IEEE Spectrum

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.