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Dealers of Lightning
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.
You can purchase Dealers of Lightning from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
One of the knocks I heard about the book was too much time on the personalities -- not enough on the
technologies. I'd be curious to the voracity of that claim, and if it did or did not make it a better book?
I'm also curious to know if the book covers the reasons Xerox didn't pursue legally look-n-feel issues? From what I understand, they could have made claims against both MSFT and Apple.
FYI, here's the book via Amazon
--- have you healed your church website?
Part I: Prodigies
1. The Impresario
2. McColough's folly
3. The house on porter drive
4. Utopia
5. Berkeley's second system
6. "Not your normal person"
7. The clone
8. The future invented
Part II: Inventors
9. The refugee
10. Beating the dealer
11. Spacewar
12. Thacker's bet
13. The Bobbsey Twins build a network
14. What you see is what you get
15. On the lunatic fringe
16. The pariahs
17. The big machine
Part III: Messengers
18. Futures day
19. Future plus one
20. The worm that ate the ethernet
21. The silicon revolution
22. The crisis of biggerism
23. Steve Jobs gets his show and tell
24. Supernova
25. Blindsided
26. Exit the Impresario
Epilogue. Did Xerox Blow It?
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
I bought this book over 2 years ago.
/. review!
Nothing like a timely
Not this again. Once again, Apple paid for the privilege of accessing PARC research. *sigh*
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
A good piece of companion reading to "Dealers of Lightning" is "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander.
Originally published in 1988, and largely based on a business school case study of PARC, it presents a nice second perspective on things. Thankfully, it is back in print again.
Cringely even cites it in his book "Accidental Empires".
Dont' bet on it, they came close to filing for bankruptcy a couple of years ago.
Xerox is currently on shaky ground financially. Sales and profits have been declining for the past four years. They also are in trouble for using Enron/Worldcom style accounting, overstating earnings by billions in that time period.
Microsoft's Research department is at http://research.microsoft.com