Michael A. Hiltzik > Quotes

“Kay remained preoccupied with a lesson he had assimilated from Marshall McLuhan: Once humans shape their tools, they turn around and “reshape us.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“We’ve decided to go with black and white,” he said. “This project is over.” Smith was stunned. “You’re crazy!” he blurted. “It’s going to be all color from here on out, and you guys can own it all! I can’t believe you’re shutting it down.” “Well,” Elkind replied evenly, “it’s a corporate decision.” Smith had no choice but to leave. With a fellow artist and Superpaint fanatic, David DiFrancesco, he drove off toward Utah in quest of permission to continue his work on a frame buffer installed at the university there. He failed to get it, but instead received an invitation to set up a video program at the private New York Institute of Technology. The department later transferred en masse to George Lucas’s Lucasfilm and even later was spun off as Pixar,”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The occasion was the broadcast of a television program about the artistic avant-garde entitled Supervisions, which was produced by the Los Angeles public television station KCET. Smith’s and Shoup’s work on Superpaint had started to win wide notice outside PARC, thanks in part to a tape called “Vidbits” which Smith had compiled from clips of his best work for playing to artists’ gatherings all around California. After one such showing, KCET commissioned the two of them to supply some brief color-cycling effects for Supervisions. They had scrupulously insisted that the producers give Xerox screen credit, assuming that the parent company would appreciate the honor. Instead, Taylor marched into the video lab a day or two after the broadcast and buttonholed Smith. “Xerox wants their logo off every piece of tape,” he said. “Right now.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Xerox had thoroughly misunderstood the difference between scientific computing, in which SDS might with great effort manage to hold its own, and business computing, in which it was a non-starter.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The lone exception was the Bureau of Reclamation, which had one enormous project already mapped out, with years of engineering and architectural studies behind it, all tied up neatly with the ribbon of congressional approval and bow of a presidential signature. This was, of course, the Boulder Canyon Project.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“single consistent legal principle of water rights might have resolved their conflicts. In the West, however, there was not one principle in use, but two that were mutually incompatible. These were riparian law and the rule of prior appropriation. Unless the delegates to the compact commission could reach an agreement superseding both, the harvest would be not economic progress, but Hoover’s nightmare of endless litigation. The riparian doctrine had originated in temperate regions, where water was abundant and arable land almost always situated adjacent to a river. The rule granted the owner of land abutting a stream the right to use the water flowing past his property, on condition that his use did not interfere with the same right of landowners downstream. The river and its waters were inviolate, belonging as property to no one.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“In a small group the dynamics are like those on a good basketball team,” Kay observed. “Everybody has to be able to play the whole game. Each person should have certain things they’re better at than the others, but everyone should be pretty good at everything.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“color contributing anything other than window-dressing to the office of the future. Something so trivial, he argued, might just as well be ignored until it was not merely cheap, but free.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Here entered Lampson’s other important objection to Superpaint: He was constitutionally unable to imagine color contributing anything other than window-dressing to the office of the future. Something so trivial, he argued, might just as well be ignored until it was not merely cheap, but free.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“But instead of accepting the office task force’s recommendation that Xerox throw its weight behind the Alto III, he pushed his own new machine, another nonprogrammable word processor called the Xerox 850—essentially a typewriter with enough memory in it to hold a few pages of a business letter long enough to be proofread.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“I said, what if instead of scanning the image in, as is done in office xerography, I actually just created the data on the computer? If I could modulate the beam to match the digital bits, I could actually print with this thing. I did some test experiments in Rochester, which my immediate management felt was probably the most lunatic project they’d ever seen in their lives. That’s when my section manager said, ‘Stop, or I’m going to take your people away.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“At the first session the group piled on an unfortunate wild man from that backwater, the University of Utah, named Alan Kay. Kay had stepped forth in a public session to pitch his vision of a computer you could hold in your hand. He had already coined a name for it: “Dynabook,” a notebook-shaped machine with a display screen and a keyboard you could use to create, edit, and store a very personal sort of literature, music, and art. “He was crazy,” Wessler recalled. “People greeted the whole idea with disbelief and gave him a very tough time. He painted this picture of walking around with a computer under your arm, which we all thought was completely ridiculous.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“For a chronicler of PARC this presents a unique difficulty. No anecdote from PARC’s history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. The collective memory of the Jobs visit and of its aftermath is so vivid that some former PARC scientists are no longer sure whether they were there themselves, or just heard about it later. PARC engineers and their guests from Apple disagree with each other (and among themselves) about who delivered which portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado; and whether Steve Jobs was desperate to get a look at PARC’s technology, or so dubious about anything produced by a big corporation that he had to be wheedled into going in the first place.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Xerox had the Alto; IBM launched the Personal Computer. Xerox had the graphical user interface with mouse, icons, and overlapping windows; Apple and Microsoft launched the Macintosh and Windows. Xerox invented What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processing; Microsoft brazenly turned it into Microsoft Word and conquered the office market. Xerox invented the Ethernet; today the battle for market share in the networking hardware industry is between Cisco Systems and 3Com. Even the laser printer is a tainted triumph. Thanks to the five years Xerox dithered in bringing it to market, IBM got there first, introducing its own model in 1975.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“He had been convinced that teaching kids to program at an early age would permanently shape their thought processes. His real ambition had been to provide them with a singular window on human enlightenment. Yet his experiments led him to a contradictory conclusion. Programming did not teach people how to think—he realized he knew too many narrow-minded programmers for that to be so, now that he considered the question in depth. The truth was the converse: Every individual’s ingrained way of thinking affected how he or she programmed.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“On August 18 the word processing task force, reversing itself under pressure from McCardell and others, declared the 850 the official Xerox word processor. As a Xerox product, the Alto III was dead.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The second was Yale’s complacent refusal to accommodate its sought-after assistant professor’s request for a promotion to associate professor. Such rapid advancement cut against the grain in New Haven. Ernest’s academic superiors were unable to see past his youth, much”
― Michael Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“The Computer Science Lab was a collection of engineers who weighed everything pitilessly against the question: How will this get us closer to our goal? They had committed themselves to developing Xerox’s office of the future, and anything that diverted their attention or served an alternative goal had to be discarded or obliterated.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“But one man was way ahead of them all. That one had written a doctoral thesis at Utah in 1969 describing an idealized interactive computer called the FLEX machine. He had experimented with powerful displays and with computers networked in intricate configurations. On page after page of his dissertation he lamented the inability of the world’s existing hardware to realize his dream of an interactive personal computer. He set before science the challenge to build the machine he imagined, one with “enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store thousands of pages, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, and anything else you would like to remember and change.” To Taylor he was a soulmate and a profound thinker, capable of seeing a computing future far beyond anything even he could imagine. Among the computer scientists familiar with his ideas, half thought he was a crackpot and the other half a visionary. His name was Alan Kay.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The machine was called Superpaint. It deserves a place in history as the only invention too farsighted even for PARC’s Computer Science Lab. And all because it thought in color.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Campbell could not disagree with Europeans’ condescending view of American science as a backwater rich in money and manpower but poor in theoretical understanding.”
― Michael Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

“The states could be divided roughly into two basins. The upper basin comprised Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico—all rural, agrarian, and underdeveloped. The lower basin states were Arizona and California—agriculturally more productive, increasingly industrial, and voraciously thirsty—and Nevada, which fit geographically with its two neighbors, but which constituted a category all its own, unpopulated, arid, and seemingly devoid of prospects for development of any kind. (That impression would be dramatically contradicted in coming decades.)”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“Crowe accepted a job with Morrison-Knudsen at some point in April or May 1925. He would build three dams in five years for the partnership. After Guernsey came Van Giesen Dam outside Sacramento, finished in 1928 for the state of California, and Deadwood Dam in Idaho, another Reclamation project, in 1930. As always, he worked at breakneck speed, poring over the blueprints of the next dam even before he was finished with the present one.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“When Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 for stealing the “look and feel” of its Macintosh graphical display to use in Windows, Bill Gates’s defense was essentially that both companies had stolen it from Xerox.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“They said, ‘We just gave you the 8086 last week! How could you report a bug already?’”, Tesler recalled. But Intel had not reckoned with PARC’s do-it-yourself mentality. Years earlier the lab had purchased a rare million-dollar machine known as a Stitchweld, which could turn out printed circuit boards overnight from a digital schematic prepared on Thacker’s SIL program. “It turned out that no one else using the 8086 had Stitchwelds. Everyone else was going through complicated board designs, so they wouldn’t know for months if there was a bug. But at Xerox we gave them that feedback in a few days.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The United States became in that post-dam era a country very different from the United States that built it. It was transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support. To be sure, that change was not all the making of the dam itself; Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and other New Deal programs forged in the crucible of the Depression played their essential role, as did the years of war. But the dam was the physical embodiment of the initial transformation, a remote regional construction project reconfigured into a symbol of national pride.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam

“They spent a week or two testing the circuit together for a few hours each day. Debugging a complex electronic device being almost as powerful a bonding experience as, say, serving on a submarine in wartime, Metcalfe learned a lot about his partner: That he was a digital whiz, accomplished at wielding the oscilloscope, and, most interesting, underemployed in his POLOS work.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“playful digitized image of Cookie Monster launched the age of the personal computer.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The people of Mexicali, a city that had expanded organically over the low alluvial plain at the river’s edge, waged a futile battle to protect themselves from the advancing cataract. In the end there was nothing for them to do but watch stoically as the flood chewed away at the riverbanks and coursed through their streets, devouring the town house by adobe house. On June 30 the main business district collapsed into the water, a dozen brick buildings swept away in a matter of hours while the townspeople stood transfixed under clouds of spray towering forty feet in the air. Before the flood was over, four-fifths of the town would be wiped out.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam