At Xerox PARC, the home of one of the most exceptional teams of inventing talent ever assembled in one place, prodigious feats of invention and engineering sprouted as commonly as raises in an open field.
A great myth is that Xerox never earned any money from PARC. TR he truth is that it’s revenues from one invention alone, the laser printer, have come to billions of dollars —returning it’s investment in PARC many times over
Anyone could leave Palo Alto in the morning, lunch at SDS, and get home in time for dinner.
On their first recon trip to Silicon Valley, they found that cutbacks in government and military research spending had left plenty of vacant research facilities to choose from.
Stanford Industrial Park was occupying a parcel of land th cash-strapped university had decided to lease out to small businesses.
Pake hired carefully as his aspirations were winning Nobel prizes (like Bell Labs). 6 months in PARC’s staff, including administrators, was only 23
Selenium was a critical element of xerography. It’s electric static charge was neutralized by light and preserved by shadow in a way that mirrored the image of a page to be copied. Particles of toners stuck to the charged regions of the drum which corresponded to dark marks on the original and could be transferred to a fresh page to reproduce the image
We were physically adjacent to Stanford so there were visitors dropping in and out of the lab all the time.
When all inputs and outputs were synchronized, it often seemed as if his mind worked about a thousand times faster than anyone else’s (We can now appreciate that in spoken discourse the theoretical speed limit is the Lampson)
In computing economies of scale often work in Reverse as a system grows larger it becomes exponentially more complicated
Alan Kay’s personality was transferred to multiple characters in the movie Tron by his wife who was the screenwriter
People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given. But this is dangerous because it controls you. Zen in the twentieth century is about taking things that have been rendered invisible by this process and trying to make them visible again.
Computers look smart but their intelligence is a fraud, a sleight of hand stunt abetted by blinding speed and a capacity for infinite reiteration
Computer programming is the process of telling a computer in its own language how to read and follow this cascade of ifs
This book is basically the Dream Machine but set a generation later and with the focus entirely split between characters.
The Alan Kay chapter is awesome
The PDP was a rival of Xerox’s machine. Instead of choosing the SDS, the PARC team decided to build their own clone of the PDP
It’s crazy how important taking Moore’s law seriously was to succeeding as a company. PARC realized it, but Xerox did not, which is how they missed out.
I wonder if the same is true of AI today? Intelligence will get cheaper, what can you do with that?
In the early days of digital printers, memory mattered a lot. This meant caring a lot about characters and fonts.
Max Pavelsky left the Xerox board and invested in Rolling Stone and became their chairman of the board.
At MIT you learn by doing because you’re an engineer. At Harvard they want you to be a scientist and scientists would never soul themselves by doing things.
Ethernet was up against “sneakernet” at the start, running removable disks between computers.
Bravo’s interface was heavily moded, meaning the result of typing a key would differ depending on whether the program was in command or text mode.
Dave Liddle played varsity basketball at Michigan. He got courtside seats to a Lakers game and knew Cazzie Russell who he played with. Russell Brought over Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to say hi to him and Metcalfe.
They had to sandbag the Alto III because with it they wouldn’t make their numbers and therefore wouldn’t get their bonuses.
By 1977, after an expenditure of $90M, more than Boeing spent designing the 747, Xerox had not yet produced a machine that could credibly compete in the marketplace. Kodak had just introduced a superior product with a document handler so fast that the Moses (Xerox) version still on the drawing board was already obsolete
This is a tale of the dangers of a sales led organization
Taylor believed that the unique success of the 914 copier had inculcated Xerox management with the doctrine that good things derived only from hardware
Until the day he saw VisiCalc on the Apple II Simonyi too bad dismissed the hobbyist machines as a joke, as absurd in their triviality as the star was in its bloat.
Ethernet was a open standard. Companies had to pay a one time $1000 fee and pledge to support the ecosystem. It then became the most popular networking standard.
The IBM PC demonstrated that the business user would gladly forgo graphical bells and whistles and seamless system integration and would tolerate a large dose of flakiness in order to save on price.
Warnock and Geschke started Adobe out of work they did at PARC. Their plan: the refining and marketing of a new “typesetting” or page description, language, along the lines initially developed in Interpress.
Taylor never traveled. He would come in every day at 10:00 in the morning park is BMW in the same space every day and pick up his badge from the security guard he would go in his office break out a Dr Pepper and for the next 8 to 10 hours individually touch every member of his lab as consensus manager he was extraordinary.
To sell computers, Xerox would not only have to build a new kind of machine, but also a new system of compensating and motivating it’s more than 100,000 sales executives.
Microsoft tried to recreate PARQ with Microsoft Research