Dealers of Lightning (43 page)

"We were saying our way is the right way," Lampson recalled. "We
openly articulated our feelings. We really thought they were doing the
wrong thing and any resources poured into it were going to be wasted,
as indeed they were."

The POLOS defenders were equally spirited, arguing that CSL's
plan to distribute $20,000 machines to everyone in the building would
be a ludicrous waste of resources, like giving every secretary her own
printing press when all she needed was a typewriter. Not to mention
that such a system would present a massive maintenance headache,
especially compared to one where the most complicated machines
were kept conveniently in one spot and the only distributed elements
were essentially cheap, low-maintenance TV sets.

What may not have been clear at the moment was that POLOS was
already in trouble—and for exactly the reasons Lampson cited. The
system was too complicated and inherently inefficient to survive. The
POLOS team's inability to get the elaborate network operating consis­tently eventually became too obvious for even its staunchest advocates
to ignore.

"We didn't know how to deal with a system so complicated," acknowl­edged Smokey Wallace, another ex-Engelbart engineer working on the
project. In contrast to a modular system like Alto-Ethernet, where the
whole system would keep functioning regardless of any one component's
failure, POLOS was so organically integrated that the crash of any one
part would knock the entire assemblage out of commission, sometimes
inexplicably. "It would run for three months straight and then fall apart
for half a day," Wallace recalled, "and we wouldn't know why."

Still, for more than a year after the Cookie Monster first munched its
way across Chuck Thacker's display screen, it was impossible to say
which system would eventually prevail. POLOS still had a lot to offer,
including the spectacular multimedia capabilities of Doug Engelbart's
NLS, re-implemented and in many respects improved upon. Mean­while, the Alto was still looking for a rationale.

Taylor jumped at the chance to put Tim Mott to work. He knew Mott
needed an alternative to POLOS. Clearly the answer would have to be
the Alto. When he asked over at the Systems Science Lab if they had any­one with expertise in publication systems to work with Mott, Bill English
suddenly recalled that Larry Tesler had done that "Pub" thing. Without
hesitating, he called Tesler in to tell him about his new job.

"What is it?" Tesler asked.

"You're going to do a publication system for Ginn," English said.

By the time Mott and Tesler started working together, several proto­type word processing programs had already been written at PARC.

Almost none of them functioned very well on the Alto, however—they
were too slow, or too elementary, or too complicated. The exception
was Bravo, which was fast, rich in features, and well-tuned to the Alto's
capabilities.

Mott and Tesler, however, were among those who believed that
Bravo, for all its marvelous endowments, harbored some major flaws.
As with POLOS, most of these had to do with the user interface—the
keystrokes, commands, and visual cues through which user and pro­gram communicated with each other.

For one thing, Bravo's interface was heavily moded, meaning that the
result of typing a key would differ depending on whether the program
was in "command" or "text" mode. The operator always had to keep in
mind which of these states the system was in, lest disaster ensue. In "text"
mode, for instance, the system functioned like a typewriter: Pressing the
"D" key gave you the letter D. In "command" mode, however, the keys
produced not text characters but commands—pressing a D, for example,
instructed the program to
delete
a selected block of text.

Modes were such notorious pitfalls in interface design that they had
spawned a standard cautionary joke. This involved a user who inatten­tively typed the word "edit" while in command rather than text mode:
Typing "e" selected the entire document, "d" deleted the selection, and
"i" instructed the machine to insert in its stead the next character to be
typed
...
at which point the user discovered that his entire document
had been inalterably replaced by the letter "t."

For the sake of the layman, Tesler and Mott believed, modes had to
be exterminated. They thought Bravo's interface represented a vast
improvement over POLOS's thicket of perverse and counterintuitive
commands, but that it had not gone far enough. Its modes were simpli­fied, but they were still modes, making it "still a very dangerous editor
to use," as Tesler recalled.

Moreover, like all CSL programs, Bravo was exceedingly ugly in
appearance. For all CSL's delight at its WYSIWYG capabilities, the pro­gram made scant use of the bitmapped screen's graphical power. Even
the variable fonts were still displayed as bare text on a blank screen. This
reflected a deliberate choice by the CSL designers, who avoided elabo­rate graphics because they slowed
down
the system. But because tire
Systems Science Lab engineers were mostly interested in making the
computer intelligible to the average user, they loaded up their programs
with graphical gewgaws of all kinds, figuring that within a generation or
two the machine s speed would eventually catch up.

Tesler and Mott therefore set out to create a modeless graphical
interface to make Bravo simple to use. Inspired by the costume Mott's
stepdaughter was wearing for Halloween that year, 1974, they called
their new program "Gypsy."

Their first step was to do something PARC had never tried before:
They analyzed how non-engineers would actually use a computer.

This survey was conducted back at Ginn, to which Mott returned
with an Alto display, keyboard, and
mouse.
He installed them as a sort
of dummy setup (the machine was nonfunctional) and invited editors
to seat themselves in front of the equipment, imagine they were edit­ing on-line, and describe what they expected it to do.

"They were a little skeptical," he recalled. "But—surprise, surprise
—
what you got was them wanting the machine to mimic what they would
do on paper." They even described the processes in terms of the tools
they had always used. That is why to this day every conventional word
processors commands for deleting a block of text and placing it else­where in a file are called "cut" and "paste"—because Ginns editors, the
first non-engineers ever to use such a system, were thinking about tire
scissors and paste pots they used to rearrange manuscripts on paper.

While Mott was back in Boston studying the human factors, Tesler
worked on the visual representation of the interface. His ambition was to
build it around icons and menus
—
thumbnail-sized illustrations that
would perform discrete functions when clicked with the mouse, and lists
of commands that could be executed at any given time. For a while he
almost started sympathizing with CSLs view of how heavy graphics bur­dened the underpowered Altos: His first graphical interfaces worked so
slowly that to demonstrate his scheme he had to record it on videotape at
one-ninth normal speed so it would appear natural when played back in
real time.

In 1975, after a year of work, Gypsy was ready for launch. Mott brought
a couple of Altos and a high-speed Dover laser printer back to Ginn and
wired them to a phototypesetter that would output camera-ready text.
For the first time on such a large scale, professional editors manipulated
text on a screen and stored it on magnetic disks rather than cutting, past­ing, and marking a typed manuscript with progressively illegible changes.

"Initially the reaction to the concept was, 'You're going to have to drag
me kicking and screaming,'" Mott recalled. "But everyone who sat in
front of that system and used it, to a person, was a convert within an
hour."

In every way possible, Gypsy mimicked Ginn's customary routines. The
system retained multiple versions and drafts of every file and displayed
them as a list. An editor could use the mouse to scroll down the list and
click on the desired version to open it. (This was the first time the mouse
was used as it is today, to execute point-and-click operations; Engelbart's
system and Bravo both used it simply to position the cursor within a block
of text.)

Mott s diligence in drawing the Ginn editors into the design phase paid
off. Instead of an editing process "so laborious that there was a point at
which you threw up your hands and said, 'I just don't want to do this any­more,'" he recalled, the Ginn staff "found the ability to edit on the
screen and always have a clean copy improved the quality of the editing
itself. They could do a lot more of it before it became frustrating."

Within PARC, Bravo and Gypsy decisively tipped the balance in favor
of the Alto over POLOS. Simonyi, Tesler, and Mott had shown that the
Alto could support an interactive office system that worked fast enough
to enhance—call it "augment"—the professional office worker's intelli­gence. Since POLOS was slipping even further behind schedule, the suc­cess of the Ginn experiment sealed its doom. "The only real question,"
remarked Ted Kaehler, one of Kay's engineers, "was whether POLOS
would be obsolete before it was even operational." In the end, it was.

For all their coolness as killer apps,
Bravo
and
Gypsy only
scratched the surface of the
Alto's
vast capabilities.
Although it was not the first machine small enough
to
be
used
by an individual
—
the
LINC
had been there
before
—
the Alto
was the
first one deliberately designed as a general-purpose "personal"
appliance: individualistic and infinitely customizable.
The
computer
was no longer a machine to which man had to adapt, but one endlessly
adaptable to every users needs.

The
Alto's mystique worked potently on its new owners, who
anthro­
pomorphized their machines like drivers of Volkswagen Beetles, painting
them in bright colors and christening them with considerable
ceremony.
Kay
named his first so-called interim Dynabook "Bilbo," after
J. R. R.
Tolkien's
heroic Hobbit. John Ellenby, a Briton who was placed in charge
of readying
the Alto design for large-scale production,
called his
the
"Gzunda"
("because it 'gzunda' the desk").
The
graphics
researcher Dick
Shoup connected his to a color video terminal, creating the
first
color
computer monitor, and Taylor got his rigged to beep out the opening bars
of
"The Eyes
of Texas
Are
Upon You" whenever he
received
an e-mail
message.

Linked by Ethernet to each other, to printers, and to a host of other
devices such as video displays and organ keyboards, the Altos lit PARC's
creative fuse. Thacker had designed the first custom application, a pro­gram called "SIL" (for "Simple Illustrator") that automated the process
of laying out computer circuits and allowed schematics to be translated
directly into printed boards. But scores more were right behind.

There were "Draw" by Patrick Beaudelaire and "Markup" by William
Newman, which picked up where Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad" left off
by giving users the power to place freehand drawings directly onto the
bitmapped screen. (Of course, where Sutherland's program worked only
on the lone TX-2 at MIT, these would run on any Alto.) There were pro­grams to compose music and animation, to format text documents, and to
assist the writing of more programs, and dozens of programs in Smalltalk.

Meanwhile the all-pervading Ethernet encouraged the spread of
e-mail and consequently the development of "Laurel," a program to
simplify composing, reading, and filing e-mail messages. (A later ver­sion was dubbed "Hardy.") This was a huge leap toward Taylor's grail
of the computer as communications device. "Computers didn't com­municate with each other then," Thacker recalled. "Except at PARC."

And there they communicated almost nonstop, a digital chatter that
would be the envy of today's Internet junkies. On the Alto network Xerox
employees started the first on-line clubs, played the first networked com­puter games, even completed the first joint research projects widiout
ever meeting their partners face to face. "At PARC I received my first
electronic junk mail, my first electronic job acceptance, and first elec­tronic obituary," recalled one lab supervisor. Warren Teitelman once
returned from a week out of town to find his electronic mailbox crammed
with 600 messages.

All this activity plainly pointed to a future in which the computer's
functions would no longer be dictated by hardware, but software: stan­dardized, commercialized, and boundlessly adaptable. Butler Lampson
was one of the first to divine the possibilities. In 1972, even before the
Alto took form and more than ten years before the advent of the IBM
Personal Computer and the software and hardware industries it
spawned, he set forth in a professional publication his "rather phantas­magoric" vision of a Utopian computer-enhanced destiny:

Millions
of people will write
non-trivial
programs, and hundreds of
thousands will try to sell them.
Of course,
the market will be much
larger and very much more diverse
than it
is now, just as paper is
more widespread and is used
in many more
ways than
are
adding
machines. Almost everyone
who uses a pencil
will use
a
computer,
and although most people will
not do any
serious programming,
almost everyone will be a potential
customer
for serious programs of
some kind. . . . Such a mass market
will
require mass distribution.
Analogues of bookstores, newsstands and magazine subscriptions
seem plausible, as well as the kind
of
mail-order and home improve­ment marketing patterns we have
now.

Raised
on time-sharing, most of
PARC's
computer scientists had trou­ble getting acclimated to the experience of having computer cycles
at
their personal disposal.
A
few even felt a twinge of guilt the
first
time
they
turned their backs on an idle
Alto,
as though they were leaving
food
on
the table
while others starved.
But
for the first time in the
history
of com­puting, resources were abundant enough to waste.

Few
people at
PARC
were as devoted to the machine as
Alan Kay. It
was as
diough
this
was what he had been waiting for all his fife
—indeed,
it had
virtually been built to his personal specifications.
And
when it
appeared,
he
was
fully prepared to take advantage of it.

Among the Tom Sawyers Kay
was known for wielding the most beguil­ing paintbrush
in
the building.
No
one evangelized more convincingly on
behalf of
ideas he found compelling, whether they were his own or
belonged to
others.
Kay
proselytized out of necessity.
The
experience of
emerging
from grad school with a four-hundred-page thesis describing a
machine that
could not be physically realized had sent him into a psy­chological tailspin.
An
old tendency toward depression, spurred by his
inability
to execute,
reasserted itself.

"Right
about that first year at
PARC,
under psychotherapy,
I
discov­ered I was confusing my talent with my temperament," he said. "I didn't
have the temperament of a programmer. I realized I needed a group."

This epiphany resembled that of a poet suddenly finding his voice. Like
all the self-educated, having once grasped an idea Kay was impatient to
move onto the next. He was a man of bifurcated nature, simultaneously a
peerless formulator of theory and an instinctive craftsman with a short
attention span. Having spent decades as an intellectual lone wolf, Kay
redirected his gift for communicating enthusiasm toward the goal of
attracting followers, often at the university lectures for which he was
much in demand. It helped that he could size up a potential disciple in a
split second, and that technical aptitude was not a prerequisite.

"After I would give a talk there would always be a fair number of
people who would come up at the end with special stars in their eyes.
At that stage nobody really knew how to do this stuff anyway, so I
tended to hire people who could buy into the romance of the whole
thing, because you could go a really good distance on romance."

Inside the building it was impossible to pass within a few yards of Kay's
door without sensing a gravitational tug. Perhaps his most important
recruit was swept into his orbit that way, never to leave. Dan Ingalls had
come to PARC on a temporary contract to help George White set up the
SDS Sigma 3 he had acquired for his work in speech recognition.

"My office ended up across the hall from Alans," Ingalls said. "I kept
noticing that I was more interested in what I was hearing across the hall
than in the speech work I was hired to do. These conversations I was
eavesdropping on were all about open-ended computer science stuff,
which I was interested in. One day I walked over and said, 'Hey, what are
you up to?' And that led to his talking about his whole picture of personal
computing and how one might make a simple job of a lot of the impor­tant things through some new language."

Alan Kay on a tear through Ideaspace was a very formidable force.
Ingalls hastened to finish his job for White, then cadged himself a full­time appointment across the hall. Kay had not been daydreaming when
he told Ingalls about his plans for a new computer language. What he had
in mind would become perhaps the first project in his life he would see
through to fruition. Dan Ingalls, it turned out, was the person he needed
to make it happen.