IEEE Spectrum

In 1979, three years after Alan Kay had wanted to throw away the Altos “like Kleenex,” the Dorado, a machine 10 times more powerful, finally saw the light of day.“It was supposed to be built by one of the development organizations because they were going to use it in some of their products,” recalled Severo Ornstein, one of the designers of the Dorado and now chairman of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in Palo Alto. “But they decided not to do that, so if our lab was going to have it, we were going to have to build it ourselves. We went through a long agonizing period in which none of us who were going to have to do the work really wanted to do it.“Taylor was running the lab by that time,” Ornstein said. “The whole thing was handled extremely dexterously. He never twisted anyone’s arm really directly; he presided over it and kept order in the process, but he really allowed the lab to figure out that that was what it had to do. It was really a good thing, too, because it was very hard to bring the Dorado to life. A lot of blood was shed.”At first, Ornstein recalled, the designers made a false start by using a new circuit-board technology-so-called multiwire technology, in which individual wires are bonded to a board to make connections. But the Dorado boards were too complex for multiwire technology. When the first Dorado ran, there was a question in many people’s minds whether there would ever be a second.“There Butler Lampson’s faith was important,” Ornstein said. “He was the only one who believed that it could be produced in quantity.In fact, even after the Dorado was redesigned using printed-circuit boards instead of multiwire and Dorados began to be built in quantity, they were still rare. “We never had enough budget to populate the whole community with Dorados,” recalled one former PARC manager. “They dribbled out each year, so that in 1984 still not everybody had a Dorado.”Those who did were envied. “I had a Dorado of my very own,” said John Warnock. “Chuck Geschke was a manager; he didn’t get one.”“In the early days...I got to take my Alto home. But the evolution of machines at Xerox went in the opposite direction from making it easy to take the stuff home.—Dan Ingalls“I got a crusty old Alto and a sheet of paper,” Geschke said. The advent of the Dorado allowed researchers whose projects were too big for the Alto to make use of bit-mapped displays and all the other advantages of personal computers. ‘‘We had tried to put Lisp on the Alto, and it was a disaster,” recalled Teitelman. “When we got the Dorado, we spent eight or nine months dis­ cussing what we would want to see in a programming environ­ment that would combine the best of Mesa, Lisp, and Small­ talk.” The result was Cedar, now commonly acknowledged to be one of the best programming environments anywhere.“Cedar put some of the good features of Lisp into Mesa, like garbage collection and run-time type-checking,’’ said Mitchell of Acorn. Garbage collection is a process by which memory space that is no longer being used by a program can be reclaimed; run­ time type-checking allows a program to determine the types of its arguments—whether integers, character strings, or floating-point numbers—and choose the operations it performs on them accordingly.Interlisp, the language Teitelman had nurtured for 15 years, also was transported to the Dorado, where it was the basis for a research effort that has now grown into the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at PARC.PARC’s Smalltalk group, who had gotten used to their Altos and then built the Notetaker, another small computer, had some trouble dealing with the Dorados.“In the early days, we had Smalltalk running on an Alto, and I got to take my Alto home,” recalled Ingalls. “But the evolution of machines at Xerox went in the opposite direction from making it easy to take the stuff home. The next machine, the Dolphin, was less transportable, and the Dorado is out of the question—it’s a fire-breathing dragon.”

While some of PARC’s pioneers were getting restless by the mid-1970s, others were just beginning to find uses for the marvelous tools of the office of the future. One was Lynn Conway, who used the Alto, networks, and laser printers to develop a new method of designing integrated circuits and disseminate the method to hundreds of engineers at several dozen institutions around the country.When Bert Sutherland came in as manager of the Systems Science Laboratory in 1975, he brought Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, to PARC “to wander in and create some havoc.” Mead was an expert in semi­ conductor design who had invented the MESFET in the late 1960s.Sutherland had worked on the application of computer graphics to integrated-circuit layout, Conway recalled, so it was natural for him to think about applying an advanced personal computer like the Alto to the problem of IC design. Conway herself was drawn to integrated-circuit design by the frustration of the OCR-Fax project, in which she had conceived an elegant architecture that could only be realized as racks and racks of equipment. But those racks might become a few chips if only they could be designed by someone who knew what they should do and how they should fit together.“Carver Mead came up and gave a one-week course at PARC on integrated-circuit design,” Fairbairn recalled. “Lynn Conway and I were the ones that really got excited about it and really wanted to do something.”“Then a whole bunch of things really clicked,” said Conway. “While Carver and I were cross-educating each other on what was going on in computing and in devices, he was able to explain some of the basic MOS design methods that had been evolving within Intel. And we began to see ways to generalize the struc­tures that [those designers] had generated.’’ Instead of working only on computer tools for design, Conway explained, she and Mead worked to make the design methods simpler and to build tools for the refined methods.“Between mid-’75 and mid-’77, things went from a fragmentary little thing—one of a number of projects Bert wanted to get going—to the point where we had it all in hand, with examples, and it was time to write.”In a little less than two years, [Carver] Mead and [Lynn] Conway had developed the concepts of scalable design rules, repetitive structures, and the rest of what is now known as structured VLSI designIn a little less than two years, Mead and Conway had developed the concepts of scalable design rules, repetitive structures, and the rest of what is now known as structured VLSI design—to the point where they could teach it in a single semester.Today structured VLSI design is taught at more than 100 universities, and thousands of different chips have been built with it. But in the summer of 1977, the Mead-Conway technique was untested—n fact belittled. How could they get it accepted?“The amazing thing about the PARC environment in 1976-77 was the feeling of power; all of a sudden you could create things and make lots of them. Not just one sheet, but whole books,” said Conway.And that is exactly what she and her cohorts did. “We just self-published the thing [Introduction to VLSI Systems],” said Conway, “and put it in a form that if you didn’t look twice, you might think this was a completely sound, proven thing.”It looked like a book, and Addison-Wesley agreed to publish it as a book. Conway insisted it couldn’t have happened without the Altos. “Knowledge would have gotten out in bits and pieces, always muddied and clouded-we couldn’t have generated such a pure form and generated it so quickly.’’The one tool Conway used most in the final stages of the VLSI project was networks: not only the Ethernet within PARC, but the ARPAnet that connected PARC to dozens of research sites across the country. “The one thing I am clear of in retrospect,” said Conway, “is the sense of having powerful invisible weapons that people couldn’t understand we had. The environment at PARC gave us the power to outfox and outmaneuver people who would think we were crazy or try to stop us; otherwise we would never have had the nerve to go out with it the way we did.”

Essentially, the PARC researchers worked in an ivory tower for the first five years; while projects were in their infancy, there was little time for much else. But by 1976, with an Alto on every desk and electronic mail a way of life at the center, re­ searchers yearned to see their creations used by friends and neighbors.At that point, Kay recalled, about 200 Altos were in use at PARC and other Xerox divisions; PARC proposed that Xerox market a mass-production version of the Alto: the Alto III.“On Aug. 18, 1976, Xerox turned down the Alto III,” Kay said.So the researchers, rather than turning their project over to a manufacturing division, continued working with the Alto.“That was the reason for our downfall,” said Kay. “We didn’t get rid of the Altos. Xerox management had been told early on that Altos at PARC were like Kleenex; they would be used up in three years and we would need a new set of things 10 times faster. But when this fateful period came along, there was no capital.“We had a meeting at Pajaro Dunes [Calif.] called ‘Let’s burn our disk packs.’ We could sense the second derivative of progress going negative for us,” Kay related. “I really should have gone and grenaded everybody’s disks.”Instead of starting entirely new research thrusts, the PARC employees focused on getting the fruits of their past research projects out the door as products.Every few years the Xerox Corp. has a meeting of all its managers from divisions around the world to discuss where the company may be going. At the 1977 meeting, held in Boca Raton, Fla., the big event was a demonstration by PARC researchers of the systems they had built.The PARC workers assigned to the Boca Raton presentation put their hearts, souls, and many Xerox dollars into the effort. Sets were designed and built, rehearsals were held on a Holly­ wood sound stage, and Altos and Dovers were shipped between Hollywood and Palo Alto with abandon. It took an entire day to set up the exhibit in an auditorium in Boca Raton, and a special air-conditioning truck had to be rented from the local airport to keep the machines cool. But for much of the Xerox corporate staff, this was the first encounter with the “eggheads” from PARC.“PARC was a very strange place to the rest of the company... It was thought of as weird computer people who had beards, who didn’t bathe or wear shoes, who spent long hours deep into the night staring at their terminals...and who basically were antisocial egg­ heads. Frankly, some of us fed that impression."—Richard Shoup“PARC was a very strange place to the rest of the company,” Shoup said. “It was not only California, but it was nerds. It was thought of as weird computer people who had beards, who didn’t bathe or wear shoes, who spent long hours deep into the night staring at their terminals, who had no relationships with any other human beings, and who basically were antisocial egg­ heads. Frankly, some of us fed that impression, as if we were above the rest of the company.”There was some difficulty in getting the rest of Xerox to take PARC researchers and their work seriously.“The presentation went over very well, and the battle was won, but the patient died,” Goldman said. Not only had Xerox executives seen the Alto, the Ethernet, and the laser printer, they had even been shown a Japanese-language word processor. “But the company couldn’t bring them to market!” Goldman said. (By 1983, the company did market a Japanese version of its Star computer.)One reason that Xerox had such trouble bringing PARC’s advances to market was that, until 1976, there was no development organization to take research prototypes from PARC and turn them into products. “At the beginning, the way in which the technology would be transferred was not explicit,” Teitelman said. “We took something of a detached view and assumed that someone was going to pick it up. It wasn’t until later on that this issue got really focused.”

While PARC may have had more than its share of successes, like any organization it couldn’t escape some failures. The one most frequently cited by former PARC researchers is Polos.Polos was an alternate approach to distributed computing. While Thacker and McCreight were designing the Alto, another group at PARC was working with a cluster of 12 Data General Novas, attempting to distribute functions among the machines so that one machine would handle editing, one would handle input and output, another would handle filing.“With Altos,” Sutherland said, “everything each person needed was put in each machine on a small scale. Polos was an attempt to slice the pie in a different way-to split up offices functionally.”By the time Polos was working, the Alto computers were proliferating throughout PARC, so Polos was shut down. But it had an afterlife: Sutherland distributed the 12 Novas among other Xerox divisions, where they served a£ the first remote gateways onto PARC’s Alto network, and the Polos displays were used as terminals within PARC until they were junked in 1977. Another major PARC project that failed was a combination optical character reader and facsimile machine. The idea was to develop a system that could take printed pages of mixed text and graphics, recognize the text as such and transmit the characters in their ASCII code, then send the rest of the material using the less-efficient facsimile coding method.“It was fabulously complicated and fairly crazy,” said Charles Simonyi, now manager of application development at Microsoft Corp. ‘‘On this project they had this incredible piece of hardware that was the equivalent of a 10,000-line Fortran program.” Un­fortunately, the equivalent of tens of thousands of lines of Fortran in those days meant tens of thousands of individual integrated circuits.“While we made substantial progress at the algorithmic and architecture level,’’ said Conway, who worked on the OCR project, “it became clear that with the circuit technology at that time it wouldn’t be anywhere near an economically viable thing.” The project was dropped in 1975.