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Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.
Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and executives who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC's humble beginnings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp, and ultimately exploit, the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered. Dealers of Lightning offers an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions, and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistoiy--and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.
Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and executives who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC's humble beginnings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp, and ultimately exploit, the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered. Dealers of Lightning offers an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions, and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistoiy--and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.
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First published April 5, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 196 reviews
June 24, 2011
Riveting read. Not as technical as I'd like - though I have yet to read any computer book that is. Mostly it's straight up porn for anyone who loves working with computers. PARC was one hell of a lab back in the day.
The most interesting part about this is seeing what really happened with Xerox and the first GUI PCs. It's not that they let the opportunity slip through their fingers, they were never the right company to produce an OS in the first place.
Still, it worked out well for virtually all of the engineers involved. They went on to bigger and better things, or started companies of their own (3com, Adobe) to make the computer technology they wanted.
The most interesting part about this is seeing what really happened with Xerox and the first GUI PCs. It's not that they let the opportunity slip through their fingers, they were never the right company to produce an OS in the first place.
Still, it worked out well for virtually all of the engineers involved. They went on to bigger and better things, or started companies of their own (3com, Adobe) to make the computer technology they wanted.
April 5, 2018
The first ever time I developed software using the Smalltalk programming language and development environment, it was a sublime experience. There was no other way to describe it. I had written computer programs in C, Cobol, Fortran etc prior to that for many years, but Smalltalk was qualitatively in a much higher plane in terms of the joy it brought to the programming experience. The object-oriented approach and the Integrated Development Environment of Smalltalk brought a totally intuitive feel to design, coding and testing of software. Thinking in terms of objects to design computer software seemed the natural way to solve problems. It made me want to learn about the creators of this technology. That is how I came to know about Xerox PARC, a research arm of the parent company Xerox. The more I read about PARC, the more I discovered that PARC was indeed the home of many pioneering inventions in the digital computer space in the past fifty years. Whoever would have thought that a company, known for a dull product like copiers, also happens to be the foundation and one of the main pillars of the modern era of personal computing and the internet?
This book was written almost twenty years ago and it talks about what happened in PARC in the 1970s. To that extent, it may not impact the current generation of 25-year olds and younger. After all, this generation has always been blessed with a computer in each of their hands with all its modern-day graphics and interactive features. However, the earlier generations know how difficult it was to get ‘some computer time’ in a batch processing environment on a mainframe computer. Those systems were usually secured away from programmers with no interactive provisions. It was Xerox PARC, which leapfrogged this world of quarantined, barely-accessible computers into the modern era of friendly personal computing, graphical user interfaces, laser printers, desktop publishing and the Internet. It is amazing that the ideas behind such a leap were formulated in just a decade of frenzied innovation in one corner of Silicon Valley. So much so that even the company which owned all these inventions - Xerox - was perhaps unprepared for the pace of change, that they missed out on making enough economic capital out of this bonanza.
First of all, it is important to put the many advances that happened in PARC in the 1970s in perspective. The following timeline gives an idea of how the transformation happened:
1971: Alan Kay completes the first version of the revolutionary object-oriented Smalltalk language along with concepts from his Dynabook, which was the forerunner of modern-day laptops, GUI and e-books. Gary Starkweather completes work on the first laser printer.
1972: Alan Kay, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson start work on ‘Alto’, the first ever personal computer.
1973: Dick Shoup builds ‘Superpaint’, the first ever image editing software. Bob Metcalfe invents ‘the Ethernet’
1974: Dan Ingalls invents ‘BitBlt’, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, enabling overlapping windows and pop-up menus. Charles Simonyi, Tim Mott and Larry Tesler develop ‘Bravo’ and ‘Gypsy’, two programs which together were the first user-friendly word processors.
1976: Dan Ingalls designs the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical
1977: The book, ‘Introduction to VLSI Systems’ is typeset entirely on desktop publishing systems, invented at PARC
1978: The Dorado and the Notetaker are completed - the former the best computer from PARC and the latter a suitcase-sized machine that became the forerunner of portable computers.
1980: Jim Clark designs the ‘Geometry Engine’ using design principles formulated at PARC. It was the first 3-D computer graphics chip which was the foundation of Silicon Graphics Inc.
Looking at this array of achievements, I have often wondered what the ‘ je ne sais quoi’ was that made PARC so special. The author says that PARC believed in getting the best research done by hiring the best researchers and leaving them unburdened by directives, instructions or deadlines. The engineers at PARC were free from improving Xerox’s existing products. They were tasked to lead the company into new and unchartered territory. PARC lived the famous dictum of Alan Kay that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Bob Taylor noted that time-sharing computers created computing communities but kept them isolated due to the design differences between their machines. This made him view the computer as more than just a mathematical calculator. He saw it as a communicating device, paving the way for computer networks and the internet. At a time when the computer was believed to be a perfect machine that wouldn’t tolerate errors and faults, Bob Metcalfe explicitly designed the Ethernet to be imperfect. Alan Kay said, “it was an object lesson to make something work when you don’t know how to make it work well.” The author emphasizes that even the TCP/IP architecture, which has been the backbone of the internet, was the contribution of PARC’s Universal Packet (PuP). Hiltzik sums up with the words, “Xerox brought together a group of superlatively creative minds at the very moment when they could exert maximal influence on a burgeoning technology, and financed their work with unexampled generosity”.
The book is mainly about the scientists of PARC, the culture of PARC, the politics and interactions with one another in creating the future. It deals less with the details of the technologies which were developed there. For those interested in Silicon Valley lore, there are fascinating chapters on Steve Jobs’ visit to PARC in 1979 and Charles Simonyi’s meeting with Bill Gates in 1981. The popular impression in Silicon Valley about PARC is that Xerox failed to monetize any of this path-breaking work and left it to other companies like Apple, IBM, Intel and Microsoft to benefit greatly from it. Author Hiltzik shows that this is not fully correct. Apparently, Xerox got revenues from its laser printer alone which ran into returns of its investment in PARC many times over. Steve Jobs apparently said in the 1980s that Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, but failed to do so. However, Hiltzik does not believe that any single company could have dominated the computer industry and gives rational arguments to back up his conclusions.
I enjoyed reading the book as a lesson in the history of computer technology as well as a slice of Silicon Valley history, both of which have been a major part of my life as well. My unstinted admiration for Smalltalk and PARC made this book an exercise in preaching to the converted. But it is not a book just for the computer technologist. There is enough human interest in it to make it worthwhile for the general reader. The passion of the scientists and engineers for their vision and the leadership at PARC that knew how to get the most out of its human capital are engrossing stories in themselves. One can also read the book as a peep into how organizations do innovation and how they promote creativity in their laboratories.
This book was written almost twenty years ago and it talks about what happened in PARC in the 1970s. To that extent, it may not impact the current generation of 25-year olds and younger. After all, this generation has always been blessed with a computer in each of their hands with all its modern-day graphics and interactive features. However, the earlier generations know how difficult it was to get ‘some computer time’ in a batch processing environment on a mainframe computer. Those systems were usually secured away from programmers with no interactive provisions. It was Xerox PARC, which leapfrogged this world of quarantined, barely-accessible computers into the modern era of friendly personal computing, graphical user interfaces, laser printers, desktop publishing and the Internet. It is amazing that the ideas behind such a leap were formulated in just a decade of frenzied innovation in one corner of Silicon Valley. So much so that even the company which owned all these inventions - Xerox - was perhaps unprepared for the pace of change, that they missed out on making enough economic capital out of this bonanza.
First of all, it is important to put the many advances that happened in PARC in the 1970s in perspective. The following timeline gives an idea of how the transformation happened:
1971: Alan Kay completes the first version of the revolutionary object-oriented Smalltalk language along with concepts from his Dynabook, which was the forerunner of modern-day laptops, GUI and e-books. Gary Starkweather completes work on the first laser printer.
1972: Alan Kay, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson start work on ‘Alto’, the first ever personal computer.
1973: Dick Shoup builds ‘Superpaint’, the first ever image editing software. Bob Metcalfe invents ‘the Ethernet’
1974: Dan Ingalls invents ‘BitBlt’, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, enabling overlapping windows and pop-up menus. Charles Simonyi, Tim Mott and Larry Tesler develop ‘Bravo’ and ‘Gypsy’, two programs which together were the first user-friendly word processors.
1976: Dan Ingalls designs the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical
1977: The book, ‘Introduction to VLSI Systems’ is typeset entirely on desktop publishing systems, invented at PARC
1978: The Dorado and the Notetaker are completed - the former the best computer from PARC and the latter a suitcase-sized machine that became the forerunner of portable computers.
1980: Jim Clark designs the ‘Geometry Engine’ using design principles formulated at PARC. It was the first 3-D computer graphics chip which was the foundation of Silicon Graphics Inc.
Looking at this array of achievements, I have often wondered what the ‘ je ne sais quoi’ was that made PARC so special. The author says that PARC believed in getting the best research done by hiring the best researchers and leaving them unburdened by directives, instructions or deadlines. The engineers at PARC were free from improving Xerox’s existing products. They were tasked to lead the company into new and unchartered territory. PARC lived the famous dictum of Alan Kay that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Bob Taylor noted that time-sharing computers created computing communities but kept them isolated due to the design differences between their machines. This made him view the computer as more than just a mathematical calculator. He saw it as a communicating device, paving the way for computer networks and the internet. At a time when the computer was believed to be a perfect machine that wouldn’t tolerate errors and faults, Bob Metcalfe explicitly designed the Ethernet to be imperfect. Alan Kay said, “it was an object lesson to make something work when you don’t know how to make it work well.” The author emphasizes that even the TCP/IP architecture, which has been the backbone of the internet, was the contribution of PARC’s Universal Packet (PuP). Hiltzik sums up with the words, “Xerox brought together a group of superlatively creative minds at the very moment when they could exert maximal influence on a burgeoning technology, and financed their work with unexampled generosity”.
The book is mainly about the scientists of PARC, the culture of PARC, the politics and interactions with one another in creating the future. It deals less with the details of the technologies which were developed there. For those interested in Silicon Valley lore, there are fascinating chapters on Steve Jobs’ visit to PARC in 1979 and Charles Simonyi’s meeting with Bill Gates in 1981. The popular impression in Silicon Valley about PARC is that Xerox failed to monetize any of this path-breaking work and left it to other companies like Apple, IBM, Intel and Microsoft to benefit greatly from it. Author Hiltzik shows that this is not fully correct. Apparently, Xerox got revenues from its laser printer alone which ran into returns of its investment in PARC many times over. Steve Jobs apparently said in the 1980s that Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, but failed to do so. However, Hiltzik does not believe that any single company could have dominated the computer industry and gives rational arguments to back up his conclusions.
I enjoyed reading the book as a lesson in the history of computer technology as well as a slice of Silicon Valley history, both of which have been a major part of my life as well. My unstinted admiration for Smalltalk and PARC made this book an exercise in preaching to the converted. But it is not a book just for the computer technologist. There is enough human interest in it to make it worthwhile for the general reader. The passion of the scientists and engineers for their vision and the leadership at PARC that knew how to get the most out of its human capital are engrossing stories in themselves. One can also read the book as a peep into how organizations do innovation and how they promote creativity in their laboratories.
March 10, 2019
Actual Rating: 2.5 Stars
"This did not mean that great discoveries, even surprising ones, will not be made here and there by researchers working for corporations. It simply means that a certain quality once possessed by PARC in its extraordinary early years seems to have departed from the world of science and technology, perhaps forever. Call it magic."
Not my favorite book; read for class. It wasn't that it was bad, it just wasn't for me and didn't really capture my interest. However, it gives a good history of Xerox PARC and how the Computer Age came to be.
"This did not mean that great discoveries, even surprising ones, will not be made here and there by researchers working for corporations. It simply means that a certain quality once possessed by PARC in its extraordinary early years seems to have departed from the world of science and technology, perhaps forever. Call it magic."
Not my favorite book; read for class. It wasn't that it was bad, it just wasn't for me and didn't really capture my interest. However, it gives a good history of Xerox PARC and how the Computer Age came to be.
October 8, 2018
I'm sceptical of the genius narrative. In my mind, there are always a few people with irrational self-confidence - and of course a couple happen to succeed. Cue mythmaking, fawning biographies and countless would-be clones...
Relatedly, I can feel some sympathy for the executives at Xerox. The standard narrative is that their Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) developed all of the big ideas of modern desktop computing (mouse, ethernet connection, desktop GUI, laser printing) under their noses, but the myopic suits failed to develop and fund it. This unremarkable, reportage-like book acknowledges that there is another side to that story - one in which hindsight is easy but managing a failing company is hard, in which brilliant but cantankerous geniuses aren't always best off given all the control and resources they want - without trying to say which story is true, or divine greater lessons.
Steve Jobs (whose own tech-world canonisation came after this book was written) said that Xerox could have been the IBM or Microsoft of the '90s. Instead, others came in (including, famously and literally, Jobs himself) and took the ideas forward. Hiltzik notes that there is nothing like Xerox PARC at the time of writing - even Microsoft's research is much more product-focused. Would Google/Alphabet change his mind?
Relatedly, I can feel some sympathy for the executives at Xerox. The standard narrative is that their Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) developed all of the big ideas of modern desktop computing (mouse, ethernet connection, desktop GUI, laser printing) under their noses, but the myopic suits failed to develop and fund it. This unremarkable, reportage-like book acknowledges that there is another side to that story - one in which hindsight is easy but managing a failing company is hard, in which brilliant but cantankerous geniuses aren't always best off given all the control and resources they want - without trying to say which story is true, or divine greater lessons.
Steve Jobs (whose own tech-world canonisation came after this book was written) said that Xerox could have been the IBM or Microsoft of the '90s. Instead, others came in (including, famously and literally, Jobs himself) and took the ideas forward. Hiltzik notes that there is nothing like Xerox PARC at the time of writing - even Microsoft's research is much more product-focused. Would Google/Alphabet change his mind?
April 21, 2017
Really the Grand Canyon of books. Everyone knows that the Grand Canyon is a big hole in the ground but when you go see it your like "DAMN that's a big hole in the ground. Same thing with this book. The myth is that xerox parc invented most modern software but when you read this book your like "DAMN they really did invent everything." Overall though, a few stories aside, it just adds depth to the myth rather than providing any real new insights.
March 11, 2016
This book details the history of Xerox PARC, which set up a research lab that invented many aspects of modern computing and then failed to capitalize on it (at least to the extent that many people thought they should have). I was happy to see the author resist the obvious and often-retold narrative of a corporation that was simply too dumb to realize what their visionary research division had. The book instead paints a more realistic picture, mentions some of the tensions present between a corporation and a research lab and dispels the overly simplistic notion that Xerox would have clearly become immensely successful if they only followed up on the research. This is mostly our benefit of hindsight and there are many other variables at play.
You'll get a sense of the history, some of the drama, some of the background story behind the inventions. But unfortunately the book doesn't spend a lot of time talking about the layout of the lab, or some of the philosophy that led to its success in research. Neither does it try to generalize, observe, or contrast. Therefore, sadly the book felt mostly as an enumeration of facts rather than an attempt at their interpretation in a wider picture. This is understandable because the former is relatively easy, but the latter is not. 3/5 - I liked it.
You'll get a sense of the history, some of the drama, some of the background story behind the inventions. But unfortunately the book doesn't spend a lot of time talking about the layout of the lab, or some of the philosophy that led to its success in research. Neither does it try to generalize, observe, or contrast. Therefore, sadly the book felt mostly as an enumeration of facts rather than an attempt at their interpretation in a wider picture. This is understandable because the former is relatively easy, but the latter is not. 3/5 - I liked it.
August 4, 2019
Entertaining account of the heyday of Xerox PARC in the 1970s when Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, and Thacker were all there spewing out inventions such as the ALTO; arguably the most complete, first personal computer. Although it was never successfully brought to market, it heavily influenced personal computing. Xerox is where the foundation of human-computer interaction was developed: mouse, GUI, WYSIWYG, and so on. Ethernet was built at XEROX too, where the appeal of an "ARPANET for Everyone" (ARPAnet was a small University 'internet') was a vision I imagine was often discussed at lunch.. In addition, Smalltalk was invented here and it allowed the engineers to work faster than anyone else. In particular, the speed of re-compilation was one of the things that really wow'ed Jobs when he made his historical visit.
Why not 5 stars? I was reading this book to really hope to get under the skin of the culture of XEROX. What made this such a creative environment? It's more of a historical account, which is still thoroughly enjoyable--but it didn't go as deep as I would've liked.
I listened to the audiobook, which I probably wouldn't recommend. Audio sounds like something recorded on cassette in the 90s, which upon further inspection seems to be fairly close to the truth..
Why not 5 stars? I was reading this book to really hope to get under the skin of the culture of XEROX. What made this such a creative environment? It's more of a historical account, which is still thoroughly enjoyable--but it didn't go as deep as I would've liked.
I listened to the audiobook, which I probably wouldn't recommend. Audio sounds like something recorded on cassette in the 90s, which upon further inspection seems to be fairly close to the truth..
November 5, 2014
I love the stories from this era. It created the industry I love and work in. The book feels very accurate and tells a detailed story. I found it a bit heavy sometimes though.
If you liked this book you should definitely read iWoz.
If you liked this book you should definitely read iWoz.
February 11, 2018
Fascinating story but told in a superficial manner. Mentions hundreds of names you will not remember a minute later and ignores all but simplest technical issues. I'm just not that interested in people's personal stories. Came here for the technology and was bored by all the social aspects.
July 22, 2015
rating for entertainment alone -- i don't rly agree with a lot of the overarching points made here but god i love reading about old computers.
May 4, 2019
church
October 9, 2020
"Computing is pop culture. […] Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all
about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation,
the past or the future — it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most
people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]…"
- Alan Kay
We stand on the shoulders of giants. I swear to never forget this. Writing code for me now, will be a spiritual experience. I atleast hope so.
From the silicon transistors that can amplify and switch electronic signals, to the IC's embedding billions of those transistors to the micro-processors built on top of these transistors, to the operating system talking to those micro processors which in turn is given instructions by compilers which take the pithy "code" we "programmers" write and convert it to a form those operating systems can understand, it's all human magic. One hundred years of blood, toil, tears and sweat has gone into ensuring all this works correctly on a a small machine that stands atop my desk right now. To get an idea of how far we've come, here's a photo of a computer in the 1950's. It's simply been 70 years since then, just one human generation.
https://www.quora.com/What-did-comput...
This is a machine that helps me derive meaning in life and pay my dad's medical bills. We owe a debt to those greats, who followed their curiosity to the extremes, those "geeks" who combined night and day and winter and summer into one beautiful symphony of flow state that will far surpass the satisfaction that you and I will ever get to experience in life.
The gorgeous visual displays we take for granted, the trackpad and the mouse that make it easy for the "man" to interact with the "machine", the Ethernet cables, radio waves and software protocols that make it easy for me to send those "I love you's" to people I care about in seconds across the globe, a globe with unforgiving entropy. The "programming languages" that help a million middle class households in my country pay their bills and educate their children, all of this and more was either made possible or improved upon by a bunch of renegades at XEROX PARC.
This is a story of their battles, their politics, the uphill engineering struggles they faced, their inner demons but above all, the story of the triumph of what unyielding human curiosity, chutzpah and soul gutting hard work can accomplish.
Read this if you ever feel nihilistic about the world, work or your life in general.
March 4, 2015
I’ve heard of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) for years now and of its importance, but this book really drove home just what a critical place PARC was for the development of the personal computer. It was an excellent, excellent book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Back in the mid-60s, Xerox decided they wanted to compete with IBM and AT&T by developing their own research labs in the hopes of winning prestige and a possible Nobel or two, just like Bell Labs did. They set PARC up with a virtually unlimited budget and told the director he could hire whomever he wanted. Pake, the director, had heard of one Bob Taylor, formerly of ARPA, the precursor of the Internet, and hired him to head his computer lab. Taylor instilled a fierce commitment in his employees, but had a very adversarial management style and made a lot of enemies around the company. Another key hire was Alan Kay, a programmer with a dream of creating laptops and one day tablets (30 years before they ever came out) which would be so easy to program, kids could do it. Soon PARC had the best and the brightest from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Utah, etc. They came from all over, from the best computer science programs. And there were no deadlines and nothing to produce – it was like a giant think tank where you could just follow your dreams to see where they’d lead with unlimited funding. For the most part.
By the late 60s, one of the programmers had produced a mouse, ancient by our current standards, but radical by theirs. Also, they were producing GUI operating systems for point and click possibilities. By the mid to late 70s, the inventers had invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, overlapping windows, a text editor (word processor), a programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. And that’s the crux of the situation. Xerox didn’t know what it had. Xerox did nothing with PARC. PARC embarrassed Xerox. The wizards at corporate were so far behind the times that change of that enormity just unnerved them too much to act, so they didn’t. In fact, they got rid of the R&D people who had created PARC, brought in new managers to run PARC, got rid of Bob Taylor (who had gotten too big for his britches), prompting a ton of resignations from his team members, and lost a lot of people who went on to form companies like 3Com, Adobe, SGI, and others. Xerox could have OWNED computing and they blew it! They literally could have been Microsoft, IBM, and Apple rolled into one and they blew it. The author tries to shield them from this criticism. He tries to say that as a copier company, they weren’t equipped to sell computers. Well, why invest in researching them, then? He tried to say you’d have to retrain 100,000 salesmen. Well, do it. Piss poor excuses, in my opinion. Xerox has no excuse for blowing things the way they did.
One last thing. I really enjoyed the chapter on the visit by Steve Jobs. Of course, it’s a famous story about how Jobs visited PARC, saw what they had, ripped them off, put everything in the Mac, and made a killing. Part of which is true. However, with his first visit, he was given just a main demo given anyone who would visit. Apparently he wasn’t impressed and he had the ear of the Xerox CEO, who was investing in Apple, so PARC got a call telling them to show Apple everything. Jobs and his crew went back again and this time got more, but not everything. Somehow Jobs knew this, and before Jobs was out of the building, the Xerox CEO was on the phone to PARC telling them to show them everything. This elicited a great deal of stress and agony in some Xerox employees, who thought they were giving away the store. (They were.) So Jobs went back and apparently went nuts when he saw the GUI interface, and his engineers also appreciated the mouse and networking, etc, et al. And so the Mac was born.
This book isn’t perfect. There are a ton of people to keep up with. It gets hard. Sometimes the book gets a little boring. But all in all, if you’re into computers and into the development of the personal computer, the story of how the first one was built before Steve Wozniak came along and claimed to do it is pretty awesome and the story of Xerox PARC is pretty awe inspiring. Definitely recommended.
Back in the mid-60s, Xerox decided they wanted to compete with IBM and AT&T by developing their own research labs in the hopes of winning prestige and a possible Nobel or two, just like Bell Labs did. They set PARC up with a virtually unlimited budget and told the director he could hire whomever he wanted. Pake, the director, had heard of one Bob Taylor, formerly of ARPA, the precursor of the Internet, and hired him to head his computer lab. Taylor instilled a fierce commitment in his employees, but had a very adversarial management style and made a lot of enemies around the company. Another key hire was Alan Kay, a programmer with a dream of creating laptops and one day tablets (30 years before they ever came out) which would be so easy to program, kids could do it. Soon PARC had the best and the brightest from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Utah, etc. They came from all over, from the best computer science programs. And there were no deadlines and nothing to produce – it was like a giant think tank where you could just follow your dreams to see where they’d lead with unlimited funding. For the most part.
By the late 60s, one of the programmers had produced a mouse, ancient by our current standards, but radical by theirs. Also, they were producing GUI operating systems for point and click possibilities. By the mid to late 70s, the inventers had invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, overlapping windows, a text editor (word processor), a programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. And that’s the crux of the situation. Xerox didn’t know what it had. Xerox did nothing with PARC. PARC embarrassed Xerox. The wizards at corporate were so far behind the times that change of that enormity just unnerved them too much to act, so they didn’t. In fact, they got rid of the R&D people who had created PARC, brought in new managers to run PARC, got rid of Bob Taylor (who had gotten too big for his britches), prompting a ton of resignations from his team members, and lost a lot of people who went on to form companies like 3Com, Adobe, SGI, and others. Xerox could have OWNED computing and they blew it! They literally could have been Microsoft, IBM, and Apple rolled into one and they blew it. The author tries to shield them from this criticism. He tries to say that as a copier company, they weren’t equipped to sell computers. Well, why invest in researching them, then? He tried to say you’d have to retrain 100,000 salesmen. Well, do it. Piss poor excuses, in my opinion. Xerox has no excuse for blowing things the way they did.
One last thing. I really enjoyed the chapter on the visit by Steve Jobs. Of course, it’s a famous story about how Jobs visited PARC, saw what they had, ripped them off, put everything in the Mac, and made a killing. Part of which is true. However, with his first visit, he was given just a main demo given anyone who would visit. Apparently he wasn’t impressed and he had the ear of the Xerox CEO, who was investing in Apple, so PARC got a call telling them to show Apple everything. Jobs and his crew went back again and this time got more, but not everything. Somehow Jobs knew this, and before Jobs was out of the building, the Xerox CEO was on the phone to PARC telling them to show them everything. This elicited a great deal of stress and agony in some Xerox employees, who thought they were giving away the store. (They were.) So Jobs went back and apparently went nuts when he saw the GUI interface, and his engineers also appreciated the mouse and networking, etc, et al. And so the Mac was born.
This book isn’t perfect. There are a ton of people to keep up with. It gets hard. Sometimes the book gets a little boring. But all in all, if you’re into computers and into the development of the personal computer, the story of how the first one was built before Steve Wozniak came along and claimed to do it is pretty awesome and the story of Xerox PARC is pretty awe inspiring. Definitely recommended.
May 30, 2022
I had a blast reading this one. If you are into history of computers this is a gem. It's the story of PARC (Xerox's huge research lab) during its most prolific decade, 70 to 80. It's maybe the last known example of a company leaving scientists do whatever they want with a huge budget. You get stories about the invention of Ethernet, PuP (which inspired TCP/IP), Postcript, and the Alto. A computer ridiculously ahead of its time. The first half was the most interesting because you see the gestation of all these ideas, the second part is more about company relations and people slowly leaving to create their own business or join Apple or Microsoft.
February 4, 2011
"The theory of second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month: 'The second system is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.'" (74)
"Yet to chalk up the mixed fate of PARC's technologies purely to Xerox's blundering, as has been done for many years, is misleading. It encourages others to believe that the commercializing of advanced new technologies is easy, provided only that one has the will to do so; and that a company's early domination of a high-tech market will reward it with an unassailable competitive advantage for decades to follow. It presupposes that a corporation should invariably be able to recoup its investment in all its basic research -- a mindset bound to lead not to more effective corporate-funded basic research but simply to less of it." (390)
"Yet to chalk up the mixed fate of PARC's technologies purely to Xerox's blundering, as has been done for many years, is misleading. It encourages others to believe that the commercializing of advanced new technologies is easy, provided only that one has the will to do so; and that a company's early domination of a high-tech market will reward it with an unassailable competitive advantage for decades to follow. It presupposes that a corporation should invariably be able to recoup its investment in all its basic research -- a mindset bound to lead not to more effective corporate-funded basic research but simply to less of it." (390)
January 6, 2023
Xerox PARC is fascinating and legendary, and the book does a good job to tell that – but also the bureacracy, conflicts and politics behind the-lab-where-the-GUI-was-invented. It is not as nuanced as e.g. The Soul of a New Machine, but, admittedly, the scope in time and amount of people at PARC is just too big to do it in the same way.
Still, I took a lot along. The last chapter is great for its critique of the critique of Xerox, showing that in the context of a huge company with established infrastructure, incentives, thousands of trained experts etc. you can’t just pivot to a new thing which only retrospectively seems to have been obvious all along. Some early chapters to mid chapters were particularly interesting for me showing the ideological conflict between the established idea of time sharing mainframes and inventing a personal computer that is yours and will just do what you tell it to without having to wait for someone else’s calculation to be run first. Even though mainframes are not the standard anymore, the conflicts still echo in operating system architectures and ideas of "good" users.
Still, I took a lot along. The last chapter is great for its critique of the critique of Xerox, showing that in the context of a huge company with established infrastructure, incentives, thousands of trained experts etc. you can’t just pivot to a new thing which only retrospectively seems to have been obvious all along. Some early chapters to mid chapters were particularly interesting for me showing the ideological conflict between the established idea of time sharing mainframes and inventing a personal computer that is yours and will just do what you tell it to without having to wait for someone else’s calculation to be run first. Even though mainframes are not the standard anymore, the conflicts still echo in operating system architectures and ideas of "good" users.
July 30, 2020
An ok and readable history of the research and pioneering work at PARC. That work was important and groundbreaking in some ways, but I think the book overplays some developments by giving the illusion that similar or related work was not being done by other people and institutions. For example, it spends a lot of time talking about the singular importance of their work on the laser printer, only to mention offhand, much later in the book, that IBM released a similar product to market before they did. As if... other people might have been discovering the same things at the same time.
I'm not a big subscriber to the idea of singular, irreplaceable inventors. Sometimes particular catalysts bring about change in important ways that are more gracefully and before their expected time, but many ideas and changes will eventually arise one way or the other.
The book also gets a little repetitive at times.
I'm not a big subscriber to the idea of singular, irreplaceable inventors. Sometimes particular catalysts bring about change in important ways that are more gracefully and before their expected time, but many ideas and changes will eventually arise one way or the other.
The book also gets a little repetitive at times.
February 26, 2013
Xerox PARC is legendary as the home of some of the most brilliant minds in the history of computing. It played a pivotal role in the creation of (among other things) personal computers, GUIs, and the internet. It's also emblematic of the inability of large corporations to recognise and foster innovation. This book brilliantly captures the personalities of PARC, their triumphs, frustrations and clashes, with each other and with the Xerox suits. There's a good balance here in terms of attention to the human, technical, and business elements of the story. Entertaining and informative - highly recommended.
August 6, 2018
A perfect companion to the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", this book provides a more nuanced explanation for why so many of the technologies pioneered at PARC ended up being exploited by other, more nimble, technology companies. I am coming away with a greater appreciation for the difficulty of turning truly groundbreaking research into marketable consumer products. Highly recommend.
January 15, 2022
No matter your background or career, this is a good book. However, if you are interested in where all of the devices and applications you enjoy came from, this book is amazing! My time in technology started pretty much when this book was published, which is already over 20 years ago. As a child I had an i386, learned DOS, GWBasic, and have been interested in hardware and programming since. My career has followed those interests and this book fills in the history of how it all started.
Ethernet, OOP, Smalltalk, Personal PC, Personal Devices, Graphic Design, Digital Video Editing, and more were all envisioned, invented, and shared from Xerox Parc. If you read The Idea Factory, this is where some of the visionaries from Bell Labs ended up and continued to invent the future. The end of the arc in this book describes my childhood and it was great to have a whole narrative around where all of this came from. The story ends with Apple and Steve Jobs, Microsoft, and the whole industry being influenced by the work done in the fragile, innovative bubble around Xerox Parc at a perfect time in history.
If any of this sounds interesting, read the book! You will not be bored or disappointed!
Ethernet, OOP, Smalltalk, Personal PC, Personal Devices, Graphic Design, Digital Video Editing, and more were all envisioned, invented, and shared from Xerox Parc. If you read The Idea Factory, this is where some of the visionaries from Bell Labs ended up and continued to invent the future. The end of the arc in this book describes my childhood and it was great to have a whole narrative around where all of this came from. The story ends with Apple and Steve Jobs, Microsoft, and the whole industry being influenced by the work done in the fragile, innovative bubble around Xerox Parc at a perfect time in history.
If any of this sounds interesting, read the book! You will not be bored or disappointed!
May 8, 2024
En torno al laboratorio de innovación de Xerox en Palo Alto siempre hubo misterio. Por un lado, acerca de qué desarrollaron y por otro, por qué la empresa no pudo sacarle provecho a tantas innovaciones. Este libro despeja todas las dudas en una historia muy bien contada y con excelente documentación. Un gran trabajo.
August 25, 2020
After reading Dealers of Lightning, I can conclude that the broad strokes of what you've heard about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) are true: that they were responsible for some of the most innovative achievements in computing, inventing the graphical user interface, the mouse, laser printing, desktop publishing and word processing, Ethernet, and many more -- yet that Xerox not only had no idea how to commercialize many of these achievements successfully, they let folks like Steve Jobs from the nascent Apple Computer cannibalize (willingly!) these game-changing inventions. To be sure, there are nuances and details to the story that add some color to Xerox's motivations, financial condition during PARC's halcyon years, and ultimate inability to own the computing industry, but Hiltzik's fundamental thesis is the following: large corporations (Xerox at the time of PARC was some 150,000 employees) are simply unable to behave in a nimble way when faced with discontinuous innovation, set as they are in their existing revenue streams and "big numbers". Hiltzik essentially argues that this is and will always be the downfall of huge companies. Even the counterexamples he uses to try and argue against his own thesis (General Electric and Hewlett-Packard) have, in the intervening 20 years since he wrote Dealers, run into significant headwinds and are a shell of their former selves, thus lending even more credence to his argument.
The object lesson I take from PARC is this: beware of any company that aims to start an "innovation lab", either implicitly or explicitly, because not only will that send the signal that innovation only belongs to that business unit (thus not making the company innovative overall), the lab will always be in a tug-of-war with the bean-counters who didn't understand innovation in the first place! And God forbid that the lab actually come up with good ideas, because the initial revenue numbers and cash-flow projections will be several orders of magnitude lower than the firm's current products in market -- another [patently ludicrous] reason they will try to kill emerging products in their womb. That Xerox ever managed to bring anything to market at all beyond the photocopier is a miracle.
The object lesson I take from PARC is this: beware of any company that aims to start an "innovation lab", either implicitly or explicitly, because not only will that send the signal that innovation only belongs to that business unit (thus not making the company innovative overall), the lab will always be in a tug-of-war with the bean-counters who didn't understand innovation in the first place! And God forbid that the lab actually come up with good ideas, because the initial revenue numbers and cash-flow projections will be several orders of magnitude lower than the firm's current products in market -- another [patently ludicrous] reason they will try to kill emerging products in their womb. That Xerox ever managed to bring anything to market at all beyond the photocopier is a miracle.
March 4, 2014
A fascinating account of the invention of the personal computer at a Xerox research facility in the 1970s. Hiltzik's book explains how over the course of ten years some of the world's foremost computer scientists invented almost every feature that we have come to associate with personal computing--overlapping windows, "what you see is what you get" word processing, the desktop, high speed printing, connection to an Ethernet, point and click technology, the ubiquity of the mouse, and the use of icons as opposed to coding. What's most fascinating is how Hiltzik details the creative process that led to these inventions, specifically how so many of them built off each other and the spirit of competition within the lab that resulted in great leaps forward. While the author is occasionally too worshipful of his subjects, it's not hard to see why with the cast of characters he has to work with. Heavily featured in the book are Bob Taylor (the man who ran the department of the Pentagon that literally invented the Internet), and Alan Kay (a research scientist whose dissertation anticipated by more than 30 years the hand held computer technology that Apple would bring to fruition with its Ipad), two of the most important individuals in the history of personal computing. While it may sound as though this book is written exclusively for those with an interest in or knowledge of computers, that is not the case. Much of the book explores the tensions between Xerox's corporate headquarters and PARC management in addition to the rivalries between and among the departments at PARC. What's more, I have an incredibly rudimentary understanding of technology and almost every aspect of this book made sense to me (with the exception of object oriented programming--I'm still not sure what that is or why it's important and I've done further reading on it). This is a good book for anyone interested in notions of creativity and invention.
April 21, 2022
Though the writing is a bit dry, the actual history depicted in Dealers of Lightning is fascinating and worth learning about, both to understand the origins of modern personal computers and to learn from the story of Xerox, which failed to commercialize a dizzying array of technologies developed at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Hiltzik describes the origins of Ethernet, the laser printer, overlapping desktop windows, and the mouse, most of which would only reach the public via Apple Computers which famously "raided" PARC in 1983.
There's a story here of a bloated bureaucracy getting in its own way, although Hiltzik credibly contextualizes XEROX's failures. In addition to red tape, XEROX was stuck in an old paradigm of giant office systems - they couldn't see personal computing coming and adapt when it did. It's a worthy lesson on the need to know your price, your customer, and your business model for any company.
Overall, I found this to be a worthy sequel to The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - a book about the research center the jumpstarted the silicon revolution - and a companion to Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, both stories about large companies that failed to adapt to the software age.
My favorite fun fact from the book: PARC built its systems to use a mouse because executives at the time thought typing was for secretaries. It's crazy to think how that's shaped the devices we still use today.
Hiltzik describes the origins of Ethernet, the laser printer, overlapping desktop windows, and the mouse, most of which would only reach the public via Apple Computers which famously "raided" PARC in 1983.
There's a story here of a bloated bureaucracy getting in its own way, although Hiltzik credibly contextualizes XEROX's failures. In addition to red tape, XEROX was stuck in an old paradigm of giant office systems - they couldn't see personal computing coming and adapt when it did. It's a worthy lesson on the need to know your price, your customer, and your business model for any company.
Overall, I found this to be a worthy sequel to The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - a book about the research center the jumpstarted the silicon revolution - and a companion to Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, both stories about large companies that failed to adapt to the software age.
My favorite fun fact from the book: PARC built its systems to use a mouse because executives at the time thought typing was for secretaries. It's crazy to think how that's shaped the devices we still use today.
July 4, 2021
Xerox PARC is legendary among geeks, of which I am proud to be one. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have read this book. Like many legends, there is a little embellishment in most of the recounts of the tale. I haven't seen the movie "Jobs", but I have seen " Pirates Of Silicon Valley "....the story of how Xerox fumbled away their chance to usher in and dominate the fledgling personal computer industry. The truth, as is almost always the case, is a bit more complicated.
For a time, PARC was Computer Geek Camelot. The laser printer, local.networking, and most famously, the whole package of what we today think of when someone says Personal Computer, all sprang from this one lab. But beyond the science and engineering, which were formidable, lies a story of cultures, conflicts, egos, and the realities of Big Business.
Tech isn't born in a vacuum. If you Build It, they may not come....not at this point in time, anyway. It's a great story.
Geeks change the world, more so than athletes or vapid celebrities. These people gave us this life altering technology. Read this book...get to know their names.
For a time, PARC was Computer Geek Camelot. The laser printer, local.networking, and most famously, the whole package of what we today think of when someone says Personal Computer, all sprang from this one lab. But beyond the science and engineering, which were formidable, lies a story of cultures, conflicts, egos, and the realities of Big Business.
Tech isn't born in a vacuum. If you Build It, they may not come....not at this point in time, anyway. It's a great story.
Geeks change the world, more so than athletes or vapid celebrities. These people gave us this life altering technology. Read this book...get to know their names.
March 19, 2012
Fascinating history of PARC and the people who made it the world's leading computer science research center in the 1970s. Does not specifically unpack the factors that made PARC excel, but contains enough information about its successes to draw broader lessons about creating conditions conducive to breakthrough R&D.
- Hire the best people
- Give them a long leash
- Force them to interact
Ethernet is a good example -- Bob Metcalfe was stringing coaxial cable through the PARC basement when he bumped into a colleague (Boggs?) with better soldering skills. The two of them collaborated on what became one of the critical pieces of networking hardware.
This book is also a pseudo-biography of Bob Taylor (a true hedgehog in the Tetlock schema). Taylor's focus on developing a personal computer (the Alto) led to one of PARC's biggest breakthroughs. However, Taylor's management style (and "hedgehog-ness") probably precluded PARC from fully benefiting from the interaction potential inherent in the PARC labs (SSL, GSL, CSL, etc).
Also debunks the myth that PARC "failed" (that Apple, Microsoft, and others ate its lunch with the personal computer, GUI design, etc).
An enjoyable read, but could have been shortened.
- Hire the best people
- Give them a long leash
- Force them to interact
Ethernet is a good example -- Bob Metcalfe was stringing coaxial cable through the PARC basement when he bumped into a colleague (Boggs?) with better soldering skills. The two of them collaborated on what became one of the critical pieces of networking hardware.
This book is also a pseudo-biography of Bob Taylor (a true hedgehog in the Tetlock schema). Taylor's focus on developing a personal computer (the Alto) led to one of PARC's biggest breakthroughs. However, Taylor's management style (and "hedgehog-ness") probably precluded PARC from fully benefiting from the interaction potential inherent in the PARC labs (SSL, GSL, CSL, etc).
Also debunks the myth that PARC "failed" (that Apple, Microsoft, and others ate its lunch with the personal computer, GUI design, etc).
An enjoyable read, but could have been shortened.
October 17, 2017
This book is not for everyone because it contains a lot of office politics. But it does document the role PARC played in the 1970's in laying the foundation for much of what we now take for granted in computer technology. I worked at Xerox during the 70's, spent many hours at PARC on business and was personally involved in some of the products that used PARC inventions. I also witnessed the corporate level office politics that caused PARC so much trouble. I knew many of the corporate players and the author got it right. I even learned how my personal actions had consequences I never knew about. So I enjoyed the book very much. It is hard for me to know how others would like this book because I was too close to the events he described. If you think you know a lot about how we got from 1969 to the birth of personal computing to where we are today, you are probably wrong and you might be astounded to.learn how it all came about.
December 11, 2010
Wow I had no idea how much stuff originated from PARC.
-laser printers
-ethernet
-desktop computing w/ GUI - mouse, windowing, all that
-adobe
-3com
-SGI
-object oriented programming (smalltalk)
-probably more stuff I'm forgetting
Truly a remarkable place, and a tragic story for Xerox. Their clueless corporate management and stultifying resistance to change kept them from truly realizing the commercial potential for most of these things. They could have OWNED computing in the 90's and beyond. Instead they're just the copier company, and Microsoft/Adobe/Apple/3COM/SGI/etc became the future.
-laser printers
-ethernet
-desktop computing w/ GUI - mouse, windowing, all that
-adobe
-3com
-SGI
-object oriented programming (smalltalk)
-probably more stuff I'm forgetting
Truly a remarkable place, and a tragic story for Xerox. Their clueless corporate management and stultifying resistance to change kept them from truly realizing the commercial potential for most of these things. They could have OWNED computing in the 90's and beyond. Instead they're just the copier company, and Microsoft/Adobe/Apple/3COM/SGI/etc became the future.
March 13, 2018
I started reading this with very high expectations. Unfortunately the result didn't satisfy me completely.
Yes, the story is very interesting, yes the era is exciting and all that, but after a while I realised that insisting on describing person after person and all the power struggles and corporate politics becomes tiresome after a while.
In contrast to that, Hiltzik offers little info on the products themselves and, as a result, I didn't come out any wiser about them than I was when I started reading it. Oh, I did learn a few things about photocopiers, but... the Alto, people! Give me something more!!
Yes, the story is very interesting, yes the era is exciting and all that, but after a while I realised that insisting on describing person after person and all the power struggles and corporate politics becomes tiresome after a while.
In contrast to that, Hiltzik offers little info on the products themselves and, as a result, I didn't come out any wiser about them than I was when I started reading it. Oh, I did learn a few things about photocopiers, but... the Alto, people! Give me something more!!
May 13, 2018
Author is not the most tech-savvy one abd definitely not the best to cover such an epic topic as PARC. Respect for the amount of work invested in book though.
Generally a neat story glorifying CS research geniuses significance of whose work was lost to the management of Xerox for their own loss. Stories playing up the mythos of brilliance of PARCers while entertaining, are not too technically nor socially revealing.
Sadly, the topic is of interest mostly to CS/IT people, for whom book is technically too simplistic. For others the topic might be too technical to be of any interest. So, in conclusion - bad mach of author/style with target audience.
Generally a neat story glorifying CS research geniuses significance of whose work was lost to the management of Xerox for their own loss. Stories playing up the mythos of brilliance of PARCers while entertaining, are not too technically nor socially revealing.
Sadly, the topic is of interest mostly to CS/IT people, for whom book is technically too simplistic. For others the topic might be too technical to be of any interest. So, in conclusion - bad mach of author/style with target audience.
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