging. Lasers were difficult to handle and burned out faster
than a rick of dry timber, his colleagues responded. Brisding with elec­trodes and emitting bursts of blinding light, they seemed about as safe to
put into an office machine as nuclear warheads. And they were expensive—$2,500 to $25,000 for a single unit.

For the next few years Starkweather had no choice but to experiment
on his own. His instincts told him that a beam so precise could be modu­lated—that is, altered in intensity—to carry information, just like radio
waves or the pulses on a phone line. Suppose one could educate a light
beam to reliably transmit digital bits: These could then be translated into
marks on a blank sheet, a feat that would allow one to consign to paper
the thoughts and images created inside a machine.

Enlisting the help of a couple of lab assistants, he built a clumsy proto­type, hitching a laser apparatus to an old
seven
-page-a-minute copier no
one used anymore. Whenever he could steal an hour or two early in the
morning or late at night he would run some equally clumsy tests by bom­barding an unused xerographic drum with laser beams. Eventually he
learned how to scan an original image and turn out a duplicate. True, his
first samples were crude and pale, not at all ready for prime time. Still,
they were scarcely any worse than the faded, scrawled "10-22-38 Asto­ria" Chester Carlson had reproduced on a coarse apparatus in his
kitchen. From Carlson’s crude and pale sample, Starkweather kept
reminding himself, an awesome new industry had sprung. Who was to
say that his might not do the same?

Nevertheless, Starkweather got scarcely more respect than Carlson
had at the start of his own researches. "The theoreticians gave me every
excuse," he recalled. "All hogwash. They told me the beam would be
moving so rapidly the photoreceptor would never see it. They talked
about 'photoconductor fatigue' and asked, How will you modulate? They
thought there was no practical value in it. "We got copiers we need to
ship, you need to work on the lenses for that
. . .
Painting laser beams,
these things are expensive, they never last very long and they look like a
ham radio set. It's a completely useless application. If you paint at 200
dots per inch that's a million bits of data, where will you ever get a million
bits of information?' In 1968 that was probably a valid question. But it
wasn't a valid question if you looked at where the technology might go."

Over months and years of trying, fueled by the inner conviction that
drives natural inventors, he fashioned experiments that answered every
objection. He could modulate the beam by varying the power input and
scan it by the clever application of a set of mirrors. He was proudest of
disproving the old bugaboo about "photoconductor fatigue." This
referred to a hypothetical property of the selenium coating of the
copier's xerographic drum, the electrostatic charge of which must be
neutralized by light in order for the duplicating process to work.

Laboratory dogma maintained that excessively bright light would drive
the neutralization effect deep into the selenium layer, like a hammer
driving a nail through soft wood. Once the photoconductor thus became
too "fatigued" to consistently snap back to a blank, quiescent state, one
would see persistent "ghosts" of earlier copies, all transferred together to
the blank paper. The objection, being strictly theoretical, was hard to dis­count. "It was only an inkling," Starkweather explained, "because no one
had ever tried to expose things in a few billionths of a second before."

Starkweather’s experiments proved the inkling false. He showed that
bathing a photoreceptor with the lasers extraordinarily potent beam
for a fraction of a second had the same effect as applying conventional
light for the much longer period employed in ordinary xerography. The
brevity of the exposure canceled out the strength of the beam, and the
selenium survived just fine.

As for the complaints about the devices' cost, Starkweather figured
lasers were bound to come down in price. What, after all, was the laser?
A neon tube with mirrors on the ends. A sign that says "Eat at Joe's,"
unfurled into a straight line. "There's a feeling down in your stomach
where you're sure the thing has potential," he recalled of those solitary
days and nights. "You have to believe against all odds that the thing will
work."