Dealers of Lightning (64 page)

Mead was similarly seduced by PARC's atmosphere of pure invention.
Having spent years on campus and also been involved in commercial
start-ups, he viewed PARC as a unique hybrid of both without the down­side of either. "There was a lot more teamwork than in academia," he
said. "It was about getting things done, not about publishing papers."

Nor was there the agitation
to
get product out the door he had
observed at hard-charging enterprises like Intel. Instead he found him­self surrounded by the enthusiasm for learning as an end in itself that
drives people to come early to their labs and stay late into the night.
Mead considered himself a pathologically early riser, but he could never
remember a morning at PARC on which he was the first one in the build­ing. "I'd get in at six in the morning," he said, "and Alan Kay would
already be there."

He was even more profoundly impressed by the power of the inte­grated computing environment they had invented. "It was really obvi­ous to me that this whole thing with the network and Altos and the file
and printer servers was dynamite, and that it was going to be the way
computing got done."

For the next year Caltech and
PARC
educated each other. Mead trans­ferred his theories about microelectronics and computer science, and
Conway and Fairbairn paid him back by developing design methods and
tools giving engineers the ability to create integrated circuits of unprece­dented complexity on Alto-sized workstations. The science of VLSI was
developing exactly as Mead had predicted. Systems that previously could
be realized only as shaggy mats of diodes and wire strung on six-foot
metal racks were getting reduced to filigreed etchings on the silvery sur­face of a silicon wafer
—
and they worked. They were approaching the
goal of modularity, in which circuits that once required a square yard of
schematic diagram could be reduced to a single compact chip for a com­puter designer to plug into a machine, like a simple building block from
which a child can build a model skyscraper.

"This headed us in the direction of designing and building bigger,
better, more elegant things," Conway said. "Everybody's ambition was
cranking up month by month."

They were a noisy group, given to loud and sometimes angry debates in
the hallways that reminded people of a Dealer in full cry. Conway and
Mead made for prickly teammates, sometimes collaborating, sometimes
quarreling openly about how to organize and explain a technology mov­ing ahead at breakneck speed. "Carver and I were both highly crazed by
all this," Conway recalled. "We'd compete and conflict with each other
and there was so much noise around the project that it didn't seem com­pletely sane."

VLSI also left some of their colleagues behind. The Computer
Science Lab still held to the party line that VLSI was an untested tech­nology and would remain so until there was proof the chips could be
manufactured and exploited on a commercial scale. Mead was accus­tomed to such skepticism and on the whole untroubled by it. "At the
time, the common wisdom was that if you make these things smaller
and faster they'll just melt," he recalled. As early as 1971 he had writ­ten a paper predicting that the tiny chips would soon be part of every
telephone, washing machine, and car. Nothing he had yet seen on the
technical landscape suggested he should revise his opinion.

But Conway and Fairbairn were more sensitive to how their work
was viewed by others at PARC. She felt CSL was not giving them the
benefit of the doubt. "They didn't seem to recognize that we were
principled scientists who had our own self-check on things."

She was right: CSL was profoundly dubious. "I didn't like what Lynn
Conway's group was doing and I didn't think it was very productive,"
Lampson complained, troubled to see valuable PARC resources drain­ing down a speculative rathole. Adding to the pain, Xerox was again
tightening up the budget just as CSL was hoping to launch a few new
initiatives.

"There was a zero-sum game in PARC resources and we thought there
were all kinds of great opportunities for things we might do," he recalled.
'We wanted to get into databases and things like spreadsheets which we
had completely ignored in the past. We wanted to do a lot of work on user
interfaces and programming environments, all sorts of things. We did
what we could, but it seemed clear that with more resources we could do
a lot more."

Conway started to feel that something had to be done to fight off CSL's
criticisms. Sutherland was a strong defender of her work, but by nature
he was not a confrontational individual. If the computer lab—particularly
Lampson, who commanded management's respect—continued to carp
at the money being spent on the hazy potential of VLSI, who knew how
long she could survive at PARC? Especially since the power of the tech­nology did not leap out at first glance. Compared to commercial inte­grated circuits, the schematics of VLSI looked simple and amateurish on
the surface, because they employed novel, unfamiliar design techniques
that had never been employed in building earlier generations of inte­grated circuits.

While discussing this one day with Mead and Fairbairn she realized the
problem was not just scientific, but cultural. VLSI had not been around
long enough even to generate textbooks and college courses—the para­phernalia of sound science that, she was convinced, would force every­one else to take it seriously.

"We should write the book," she told Mead. "A book that communi­cates the simplest, most elegant rules and methods for VLSI design
would make it look like a mature, proven science, like anything does if
it's been around for the ten or fifteen years you normally have behind a
textbook."

Mead was skeptical. They had no publisher and, given that they nor­mally worked in two locations five hundred miles apart, no easy way of
collaborating.

That's where you're wrong, she replied. What was the aim of all the
technology that surrounded them at PARC, if not to facilitate just the
project she was proposing? They had Altos running Bravo, a network
to link long-distance collaborators, and high-speed laser-driven Dover
printers to produce professional-looking manuscripts.

"With all that," she said, "we can do it, and get it out there fast, and
it'll
look
just like a regular textbook."

Their collaboration that summer on what became the seminal text of
the new technology was only one of Conway's efforts to distill and spread
the VLSI gospel. The same year she agreed to teach a guest course at
MIT (using the first few chapters of the still-maturing textbook), then
printed up her lecture notes for instructors at an ever-enlarging circle of
interested universities. By mid-1979 she was able to offer an additional
incentive to a dozen schools: If they would transmit student designs to

PARC over the ARPANET, PARC would arrange to have the chips built,
packaged, and returned to the students for testing.

That summer her offer came to the attention of Jim Clark, then an
untenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.

Clark had no prior expertise in integrated circuit design. "He'd never
even worked in silicon before," Conway recalled. But his expertise in
computer graphics came from well within PARC's universe: He had
received his doctorate at the University of Utah, where his thesis advisor
was Ivan Sutherland and his research funding had come from ARPA.

At Utah and later at Stanford, Clark was driven by the impulse to push
the technology of graphics beyond the limits of existing hardware. As one
of his Stanford students later recalled of a meeting in 1979, "The first day
I went to speak to Jim, he pointed to a picture of an airplane he had up
on the wall. 'I'm going to make this move,' he said."

Like no one PARC had seen since Bob Metcalfe, he was also driven to
explore all the commercial possibilities of his work, academia be damned.
("I love the metric of business," he told an interviewer in 1994. "It's
money. It's real simple. You either make money or you don't. The metric
of the university is politics.")

Clark understood at once that the computing efficiency VLSI offered
was the key to expanding the potential of computer graphics. That sum­mer he essentially relocated to PARC, taking over a vacant office next
door to Conway's and steeping himself in VLSI lore. Within four months
he had finished the Geometry Engine chip, the product of that summer's
total immersion.

Perhaps more than any other project, Clark's chip fulfilled Conway's
quest to give VLSI credibility. Not only did it launch computer graphics
as a profitable segment of high-powered computing, it showed that the
unprecedented complex circuits could be designed rapidly, and then
manufactured in huge quantities that would work flawlessly in an indus­trial context. The technology eventually matured into today's generation
of Motorola and Intel microprocessors, which run most of the world's
desktop computers, as well as a wide range of special-purpose circuits.
Carver Mead's prediction did come true. VLSI did turn every telephone,
washing machine, and car—and thousands of other workaday appliances
as well—into tiny computers. (Clark's expectations were fulfilled too: Sil­icon Graphics Inc. made him a multi-millionaire.)

Carver Mead performed one more service for PARC after complet­ing of the VLSI text with Lynn Conway. This was a visit he paid to
Stamford to warn Xerox of the dangers of squelching the inventiveness
at PARC.

The mission grew out of a conversation he had one day with Pake and
Bert Sutherland. "I told them Xerox has got to get itself together," he
recalled, "because there's no way a big company can take advantage of
things moving this fast. People will get frustrated and start their own
companies. Pake said, 'You should talk to the people at corporate head­quarters.'"

Meads familiarity with new-technology companies such as Intel won
him a respectful audience from McColough and Kearns. "I spent a
delightful morning with those guys," he said. "I told them, 'You'll never
have a better shot. If people leave because they don't see anything hap­pening, that'll be like a bomb going off inside PARC. The only question is
whether you participate and enable it, or let it happen for someone else.'"

"What do you suggest?" Kearns asked.

"Set up a venture capital arm," Mead advised. "Smell out the technol­ogy, find it, incubate it. Take an equity position in things as they happen,
otherwise it'll all be gone and you won't have any part of it."