Vital Statistics

Title Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age Author Michael Hiltzig Publisher HarperCollins Publishers http://www.harpercollins.com/ Copyright 1999 ISBN 0-88730-891-0 Pages 448 Price $26.00

Lightning Didn't Strike

The founder of Federal Express got a C on the college paper he wrote describing the idea for his company. FedEx and its competitors are doing pretty well now. I wonder, as the UPS truck pulls up outside Stately Swaine Manor, if all those stats on the growth of e-commerce include the increased business for FedEx and UPS from the likes of Amazon.com. My latest delivery from Amazon.com is Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael Hiltzig (HarperCollins 1999, ISBN 0-88730-891-0).

Although I don't agree with Hiltzig that the Alto was the world's first personal computer, that's just a matter of different definitions -- his strictly technological, mine involving price and marketing as well. I have a few other quibbles with the book, but, overall, I found it highly readable and seemingly authoritative. In writing the book, Hiltzig drew on the recollections of those who were there, interviewing all the obvious suspects and not a few innocent bystanders.

The book is worth reading just to remind yourself of the amazing invention machine PARC was -- and of the amazing collection of inventors who were there.

The development of the Alto, of course, but also:

• Jim Clark (the cofounder of Netscape) designing the Geometry Engine as part of a PARC-supervised course at Stanford and launching Silicon Graphics on the strength of it.
• Lynn Conway (of Mead and Conway, the most well-known names in VLSI) developing the design techniques and tools to make VLSI a practical reality.
• An offhand remark to Gary Starkweather leading to the invention of the laser printer.
• Bob Metcalfe sifting through various networking options and coming up with Ethernet.
• Alan Kay telling Dan Ingalls and Ted Kaehler that the most powerful programming language in the world could be specified in one page and, when challenged to put up or shut up, inventing Smalltalk.
• Bob Taylor recruiting Bill English away from Doug Engelbart and getting access to the mouse and all the other goodies of Engelbart's lab.
• Charles Simonyi inventing WYSIWYG.
• Dan Ingalls shocking the crowd when he demonstrated bitblt.
• John Warnock and Chuck Jeschke creating page-description languages.
• Alvy Ray Smith coming up with the HSV transformation. 

Hiltzig describes PARC's origins, the recruitment of talent, its culture, people, politics, and projects. He also spends a chapter on the question, "Did Xerox blow it?" That strikes me as overkill for a question that can be answered in a word -- Duh!

But I don't mean to belittle Hiltzig's analysis of the politics of PARC. He does an impressive job of telling not only what happened, but why and how it happened, and how Xerox management both hindered and empowered this amazing band of inventors.

If this is failure, we should all be so unsuccessful.

-- Michael Swaine