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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.
When I was a student, in Belgium, my network professor told us he went to Xerox PARC.
His interest for networks started from there.
But he also told us how dumb the managers were already. Basically, he told us, researchers had white cards for a whole lot of things, and really invented beautiful things.
For example, the principle of a UI, where you could type and store a whole document and then print it later on was realized there, but a dumb manager refused the idea, claiming it was too complex: all the users want, he said, is a typewriter where you can validate your text one line, print it, and then validate the next one.
No doubt that if the Xerox manegers had been smarter, Xerox would be a far bigger company than it is today.
JB.
JB.
Yes folks, they used research on children to determine that people process information visually. I dare say, having been one of those kids that picked everything up immediately, I approach problems very differently as an adult.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
What is most impressive about this book is the way it doesn't condemn the Xerox execs out of hand for not taking up ideas, it slates them for destroying the atmosphere that created those ideas. The execs made a bundle of cash out of Xerox Parc, sure they could have made more but it more than paid for itself as it was.
Where the execs went wrong was because they _tried_ to make Parc more commercial, and more commercially driven. The power of PARC was that it started as basically a University within a corporation, and the corporation gained many valuable elements from it. As soon as they moved towards a more commercial model (Star et al) then the suits began to exert more control and the brains began to leave or get pissed off.
Don't slate Xerox for not capitalising on all of the ideas, slate Xerox for trying to capitalise on PARC and destroying it in the process.
Xerox PARC invented the majority of the important technology today, in the sense that they made it a reality even if others had thought of it first. Your PC has windowing because Apple saw PARC, your PC has ethernet because they needed to network computers, your printer works because PARC made it so.
PARC founded the modern computing world, but commercialism and the attempt to exploit the ideas are what destroyed it. PARC made Xerox HUGE amounts of cash, it was a desire (greed?) to get even more than led to the bright lights leaving.
These bright lights have gone on to bigger and better things, how Xerox must now think "if only".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
From my dealings with the people there, it was clear that they had the whole research and development thing down. They inspired their people to build things that were unbelievable. But the marketing and sales folks all came from the copier side of the business whenever they wanted to roll things out. Although Xerox folks were great people, they could not bridge the gap between their experience and the future. (See Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.)
As time went on Xerox say more and more that they were not capturing the benefits of the PARC developed technology and got desperate. So all good things come to an end.
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.
Xerox had/has no case against Apple, because Xerox was compensated by Apple from the very beginning:
Xerox was allowed to buy a piece of Apple (before Apple went public) in exchange for the Apple employees' tour of PARC and the research demos.
When Adele Goldberg, formerly of PARC, was interviewed in Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary, she made it known that the Xerox executives were very aware of the possibility of PARC ideas walking out the door with the Apple people-- because Goldberg herself refused to demo anything for the Apple contingent for just that reason, unless she were ordered to do so from her Xerox superiors. The order was given without hesitation, the demos were shown, and the rest is history.
~Philly
I can't believe you're saying that their 'Clippy' wasn't innovative technology. That bloody marvellous contraption helped me through a lot of difficult moments. ** sobs uncontrolably **