Inventor of a New World

Come, journey back three decades, to a time before the Internet and laptops and disc drives--back to the moment when a major corporation established a legendary incubator for a new technology, and the personal computer was born.

As the 1970s opened, Xerox Corp. was coming face to face with both triumph and adversity. Triumph because its standard-bearing product, the Model 914 office copier, was generating a cascade of cash as befit the most successful commercial product in history. On the other hand, powerful competitors like IBM and Kodak were about to chip away at Xerox’s 15-year monopoly on office copiers by introducing their own. Even more frightening, theorists were talking about how digital computing might bring about the “paperless office.” Where would that leave Xerox, which made its fortune by charging customers for every copy they ran off a 914?

In 1969, Xerox moved to gain a foothold in the emerging digital marketplace by buying El Segundo-based Scientific Data Systems, a computer company, for the astonishing price of nearly $1 billion. Only after signing the check did Xerox discover that its prize was a stodgy machine shop, far removed from the new frontiers of computing science. To fill the gap, it decided to create a computing research center of its own.

Thus in July 1970 was founded the Palo Alto Research Center--forever to be known as Xerox PARC, on the edge of the Stanford University campus in a place not yet known as “Silicon Valley.” Several dozen men and women recruited from the finest universities, government agencies and corporate research departments would make PARC a legendary font of technological creativity. Among the PARC inventions that to this day enrich our lives were the laser printer, the graphical user interface, full-featured word processing, the notebook computer, and many of the indispensable technologies of the Internet.

But by far PARC’s most famous invention was the personal computer: the Alto, the first general-purpose computer that could fit under a desk. It was the work of many gifted individuals, but one above all invested it with its soul. That was a rumpled, voluble genius named Alan Kay, who had spent years developing his concept of the “Dynabook”--a compact computer that could be carried under one’s arm and yet hold the computing power necessary to store letters, novels, musical scores, drawings--all that a creative individual might cherish.

The following excerpt about Kay is from Michael A. Hiltzik’s book “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age,” published this month.

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Alan Kay might have been the role model for the modern computer nerd, a Chuck Yeager for the generation that got engaged by the new technology in the 1970s. If you lived within that era’s insular community of students and electronics nuts, you knew his name, perhaps because you had read his lucid explications of microelectronics and software in Scientific American, or read an article featuring him in (of all places) Rolling Stone. You had been socially conditioned to feel ungainly and isolated by your devotion to machines and math; Alan Kay positively reveled in it, swaggered with it, declared in the pages of the counterculture bible itself that you and your awkward pals in all your nebbishy glory were the prophets of a new world in which computers and their unparalleled power would belong to the masses.

The Computer Bum, he enlightened Rolling Stone’s readers as one of the foreground figures in a 1972 article by Stewart Brand, as someone who looked “about as straight as you’d expect hot-rodders to look. It’s that kind of fanaticism. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship.”

To this day, Alan Kay is the kind of person who communicates an impression of pure motion even when he is sitting down. Once you get him talking, he performs what he calls a “brain dump,” years of accumulated knowledge and synthesis pouring forth in a flood of narrative in which the protagonists are Alan Kay and the startling and visionary ideas he holds dear (many of them still deplorably unrealized), and their adversaries are managers, executives, bean counters, corporate boards, schoolteachers and all others who regard the unshackled imagination as a menace rather than a gift.

“Conversations with Alan aren’t about any particular thing,” says Carver Mead, a Caltech professor who got to know him well during a sabbatical at PARC. “They’re more a ramble through Ideaspace.”

Ideaspace Central today is divided between two Southern California locations about 10 miles apart. One is Kay’s home in Brentwood. It is unassuming from the outside except for a towering peak-roofed addition. This curious annex was custom built to shelter a two-story pipe organ professionally handcrafted of exquisite blond spruce, on which Kay can be heard almost any morning practicing his favorite music by Buxtehude and J.S. Bach. (“Alan believed his role was to make it possible to build the organ, after which he would be the happy caretaker,” remarked its architect, Greg Harrold.)

The second location is a warehouse-like building in Glendale. Artfully arranged partitions and bookcases provide Kay with a spacious work area open to the floor through a doorless passage on one side--not too private, for he likes to spend the workday in constant stir, eliciting and dispensing ideas among his co-workers with equal generosity. He greets you wearing an oval name tag reading “Alan” and bearing a picture of Mickey Mouse, for he is now employed by the Walt Disney Co., which has entrusted him with helping develop new ways to transmit story and idea from creator to audience. He has been at Disney since 1996 (after leaving PARC in 1981, he spent a brief period at Atari, which had brought out an inexpensive computer, and 12 years as an Apple Fellow, infusing that forward-thinking company with his own ideas of how to write software that bowed to the user’s needs rather than vice versa).

“It’s almost impossible for most people to see technology as the tool rather than the end,” he was saying one day in his cubicle at Disney Imagineering’s Glendale warehouse. “People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given. But it’s dangerous to take it as a given because then it controls you, rather than the other way around.”

Kay’s career as an independent thinker began when he moved with his family into his paternal grandfather’s Massachusetts farmhouse at the age of 1. The late patriarch of the clan was Clifton Johnson, a writer, musician, and pioneering documentary photographer at the turn of the century, and the farmhouse was filled with books--5,000 of them, addressing every topic under the sun. Alan reached first grade as a 5-year-old autodidact. “By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books,” he told an interviewer. “I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.”

This propensity for relying on points of view of his own choosing was a habit he never abandoned. By the time he was ready to receive his doctorate in computer science from the University of Utah in 1969, those influences included some of the most far-reaching visionaries of the new discipline. There was Ivan Sutherland, creator of “Sketchpad,” the world’s first program for drawing geometric images on a computer screen; and Seymour Papert, an MIT professor who had perfected a program known as LOGO, which taught children how to program through the deceptively simple device of a mechanical “turtle” that followed simple directives typed into the computer and traced its path by means of a pen stuck in its underbelly and trailing along the floor.

Kay’s energetic mind fused their notions into the “Dynabook,” which took shape as a computer simple enough for children to use and powerful enough to deliver the vivid interactive feedback they cherished. The idea was not to make a toy; rather, Kay reasoned that if the exacting creative standards of childhood could be met, the Dynabook would be an even richer tool for grown-ups. To appreciate how radical an idea that was for the late ‘60s, one has to remember that the standard computer of the time was a university time-sharing behemoth that users commanded via instructions written on punchcards or teletype, and which returned its answers laboriously the same way. A single sequence of instruction and response took hours or days. To Kay that would not do. To him the ideal computer was not the glorified calculator that most of the world imagined, but a large, full-color, interactive display screen with a computing chip attached.

Soon after receiving his PhD, Kay was invited to join PARC, which had opened its doors with a skeleton staff of 23 in 1970. The place seemed the perfect incubator for his embryonic ideas. Formally charged by Xerox with inventing “The Office of the Future,” the best of America’s leading young computer scientists had gathered in insular bliss to chart digital science’s course without the pressure of commercial deadlines. Kay and his colleagues interpreted their assignment to be inventing products now that Xerox could market 10 years hence, when the most advanced and costly components they were using would finally come down to a manageable price. To Xerox executives who fretted that such a timeline would leave the company exposed to unpredictable technological developments, Kay had a stock answer: “The best way to predict the future,” he told them, “is to invent it.”

Yet the managerial bureaucracy that Xerox had installed at PARC kept thwarting his efforts to get built what he invented. For all its reputation as a portal into the future, PARC harbored many who regarded Alan Kay as an odd man out, given to thinking out loud and disregarding rules--whether they were corporate regulations prohibiting unsupervised interviews with the newspapers, or the fundamental rules of engineering, which governed what it was possible to design and build.

The worst confrontation came one day in May 1972, when he submitted a formal proposal to spend several hundred thousand dollars on the construction of 30 “personal” computers. As PARC’s lab staff lounged before him in their signature beanbag chairs (upholstered in a hideous mustard yellow), he laid out the argument. He understood this would mean squeezing every drop of functionality out of existing--and exceptionally costly--display and memory technology, but he reminded his audience that the cost of that technology was destined to fall sharply over the coming few years. And wasn’t that why they were here--to build the most capable system they could imagine, so far ahead of the curve that they could figure out what to do with it by the time the rest of the world caught up?

“We know everything,” he said. “The uses for a personal gadget as an editor, reader, take-home context and intelligent terminal are fairly obvious. Now let’s build 30 of these things so we can get on with it.”

But PARC’s engineering boss, a severe executive named Jerry Elkind, shot him down. Elkind was a by-the-numbers engineer, not the type to be blinded by Kay’s techno-romantic glow. As a manager he responded to rationales on paper and rigorous questions asked and answered, not hazy visions of children playing with computers on grassy meadows. He proceeded to pick apart Kay’s proposal in pitiless detail, arguing that the technology was speculative and untested and that Kay’s ideas would never fit PARC’s mandate to create the office of the future.

Kay’s customary fluency deserted him. He sat mute while Elkind patronizingly dismissed his life’s work as a quixotic dream. “I was shocked,” he said later. “I crawled away.” Once outside the room and beyond the hearing of his audience, he broke down in tears.

What saved the project was an end run by two of Elkind’s own lab members. For while Elkind was digging the Dynabook’s grave, Kay’s ideas had fallen on more simpatico ears. Butler Lampson was, by general agreement, the most brilliant scientist at PARC, a tall, thin software genius who generally got his way by sheer force of intellect. Chuck Thacker was a master of hardware, an electrical engineer of almost mystical prowess who had already built two pioneering time-sharing computers in his short career. One day in September 1972 they showed up at Kay’s office door.

“Alan,” they asked, “do you have any money?”

“Sure,” he replied. “I’ve got about $230,000 in my budget. Why?”

Explaining that Elkind had been sent away on a corporate assignment, they said, “How would you like us to use it to build your little machine?”

Thacker and Lampson brought their own ideas to the design of the “little machine,” but in many ways the intellectual blueprint was Kay’s. Within three months the Alto was designed and the first prototypes built in PARC’s machine shops. The machine was an instant sensation, an inspired engineering balancing act that required its central processor and memory chips both to run programs and power a versatile high-quality screen display without degrading the performance of either. As Kay had predicted, the display made the Alto’s reputation. Standing vertically to mimic the size and shape of an 8-by-11 1/2-inch sheet of writing paper, the screen not only displayed black characters on a glowing white background, but could be programmed to show free-form graphic figures of almost any design. As one fan later remarked, it was a great improvement over its successors--even the IBM PC, 10 years later, lacked the Alto’s graphic capabilities.

No one at PARC--the most sophisticated computer experts in the world--had ever witnessed a machine communicating with the user so directly. None of them doubted that the Alto represented the omega to every thread of computer science that had come before it and the alpha of a dazzling new world; and no one ever forgot the feeling of pure euphoria they sensed the first moment they saw an Alto running--displaying, as it happened, a moving image of Cookie Monster, animated and digitized in Kay’s laboratory. “It was like watching a baby waving its arms,” one of his staff members recalled. “Waving its arms as if to say, ‘I’m alive! I’m alive!’ ”

More important, the Alto’s unique capabilities launched a period of creative frenzy at PARC. Characteristically, the leader in this effort was Kay, who had carefully assembled a team of software specialists--he called them, vaguely, the “Learning Research Group”--whose uncommon skills happened to lend themselves exactly to the demands of programming the Alto. Kay’s recruiting technique was characteristic: The other labs at PARC strived to hire PhD’s from established seats of computer science, but Kay sought out further qualities. Popular as a lecturer at Stanford and other universities, he trolled his student audiences for willing acolytes.

“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,” he said. “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.”

The payoff was a remarkably variegated yet cohesive group of inventors. As Kay recalled later, the LRG spent much of the daytime “outside of PARC, playing tennis, bike-riding, drinking beer, eating Chinese food, and constantly talking about the Dynabook and its potential to amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.” Their freethinking vision led to their being labeled by the rest of PARC’s engineers, not entirely in jest, as “the lunatic fringe.”

While other PARC labs focused on refining the Alto’s hardware and the operating system software that ran it, Kay’s group remained preoccupied with showing what it could actually do. A typical Learning Research Group program was no blob of black text on white background but a carnival of drawings, half-tone photographs, even animated pictures, written in a new computer language he called “Smalltalk.” Kay’s engineers developed the graphical user interface that became the precursor of the Apple Macintosh screen and the Microsoft Windows desktop ubiquitous on today’s personal computers; they were the ones who solved the deceptively complex problems of displaying overlapping windows on screen and employing the mouse as a point-and-click tool (the object itself had been invented a few years earlier in the independent lab of an engineer named Douglas C. Engelbart).

Yet for Kay these trailblazing achievements only stoked his habitual discontent. Above all he hated having to make compromises in his world view because of limitations in technology that he knew were destined to be ephemeral. Someone was always telling him why his ideas wouldn’t work . . . for now. His restlessness only grew worse as it became clearer that the Alto and its programs were destined to remain successes in theory, not commerce. For Xerox, after pondering for several months whether to commercialize the Alto as a sophisticated word processor for the office typing market, in 1977 opted instead for a glorified electric typewriter known as the Xerox 850. (Obsolete almost from the day it was introduced, the 850 was a failure).

News of the Alto’s rejection landed with a thud at PARC. Kay recalls taking the decision as a “huge blow.” Feeling that he was reaching a crossroads in his work, he shortly turned his attention to developing a stripped-down version of the Alto to be called the “Notetaker.” Conceived as something akin to an electronic notebook/textbook for schoolchildren, the Notetaker would be Kay’s last attempt to build a Dynabook at PARC. As eventually prototyped, the machine boasted an ingenious physical design that would be shamelessly mimicked by the first generation of so-called “luggable” computers, such as the Osborne six years later. When closed, the computer looked like a plump plastic attache case, but it opened to reveal a tiny screen linked to a keyboard by a flexible cable.

The Notetaker could be carried, albeit with great effort. “We used to say it ran at five herniations per block,” Kay joked. On one trip back East, one of his group fired it up on its batteries in mid-flight, therefore becoming the very first person to operate a personal computer on an airplane--the first of a legion of electronic road warriors wired to their work at 35,000 feet.

The Learning Research Group manufactured 10 Notetakers and tried in vain to interest Xerox in the product. Soon after the last one was built, Kay announced that he was taking a long-promised sabbatical. Southern California beckoned. He had a new girlfriend, Bonnie MacBird, whom he had met while she was researching a screenplay about computer wizards and who lived in Los Angeles. After endless tinkerings by Hollywood executives, the screenplay became the movie “Tron,” which came out in 1982, two years after Kay and MacBird were married. (“We like to say the marriage turned out a lot better than the movie,” he said. But the screenplay’s origins were betrayed by the name of one leading character, “Alan,” and by the brash and self-confident nature of another, an expert in the inner workings of digital computers.) He announced he was temporarily relocating to L.A. to take organ lessons. He never returned to PARC.

Nor has he ever ceased his unsettled quest for the ultimate Dynabook. It is a Grail that seems to remain perpetually out of reach, although since coming to Disney he has expressed more hope that the company’s creative gifts, served by the last few years’ advances in technology, might yet bring about that perfect conjunction of mind and machine that he sought as far back as his 1969 dissertation.

Yet in other ways his legacy might be better thought of as the restless habit of thought he instills wherever he goes. As Diana Merry, one of the loyal members of his “lunatic fringe” at PARC, put it: “It was like getting our heart cut out when he left. We missed him very badly. It really was in many ways the end of a lot of the good stuff.”

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Excerpted from “Dealers of Lightning,” published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Copyright 1999 by Michael A. Hiltzik