conanxin

Compiled from: An article introducing PARC in the 1985 IEEE Spectrum — Inside the PARC: the `information architects'

At the end of 1969, Xerox Chairman C. Peter McColough told the New York Society of Security Analysts that Xerox was determined to develop an "information architecture" to address the problems brought about by the "knowledge explosion." Legend has it that McColough then turned to Jack E. Goldman, Senior Vice President of Research and Development, and said, "Well, go establish a lab and find out what I just meant."

Goldman's account differs. In 1969, Xerox had just acquired a large computer manufacturer, Scientific Data Systems (SDS). "When Xerox acquired SDS," he recalled, "I quickly walked into Peter McColough's office and said, 'Look, since we are in the digital computer business, we better have a research lab!'"

In any case, the result was the establishment of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, one of the most unusual corporate research institutions of our time. PARC is one of three research centers at Xerox; the other two are in Webster, New York, and Toronto, Canada. It employs about 350 researchers, managers, and support staff (in contrast, AT&T's Bell Labs employed about 25,000 before its breakup). PARC has been around for 15 years and has produced or nurtured some technologies that have led to developments including:

• Macintosh computers with a mouse and overlapping windows.
• Colorful weather maps in television news programs.
• Laser printers.
• Design structures for very large scale integrated circuit systems, now taught in over 100 universities.
• Networks connecting personal computers in offices.
• Semiconductor lasers for reading and writing optical disks.
• Structured programming languages like Modula-2 and Ada.

By the mid-1970s, nearly half of the top 100 computer scientists in the world were working at PARC, which had similar strengths in other fields, including solid-state physics and optics.

Some researchers say PARC was a product of the civil rights philosophy of the 1960s and that decade's focus on improving the quality of life. The center was established in 1970, unlike other major industrial research labs; its work was not tied to the product lines of its parent company. Unlike university research labs, PARC had a unified vision: it would be dedicated to developing "information architecture."

The origin of this phrase is unclear. McColough credited it to his speechwriter. The speechwriter later said that neither he nor McColough had a specific definition for the phrase.

Thus, almost everyone who joined PARC at its inception had a different view of the center's charter. This had its advantages. Because projects were not assigned from above, researchers formed their own small groups; support for a project depended on how many people the project's planner could get involved.

"The phrase is 'Tom Sawyer,'" recalled James G. Mitchell, who joined PARC in 1971 from the now-defunct Berkeley Computer Company and is now Vice President of Research at the Palo Alto Acorn Research Center. "Somebody would think something was really important. They would start working on it, form a group, and then try to persuade others to join them."

The First Step#

When Goldman established PARC, his first decision was to bring in his old friend George E. Pake to manage it. Pake was the Executive Vice President, Provost, and Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Pake's first decision was to hire Robert Taylor, who was then at the University of Utah, to help him recruit engineers and scientists for the Computer Science and Systems Science Laboratory.

Taylor had served as the Director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and, in the mid-to-late 1960s, he and others funded the heyday of computer research.

PARC started as a small organization—perhaps fewer than 20 people. Nine of them came from Berkeley Computer Company, a small mainframe company that Taylor had tried to persuade Xerox to acquire as a way to kickstart PARC. (Many at BCC were responsible for the design of the SDS 940, which Xerox acquired in 1968.)

The 20 PARC employees lived in a rented small building, "using rented chairs, rented desks, with a four-button telephone, and no receptionist," recalled David Thornburg, who joined PARC's Integrated Science Laboratory after graduating from graduate school in 1971. The organization felt it should have its own computer.

Mitchell said, "It was a bit difficult to do language research and compiler research without machines." The computer they wanted was the PDP-10 from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Alan Kay recalled, "There was competition between Xerox's SDS and DEC in an ad in Datamation [magazine]." He came to PARC as a researcher from Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in late 1970. "When we wanted a PDP-10, Xerox envisioned a photographer capturing DEC's box in the PARC lab, so they said, 'How about a Sigma 7?'"

"We thought it would take three years to get an operating system for the Sigma 7, while we could build a complete PDP-10 in a year."

The result was the MAXC (Multiple Access Xerox Computer), which simulated the PDP-10 but used semiconductor dynamic RAMs instead of a core. MAXC invested significant effort in hardware and software and maintained a historical record of continuous availability as a node on ARPAnet.

MAXC was crucial to many developments. Intel produced the 1103 dynamic memory chips used in the MAXC design, gaining initial profits. Kay recalled, "Most of the 1103 memory chips purchased from Intel at the time didn't work." Therefore, PARC researcher Chuck Thacker created a chip tester to screen chips for MAXC. A later version of the tester, based on the Alto personal computer, was also developed at PARC and ultimately used by Intel on its production line.

Moreover, MAXC provided PARC with experience in building computers, which was beneficial for the center. "If we had bought a PDP-10, we wouldn't have gained the three capabilities we needed," recalled an early lab manager at PARC. "We needed to develop a vendor community—to finish design layouts, printed circuit boards, and so on—the only way to drive this was with a project. We also needed semiconductor memory, which the PDP-IOs didn't have. We thought we needed to learn more about programmable microprogrammed machines, even though we didn't use those features."

MAXC set a pattern for PARC: building its own hardware. This gave researchers a vision that had to become reality—at least on a small scale.

Kay said, "The original founders swore we would never build a system that wasn't designed for 100 users. This meant that if it was a time-sharing system, you had to run 100 people on it; if it was a programming language, then 100 people had to program without having to hold on all the time; if it was a personal computer, you had to be able to build 100 of them."

This policy of building systems was not the only research approach; Mitchell recalled that it was a focal point of debate at PARC.

"System research requires building systems," he said. "Otherwise, you don't know if your ideas are good or how difficult they are to implement. But some people believe that when you are building something, you are not doing research."

Since building MAXC, the center has created dozens of prototypes of hardware and software systems—sometimes thousands of prototypes.

The first personal computer developed in the United States is generally considered to be the MITS Altair, which was sold as a kit for business enthusiasts in 1976. Almost at the same time, the Apple I was also available, similarly in kit form.

However, by the end of that year, there were also 200 Alto personal computers in daily use, the first of which was built in 1973. While researchers in PARC's Computer Science Laboratory were finishing MAXC and starting to use it, their peers in the Systems Science Laboratory were assembling a distributed computer system using Nova 800 processors and high-speed character generators. In September 1972, PARC Computer Science Laboratory researchers Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker approached Alan Kay in the Systems Science Laboratory and asked, "Do you have funding?"

Kay told them he had about $250,000 earmarked for purchasing more Nova 800 and character generation hardware.

"Do you want us to build you a computer?" Lampson asked Kay.

"I would love to," Kay replied. On November 22, 1972, Thacker and Ed McCreight began building the Alto. A Xerox executive reportedly insisted that developing a large hardware system would take 18 months, which infuriated Thacker. When Thacker argued that he could do it in three months, he made a bet.

It took just over three months, but not much longer. "On April 1, 1973," Thornburg recalled, "I walked into the basement where the prototype Alto was located, with wires connected to a rack full of Novas, and saw Ed McCreight sitting in a chair with the screen displaying 'Alto lives' in the upper left corner."

Kay said the Alto proved to be "what Lampson needed, what Thacker needed, and what I needed. Lampson wanted a $500 PDP-10," he recalled. "Thacker wanted a Nova 800 that was ten times faster, and I wanted a machine that could be carried around and used by children."

The rapid construction of the Alto was due to its simplicity. Kay recalled that the processor "was just a timer"—with only 160 chips in the original integrated circuit technology of 1973. This architecture traced back to the TX-2, built by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in the late 1950s with 32 program counters. The Alto, with 16 program counters, would fetch its next instruction from the highest-priority counter at any given time. Executing multiple tasks incurred no overhead. When the machine drew the screen display, dynamic memory refreshed every 2 milliseconds, the keyboard was monitored, and information was transferred in and out from the disk. The lowest-priority task was running the user's program.

The prototype was successful, and more Altos were built. Serious research began on user interfaces, computer languages, and graphics. Lampson, Thacker, and other project planners received the first models. Many PARC researchers pitched in to speed up production, but it seemed that the demand was never satisfied.

"There was a lab producing Altos, surrounded by circuit boards, and anyone could come in and work," recalled Daniel H.H. Ingalls, who is now Chief Engineer at Apple Computer in Cupertino, California.

Ron Rider, who was still working at Xerox, "had an Alto when Altos were not available," Bert Sutherland recalled, who joined PARC in 1975 as the manager of the Systems Science Laboratory. "When I asked him how he got it, he told me he went around the labs, collected parts from people, and then assembled it himself."

Networking#

By today's standards, the Alto was not a particularly powerful computer. However, if several Altos were connected to file servers and printers, the result looked like the office of the future.

Before PARC was established—in 1966, at Stanford University—the idea of local computer networks had already been discussed. Larry Tesler, now a manager of object-oriented systems at Apple, graduated from Stanford when the university was considering purchasing IBM 360 time-sharing systems.

"I suggested to one of them that they buy 100 PDP-ls and connect them to a network," Tesler said. "Some consultants thought it was a good idea; a consultant from Yale, Alan Perlis, told them it was the right thing to do, but the IBM-oriented people at Stanford thought it would be safer to buy time-sharing systems. They missed the opportunity to invent local networks."

So PARC ultimately gained another first. While building the Alto, Thacker envisioned Ethernet, a coaxial cable that connected machines in the simplest way possible. It was partially based on a packet radio network called Alohanet developed at the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s.

Kay said, "Thacker said coaxial cable was just capturing ether, so that part was already determined before Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs showed up—that it would be packet-switched and would be a collision network. But Metcalfe and Boggs spent a year figuring out how to do the damn thing." (Metcalfe later founded 3Com in Mountain View, California; Boggs now works at DEC Western Research in Los Altos, California. Both hold fundamental patents for Ethernet.)

"I always thought it was important that Boggs was an amateur radio operator," Sutherland said. "This had a huge impact on how Ethernet was designed because Ethernet fundamentally couldn't work reliably. It was like citizen band radio or any other type of radio communication, fundamentally unreliable, just like our view of the telephone. Because you know it basically doesn't work, you did all the fault-tolerant programming—'Say again, this is garbled' protocols designed for radio communication. This made the final network function very reliably."

"Boggs was an amateur radio enthusiast who knew you could communicate reliably over unreliable media. I often wonder what would have happened if he didn't have that background," Sutherland added.

Once Ethernet was built, it was quite simple to use: a computer wanting to send a message would wait and check if the cable was clear. If it was clear, the machine would send the information in a data packet starting with the recipient's address. If two messages collided, the machines sending them would each wait a random amount of time before trying again.

One innovative use of the network had nothing to do with people sending messages to each other; it only involved communication between machines. Because dynamic memory chips were so unreliable in those days, when nothing else was being done, the Alto would also perform memory checks. Thornburg said it was very significant in detecting bad chips: "It would send a message telling you which Alto was bad, which slot had a bad board, and which row and column had bad chips. I found this out because one day a repairman came over and told me, 'Anytime you're ready to shut down, I need to fix your Alto,' and I didn't even know what the problem was."

While developing Ethernet, another key factor for the office of the future was the laser printer. After all, what good is a network capable of transmitting documents from one place to another if there is no effective means of printing documents that display various styles?

The idea for the laser printer came from Xerox's Webster Research Lab in New York, championed by Gary Starkweather. At the time, then Vice President of Research Goldman recalled that his idea was to use a laser to draw information in digital form onto the photoreceptor drum or belt of a copier. Starkweather reported to George White, Vice President in charge of the Advanced Development Business Products Group.

"George White came to me," Goldman said, "Listen, Jack, I found an amazing guy named Gary Starkweather who prints visual information with lasers, of course using Xerox machines. What an ideal concept for Xerox. But I don't think he will get anywhere in Rochester; no one will listen to him, and they won't do anything very leading-edge. Why don't you bring him to the new lab in Palo Alto?"

The newly appointed PARC manager Pake seized the opportunity. Starkweather and several other researchers from Rochester were transferred to Palo Alto and started PARC's Optical Sciences Laboratory. The first laser printer, EARS (Ethernet-Alto-Research character generator-Scanning laser output terminal), built by Starkweather and Ron Rider, began printing documents generated by Altos and was sent over Ethernet in 1973.

Thornburg said EARS was not perfect. It had a dynamic character generator that could create new patterns as characters and graphics came in. If there was no capital "Q" on the page, the character generator would save internal memory by not generating a pattern for the capital "Q." But if the page contained a very complex image, the character generator would run out of patterns; "there was a certain complexity in the unprintable drawings," Thornburg recalled.

Despite these shortcomings, the laser printer was a significant improvement over the line printers, teletypes, and fax machines used at the time, and Goldman pushed for its commercialization as soon as possible. However, Xerox rejected it. In fact, one sore point in PARC's history was that the parent company seemed unable to capitalize on the developments of its researchers.

In 1972, when Starkweather built the first prototype, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed a bid for five laser printers to promote the technology. However, Goldman could not persuade the executive at Xerox's Electro-Optical Systems Division (whose background was in accounting and finance) to allow the bid. The reason was: if the laser printer needed repairs as often as a copier, Xerox could lose $150,000 during the contract period, even though initial evidence suggested that wear and tear from printing was much less than from copying.

In 1974, when a small group of PARC researchers led by John Ellenby began purchasing used copiers from Xerox's copier division and installing laser heads in them, the laser printer finally made its debut outside PARC. John Ellenby built the Alto II, a production version of the Alto, and he is now Vice President at Grid Systems in Mountain View, California. The resulting printers were called Dovers and were used internally at Xerox and in universities. Sutherland estimated that dozens of such printers were manufactured.

He recalled, "They took all the optical instruments out of the printers and sent them back to the copier division." He said that even today, he still receives laser-printed documents from universities in which he can recognize the Dover font.

Also in 1974, the product review committee at Xerox's headquarters in Rochester finally made a decision on what kind of computer printer the company should produce. Goldman stated, "A bunch of people who knew nothing about technology were making decisions, and a week before the decision, I saw it heading toward CRT technology." (Another group at Xerox developed a printing system that displayed text on a special cathode ray tube, which would focus on the copier's photoreceptor drum and print it out.)

"That was Monday night. I commandeered a plane," Goldman recalled. "I told the planning vice president and the marketing vice president, 'You two come with me. Adjust your plans for Tuesday. Tonight you are going with me to PARC. We will come back for the 8:30 meeting on Wednesday morning.' We left around 7 PM and arrived in California at 1 AM, and God bless, the PARC folks did a beautiful demonstration showing what the laser printer could do.

"If you are dealing with marketing or planning people, let them experience it firsthand. All the charts and slides are useless," Goldman said.

The product review committee chose laser technology, but there were delays. "They wouldn't let us bring them out in the 7000 series," Goldman said, referring to the old printers used by Ellenby's team. "Instead, they insisted on launching a new 9000 series, which didn't come out until 1977."

From a purely economic perspective, Xerox's return on investment in PARC's first decade came from the profits of the laser printer. This is perhaps ironic, as one vision of the office of the future was paperless.

"I think PARC generated more paper than any other office because with the push of a button, you could print 30 copies of any report," observed former PARC technician Douglas Fairbairn, now Vice President of User Design Technology at VLSI Technology. "If the report was 30 pages long, that was 1,000 pages, but it still only took a few minutes. Then you say, 'I want that picture on another page,' and that's another 1,000 pages."

By the mid-1970s, most Altos in PARC researchers' offices could be customized to their needs. Richard Shoup's Alto had a color display. Taylor's Alto had a speaker—whenever he received an email, it would play "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You."

Moreover, in the ten years since the Alto was widely used at PARC, it became evident that personal computers could be used for both entertainment and work. PARC researchers were among the first to discover this.

"At night, whenever I was in Palo Alto," Goldman said, "I would go to the lab to see Alan Kay creating a game. This was before video games appeared; these kids were creating these things until midnight or 1 AM."

Sutherland said, "I enjoyed observing some firsts; Xerox held the first electronic lottery nationwide. At Xerox, I received my first electronic junk mail, my first electronic work acceptance, and my first electronic obituary."

When the Xerox 914 copier debuted in the early 1960s, "I was a copying maniac," Lynn Conway said, who joined PARC in 1973 from Memorex and is now the Vice Dean and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. "I loved making things and distributing them, like maps—various things. In the Xerox environment of 1976, suddenly you could create a lot."

Dozens of clubs and interest groups formed on the network. No matter what PARC employees' hobbies or interests were, he or she could find someone to share interests electronically. Many serious works were also completed electronically: reports, articles, and sometimes entire design projects were done through the network.

One side effect of all this electronic communication was the neglect of appearances and other external identities.

John Warnock said, "PARC people tended to have very strong personalities, and sometimes at design meetings, those personalities were stronger than the technical content." He joined PARC in 1978 from Evans & Sutherland, where he worked on high-speed graphics systems. Working through email eliminated personality issues during the design phase. Electronic interaction was particularly useful for software researchers, who could send code back and forth.

Warnock, now President of Adobe Systems in Palo Alto, described the design of Interpress, a printing protocol: "One designer was in Pittsburgh, one in Philadelphia, we had three in this area, and a couple in El Segundo, California. The design was almost entirely done remotely through the mail system; only twice did we all gather in the same room."

Email was also crucial for tracking team projects.

Warren Teitelman, who joined PARC from BBN in 1972, said, "One of the really useful capabilities was to save a series of information about a specific topic so you could refer back to it." He is currently the Programming Environment Manager at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View. Teitelman added, "Or if someone came in late and didn't understand the background, you could bring them up to speed by sending them all the information."

But email sometimes got out of control at PARC. Once, after a week without contact, Teitelman logged into the system to find 600 emails in his inbox.

Superpaint#

Anyone who has attended a business meeting knows that today's offices include graphics and text. In 1970, Shoup, now Chairman of Aurora Systems, began researching new ways to create and manipulate images digitally in the office of the future at PARC. His research pioneered the field of television graphics and earned him and Xerox an Emmy Award.

Shoup recalled, "It quickly became clear that if we wanted to do raster scanning systems, we should do it in a way compatible with television standards so we could easily obtain monitors, cameras, and video recorders." By early 1972, he built some simple hardware to generate anti-aliased lines, and by early 1973, the system named Superpaint was completed.

AIvy Ray Smith recalled that this was the world's first complete drawing system with an 8-bit frame buffer; he worked on Superpaint at PARC and would soon become Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Pixar in San Rafael, California. It was also the first system to use multiple graphic aids: a color lookup table for simple animations, a digitizing tablet for input, and a palette for mixing colors directly on the screen. The system also had a real-time video scanner, allowing images of real objects to be digitized and manipulated.

Shoup said, "The first thing I did on this system was some anti-aliased lines and circles because I wrote a paper on the subject but didn't finish those examples. But when I submitted the paper and it was accepted, the machine used to make the examples hadn't been built yet."

By mid-1974, additional software enhanced Superpaint, allowing it to perform a variety of tricks. Smith had just completed his doctoral work in a mathematical branch called cellular automata theory and was hired to help test the machine. He created a tape called "Vidbits" with Superpaint, which was later exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Six months later, his initial contract with PARC expired, and it was not renewed. Although Smith was disappointed, he was not surprised, as he found that not everyone enjoyed drawing with computers.

"The color graphics lab was a long, narrow room with seven doors leading into it," he recalled. "You had to go through it to get to many other places. Most people would walk by, look at the screen, and stop—even the most clichéd things they had never seen before. Bicycle color maps had never been seen before. But some people would walk by without stopping. I couldn't imagine how people could walk through that room without stopping to take a look."

Aside from others' indifference to video images, another reason for Smith's departure might have been the public television show where many viewers saw Superpaint for the first time, a program called "Supervisions" produced by Los Angeles KCET. "It only took a few uses to produce very few color cycling effects," Shoup recalled. However, Xerox was not pleased with the unauthorized use of the system on the show. "Bob Taylor sat with Alvy [Smith] for an entire afternoon, and Alvy pressed the erase button on the recorder, removing Xerox's logo from every copy of the tape," Shoup continued. (This was one of the tapes the committee saw when awarding Xerox the Emmy.)

Shoup stayed at PARC, supported by Kay's research group, while Smith moved on to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to work on computer art. He received support from the New York Institute of Technology, where he helped develop Paint, which became the basis for Ampex Video Art (AVA) and N.Y. Tech’s Images, which is still in use today.

While Shoup was working on Superpaint alone at PARC, he was not the only Superpaint enthusiast nationwide searching for frame buffers. David Miller, now known as David Em, and David DiFrancesco were among the first artists to use pixel painting. When Em lost access to Superpaint, he began a year-long quest for frame buffers, eventually entering the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Finally, in 1979, Shoup left PARC to start his own company to manufacture and sell paint systems—Aurora 100. He admitted that he did not achieve any technical leaps in designing Aurora; it was merely a second-generation version of his first-generation system at PARC.

Shoup said, "The Aurora-based machines we manufactured for the next generation were directly related to what we were thinking about seven or eight years ago at PARC."

Aurora 100 is now used by companies for internal training films and presentation graphics. Today, thousands of artists are using pixel painting. At the 1985 Siggraph art exhibition in San Francisco alone, 4,000 entries were received.

Mouse and Modes#

Most people who know that the mouse is a computer peripheral believe it was invented by Apple. Experts would correct them, saying it was developed at Xerox PARC.

But in reality, the mouse appeared before PARC. "I saw a demonstration of the mouse being used as a pointing device in 1966," Tesler recalled. "Doug Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute invented it."

At PARC, Tesler began to prove that the mouse was a bad idea. "I really didn't believe in it," he said. "I thought the cursor keys were better."

"We tested some people who had never seen a computer. Within three or four minutes, they happily edited using the cursor keys. At that point, I was ready to show them the mouse and prove that they could select text faster with the mouse than with the cursor keys. Then I would prove they didn't like it."

"Contrary to my expectations. I would let them spend an hour using the cursor keys, which made them really accustomed to those keys. Then I would teach them how to use the mouse. They would say, 'This is fun, but I don't think I need it.' Then they would play with the mouse for a while, and two minutes later, they would never touch the cursor keys again."

After Tesler's experiments, most PARC researchers accepted the mouse as an appropriate peripheral for the Alto. One person who disliked the mouse was Thornburg.

"I didn't like the mouse," he said. "It was the least reliable component of the Alto. I remember going to the PARC repair room—there was a shoebox for good mice and a 50-gallon drum for bad mice. And this thing was expensive—too expensive for the mass market."

"While I didn't mind using the mouse for text manipulation, I thought it was completely unsuitable for drawing. In the Stone Age, people stopped painting with stones for a reason: stones are not suitable painting tools; people turned to using sticks."

Thornburg, a metallurgist who had been working on materials research at PARC, began to explore alternative pointing devices. In 1977, he invented a touch tablet and connected it to an Alto. Most people who saw it said, "This is nice, but it's not a mouse," Thornburg recalled. His touch tablet eventually became a product: the Koalapad, a home computer peripheral priced under $100.

"It was clear that Xerox didn't want to do anything with it," Thornburg said. "They didn't even apply for patent protection, so I told them I liked it. After a lot of selling, they said OK."

Thornburg left Xerox in 1981, worked at Atari for a while, and then co-founded a company with another former PARC employee—now Koala Technologies—to manufacture and sell the Koalapad.

Meanwhile, although Tesler accepted the mouse as a pointing device, he was not satisfied with how SRI's mouse worked. "The left hand had a five-key keypad, and the right hand had a three-button mouse. You would tap one or two keys with your left hand, then point to something with your right hand using the mouse, and then there were more buttons on the mouse to confirm your commands. A command required six to eight keystrokes, but you could have both hands operating simultaneously. Experts could complete tasks very quickly."

The SRI system's mode was very complex. In a modal system, the user first indicates what they want to do—for example, a delete operation. This would put the system into delete mode. Then the computer waits for the user to indicate what they want to delete. If the user changes their mind and tries to do something else, they can't unless they first cancel the delete command.

In a non-modal system, the user first points to the part of the display they want to change and then indicates what should be done to it. They can point at things all day, constantly changing their minds, and never need to execute a command.

To complicate matters for the average user (but more efficiently for programmers), the meaning of each key varied depending on the mode the system was in. For example, "J" meant scroll, and "I" meant insert. If the user tried to "insert" and then "scroll" without canceling the first command, they would end up inserting the letter "J" into the text.

Most PARC programmers liked the SRI system and began to adapt it in their projects. "Many people thought it was the perfect user interface," Tesler said. "Whenever someone suggested changing it, they were met with hostile stares." As programmers, they had no objection to the fact that the keyboard responded to combinations of keys pressed simultaneously, which were represented in binary symbols for the alphabet.

Tesler began testing the interface with non-programmers. He taught a newly hired secretary how to operate the machine and observed her learning process. "Clearly, no one had ever done this before," he said. "She had a lot of trouble with the mouse and keys."

Tesler advocated for a simpler user interface. "The only person who agreed with me was Alan Kay," he said. Kay supported Tesler's attempt to write a non-modal text editor on the Alto.

Although most popular computers today use non-modal software, with the Macintosh being perhaps the best example, Tesler's experiments did not resolve the issue.

"MacWrite, Microsoft Word, and Xerox Star all started as projects with complex modes," Tesler said, "because programmers didn't believe a user interface could be flexible, useful, and extensible unless it had many modes. It turned out that this was not achieved through persuasion; customers complained that they preferred extremely simple non-modal editors, with no better functionality than this editor, because this editor had all the features they couldn't think of how to use."

Kids and Us#

Similarly, simplified non-modal editors also applied to PARC's programming languages and environments. In search of a language that children could use, Kay could often be seen testing his work among kindergarten and elementary school students.

Kay's goal was the Dynabook: a simple, portable personal computer that could meet a person's information needs and provide a channel for creativity—writing, drawing, and music composition. Smalltalk was the language of the Dynabook. It was based on the concept of classes advocated in the programming language Simula and the idea of interactive objects that communicate by sending messages requesting actions rather than directly manipulating data.

The first version of Smalltalk resulted from a chance conversation between Kay, Ingalls, and another PARC researcher, Ted Kaehler. Ingalls and Kaehler were considering writing a language when Kay said, "You can write one on a page."

He explained, "If you look at the Lisp interpreter itself, the core of these things is very small. The core of Smalltalk might even be smaller than Lisp."

Kay recalled that the problem with this approach was that "Smalltalk is doubly recursive: before you do anything with parameters, you are already using functions." In the first version of the language, Smalltalk-72, controls were passed to objects as quickly as possible. Thus, writing a concise Smalltalk definition in Smalltalk was very difficult.

"Writing ten lines of code took about two weeks," Kay said, "and it was hard to tell if those ten lines of code were valid." Kay spent two weeks thinking from 4:00 AM to 8:00 AM each day and then discussing his ideas with Ingalls. When Kay finished, Ingalls wrote the first Smalltalk in Basic on the Nova 800, as that was the only available language with good debugging capabilities at the time.

Because the language was very simple, the speed of developing programs and even entire systems was quite fast. Kay said, "Smalltalk was so large that you could go out for a beer or two and come back, and two people would inspire each other to complete a complete system in an afternoon." From one afternoon's development, overlapping windows emerged.

The concept of windows originated from Sketchpad, an interactive graphics program developed by Ivan Sutherland at MIT in the early 1960s; Evans & Sutherland implemented multiple windows on a graphics machine in the mid-1960s. However, PARC's Diana Merry implemented the first multiple overlapping windows on the Alto in 1973.

"We all thought the Alto display was very small," Kay said, "and it was clear that without a large display, you had to have overlapping windows."

After windows came the concept of Bitblt—transferring blocks of data from one part of memory to another without restrictions on alignment to word boundaries. Thacker, the main designer of the Alto, implemented a function called CharacterOp to write characters to the Alto's bitmap screen, and Ingalls extended that function to make it a general graphics tool. Bitblt simplified overlapping windows and made various graphics and animation techniques possible.

Ingalls recalled, "In early 1975, I gave a demonstration of all PARC's Smalltalk systems, using Bitblt to create menus and overlapping windows and things. Later, a group of people found me and said, 'How did you do that? Can I get the Bitblt code?' Within two months, those things were in use throughout PARC."

Despite its flashiness and impressiveness, Smalltalk-72 "was a dead end," Tesler said, "it was ambiguous. You could read a piece of code and not distinguish which were nouns and which were verbs. You couldn't complete things quickly, and you couldn't compile."

The first compiled version of Smalltalk, written in 1976, marked the end of the emphasis on a language that children could use. Ingalls said the language was now "a mature programming environment, and we were interested in outputting it and making it widely known."

The next major version of Smalltalk was Smalltalk-80. Kay no longer argued that any language should be simple enough for children to use. Tesler said Smalltalk-80 went too far in the opposite direction from the earliest versions of Smalltalk: "It became so extreme in being editable, unified, and readable that it actually became difficult to read, and you certainly wouldn't want to teach children that."

Kay looked at Smalltalk-80 and said, "It is very bad that it cannot be used by children because that was the goal of Smalltalk. It reverted to data-structured programming rather than simulation-based programming."

While Kay's group was developing a language for children of all ages, a group of artificial intelligence researchers at PARC was improving Lisp. Lisp was brought to PARC by Warren Teitelman and Daniel G. Bobrow, who came from Bolt, Beranek, & Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Lisp was developed as a service for the ARPA community. At PARC, it was renamed Interlisp, adding a window system called VLISP and developing a powerful set of tools for programmers.

In PARC's Computer Science Laboratory, researchers were developing a powerful system programming language. After several iterations, the language became Mesa—a modular language that allowed multiple programmers to work on a large project simultaneously. The key was the concept of interfaces—what a module in a program does, not how it works. Each programmer knew what other modules were authorized to do and could call them to perform specific functions.

Another major feature was Mesa's powerful type-checking capabilities, which prevented programmers from using integer variables where real numbers were needed or using real numbers where strings were needed—and prevented bugs from propagating from one module of a program to another.

These concepts later became widely used as the foundation for modular programming languages. "Many ideas from PARC's programming language research influenced Ada [the U.S. Department of Defense's standard programming language] and Modula-2," said Chuck Geschke, now Executive Vice President at Adobe Systems. In fact, Modula-2 was written by computer scientist Niklaus Wirth after a sabbatical at PARC.

No One is Perfect#

Although the successes of PARC's research may have exceeded its achievements, like any organization, it could not escape some failures. The example most often cited by former PARC researchers is Polos.

Polos was an alternative approach to distributed computing. While Thacker and McCreight were designing the Alto, another team at PARC was working on Data General Novas in groups of 12, trying to distribute functions among machines so that one machine could handle editing, another could handle input and output, and another could handle file archiving.

Sutherland said, "With Altos, everything everyone needed was on each machine. Polos tried to achieve this differently—by functionally partitioning."

When Polos began working, the Alto computer was being promoted throughout PARC, so Polos was shut down. However, it had a second life: Sutherland distributed 12 Novas in other departments at Xerox, which became the first remote gateways on the PARC Alto network, and Polos displays were used as terminals at PARC until they were retired in 1977.

Another significant PARC failure project was the optical character reader and fax machine combination. The idea was to develop a system that could print pages mixing text and graphics, recognize the text itself, and transmit characters in ASCII code, then send the rest of the content using less efficient fax encoding methods.

Charles Simonyi, an application development manager at Microsoft, said, "This was very complex, quite crazy. In this project, they had this incredible hardware, equivalent to a 10,000-line Fortran program." Unfortunately, at the time, that meant thousands of independent integrated circuits.

Conway, who worked on the OCR project, said, "While we made substantial progress in algorithms and architecture, it was clear that the circuit technology of the time was not economically viable." The project was canceled in 1975.

Turning Point#

Essentially, PARC researchers worked in an ivory tower for the first five years; while projects were still in their infancy, there was almost no time to do anything else. However, by 1976, with an Alto on every desk and email being a way of life at the center, researchers were eager to see their work used by friends and neighbors.

Kay recalled that at that time, PARC and other departments at Xerox were using about 200 Altos; PARC suggested that Xerox launch a production version of the Alto: Alto III.

"On August 18, 1976, Xerox rejected Alto III."

As a result, researchers did not hand over their projects to the manufacturing department but continued to work with the Alto.

"This is why we failed," Kay said. "We didn't throw away the Altos. Xerox management had long been told that PARC's Altos would be like Kleenex, gone in three years, and we needed a new set that was ten times faster. But when that decisive moment came, there was no capital."

"We held a meeting at Pajaro Dunes in California called 'Let's burn our disk packs.' We could feel that the second derivative of progress was negative for us," Kay said. "I really should have thrown away everyone's disks."

PARC employees did not start entirely new research directions but focused on bringing the results of their past research projects to market as products.

Every few years, Xerox would gather all its managers from around the world to discuss the company's direction. At a meeting in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1977, PARC researchers showcased the systems they had built.

The PARC staff assigned to the Boca Raton demonstration poured their hearts, souls, and a lot of Xerox's money into the work. They designed and built the set, rehearsed in a Hollywood studio, and transported Altos and Dovers back and forth between Hollywood and Palo Alto. Holding the exhibition in the auditorium in Boca Raton took a full day, and a special air-conditioned truck had to be rented from the local airport to keep the machines cool. However, for most Xerox employees, it was their first encounter with PARC's "eggheads."

"PARC was a very strange place for the rest of the company," Shoup said. "Not just California, but nerdy. Considered to be strange computer people, with beards, not bathing or wearing shoes, staring at their terminals for long hours at night, having no relations with anyone else, basically antisocial nerds. Frankly, some of us left that impression, as if we were above the rest of the company."

It was somewhat difficult to get other members of Xerox to take PARC researchers and their work seriously.

"The demonstration went very well, the battle was won, but the patient died," Goldman said. Xerox executives not only saw the Alto, Ethernet, and laser printer, but they even showcased a Japanese word processor. "But the company couldn't bring them to market!" Goldman said. (By 1983, the company did launch a Japanese version of the Star computer.)

One reason Xerox struggled to bring PARC's advances to market was that until 1976, no R&D organization had taken research prototypes from PARC and turned them into products.

"At first, the way technology transfer worked was not clear," Teitelman said. "We took a detached view, thinking someone would pick up these technologies. It wasn't until later that this issue received real attention."

Reaching Again#

Even for R&D organizations, getting Xerox executives to accept products was a hard battle. One example is the Notetaker computer, conceived by Adele Goldberg, a researcher from the Smalltalk group, who is now President of the Association for Computing Machinery and still works at PARC. "Poor Adele," Tesler said. "The rest of us got involved and kept redefining the project."

Notetaker ultimately became a battery-powered, 8086-based computer that could fit under an airplane seat. It ran Smalltalk and had a touchscreen designed by Thornburg. "We had a custom display, we had error-correcting memory, and we typically did a lot of custom engineering for real products," said Fairbairn, the chief hardware designer of Notetaker.

"In my last year at PARC," Tesler said, "I flew around the country with Notetaker, talking to Xerox executives. It was the first portable computer that ran at the airport. Xerox executives made all sorts of promises: we will buy 20,000 units, just talk to this executive in Virginia, and then talk to this executive in Connecticut. The company was so decentralized that they never met together. A year later, I was ready to give up."

Xerox may not have been ready for portable computers, but other companies were. The Osborne I was launched in 1981, about nine months after Adam Osborne reportedly visited PARC, where Notetaker was prominently showcased.