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Dealers Of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik

Sunday, 16 May 2004

It's a fairly well known fact within the computer industry that many of the facets of modern computing that we take for granted were first invented not by Microsoft, Apple, or IBM, but by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the 1970s. I'm talking about inventions such as the laser printer and Ethernet networking, as well as the graphical user interface—including the desktop metaphor—and object-oriented programming. With such an impressive track record you'd think there would be a shelf-full of books about Xerox PARC, but oddly, the story has never been comprehensively told in print. I've had a personal fascination with PARC and what went on there ever since I first found out about it.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Hiltzik attempts to address this shortcoming with Dealers of Lightning, a thick tome weighing in at 448 pages. The book is split into three parts and each chapter is primarily about the people who made it happen and their backgrounds, as well as their recollections of being at PARC. Helpfully there is a cast of characters at the front and at times I found myself flicking back to it on a regular basis.

If you're looking for a hardcore account of the technology created at PARC, then this isn't it. Having said that, the genesis of all the revolutions that PARC is justly famous for are covered. This book also contains probably the only definitive account of Steve Jobs' legendary visit (actually two) to PARC, pieced together from the differing and sometimes conflicting recollections of those who were there.

Probably the most interesting character that I learnt about by reading this book was PARC's associate manager Bob Taylor. He inspired fierce loyalty amongst the members of the Computer Science Laboratory he championed, and fierce resentment amongst those who worked in PARC's other two labs, which Taylor viewed as competitors for funding and as sideshows. His conviction that a networked personal computer with a bitmapped display was the direction to head in, led to the creation of the Alto in 1973. It's fascinating reading about how the powerhouses of PARC—for example, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker—created the Alto in a bygone era when one brilliant man could single-handedly design a brand new CPU. The Alto didn't have much software for a while until Charles Simonyi wrote Bravo, the world's first WYSIWYG word processor, a feat he would repeat later to create Microsoft Word.

The story that really comes out of this book for me is of the tension between the free thinkers of PARC and of the rest of Xerox, who in spite of being blown away by what they saw at the PARC-organised “Futures Day”, just couldn't successfully commercialise PARC's creations in a timely fashion and on a large scale. A lot of the internecine feuding between the key players is revealed, and you can feel the future slipping away from Xerox as the chapters come and go. Things all come to a head at the end and there are casualties.

Hiltzik doesn't really single out individuals for blame, but each person's contributions to the ultimate failure are documented and the final impression is of a decaying organisation struggling to pull in one direction. It's rather sad reading, particularly as many of the Xerox executives were enlightened forward-thinkers who created a unique research establishment, the likes of which has never been seen before or after. The epilogue sees the author attempting to assess whether Xerox could have done better; at the moment I'm ambivilant about the conclusions he draws. I did find it interesting when he mentioned five PARC alumni who are now at Microsoft Research, although Charles Simonyi has sunsequently left since the book was published in 2000.

Although I enjoyed reading Dealers of Lightning, its biggest shortcoming for me is the fact that they're aren't any photographs! Of course there is some archive material of PARC available online but the author must have had the opportunity to unearth previously unseen photographs whilst he was conducting the extensive interviews for the book. In spite of this it's the best account we've got of a truly fascinating time, place and group of people. 4/5.

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