The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 76

McCarthy foresaw that this could lead to a proliferation of new information sources that would compete with traditional media, though he mistakenly thought that these would be supported by customer payments rather than advertising. “Since the cost of keeping a file of information in the computer and making it publicly available will be small, even a high school student could compete with the New Yorker if he could write well enough and if word of mouth and mention by reviewers brought him to public attention.” He also predicted crowdsourced content: a user would be able to “tell the system whether last year’s cure for baldness worked and get a summary of the opinions of those who bothered to record their opinions of the cure he contemplates trying now.” McCarthy had a rosy view of what turned out to be a raucous blogosphere: “Public controversy can be carried out more expeditiously than at present. If I read something that seems controversial, I can ask the system if anyone has filed a reply. This, together with an author’s ability to revise his original statement, will lead people to converge on considered positions more quickly.”

McCarthy’s vision was prescient, but it differed in one major way from Kay’s vision, and from the networked world that we have today. It was not based on personal computers with their own memory and processing power. Instead McCarthy believed that people would have inexpensive, dumb terminals that would be connected to powerful distant computers. Even after hobbyist clubs began springing up to celebrate personal computers, McCarthy was pushing a plan for a “Home Terminal Club” that would lease to people for $75 a month simple Teletype-like terminals that would allow them to time-share on a distant powerful mainframe.⁵⁴

Kay’s contrasting vision was that powerful small computers, complete with their own memory and processing power, would become personal tools for individual creativity. He dreamed of kids wandering into the woods and using them under trees, just as they might use crayons and a pad of paper. So after two years of toiling among the time-sharing evangelists at SAIL, Kay accepted an offer in 1971 to join a corporate research center two miles away that was attracting young innovators who wanted to make computers that were personal, friendly, and geared to individuals. McCarthy would later dismiss these goals as “Xerox heresies,”⁵⁵ but they ended up setting the course for the era of personal computers.

XEROX PARC

In 1970 the Xerox Corporation followed in the footsteps of the Bell System by launching a lab dedicated to pure research. In order that it not be contaminated by the mind-set of the corporation’s bureaucracy or the day-to-day demands of its business, it was located in the Stanford industrial park, some three thousand miles from the company’s Rochester, New York, headquarters.⁵⁶

Among those recruited to lead Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, was Bob Taylor, who had recently left ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office after helping to build the ARPANET. Through his visits to ARPA-funded research centers and the conferences he hosted for the brightest graduate students, he had developed a radar for talent. “Taylor had worked with and funded many of the leading computer science research groups during this period,” recalled Chuck Thacker, who was one of Taylor’s recruits. “As a result, he was in a unique position to attract a staff of the highest quality.”⁵⁷

Taylor had another leadership skill that he had refined at his meetings with ARPA researchers and graduate students: he was able to provoke “creative abrasion,” in which a team of people can question each other, even try to eviscerate each other’s ideas, but then are expected to articulate the other side of the dispute. Taylor did that at what he called “Dealer” meetings (evoking people trying to beat the dealer at blackjack), in which one person had to present an idea while others engaged in constructive (usually) criticism. Taylor was not a technology wizard himself, but he knew how to get a group of them to sharpen their sabers in friendly duels.⁵⁸ His flair for playing a master of ceremonies allowed him to prod, cajole, stroke, and jolly up temperamental geniuses and get them to collaborate. He was much better at tending to the egos of people who worked under him than catering to his bosses, but that was part of his charm—especially if you weren’t one of his bosses.

Among Taylor’s first recruits was Alan Kay, whom he knew from ARPA conferences. “I met Alan when he was a doctoral student at Utah, and I liked him a lot,” Taylor said.⁵⁹ He didn’t, however, hire Kay for his own lab at PARC but instead recommended him to another group there. It was Taylor’s way of seeding the whole place with people who impressed him.

When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great achievement there would be. “A personal computer,” he answered. Asked what that was, he picked up a notebook-size portfolio, flipped open its cover, and said, “This will be a flat-panel display. There’ll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That’s what I’m talking about.” His interviewer scratched his head and muttered to himself, “Yeah, right.” But Kay got the job.

With his twinkling eyes and lively mustache, Kay came to be seen as a disruptor, which he was. He took impish pleasure in pushing the executives of a copier company to create a small and friendly computer for kids. Xerox’s corporate planning director, Don Pendery, a dour New Englander, embodied what the Harvard professor Clay Christensen has labeled the innovator’s dilemma: he saw the future filled with shadowy creatures that threatened to gnaw away at Xerox’s copier business. He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of “trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”⁶⁰

For his 1972 Rolling Stone piece on the emerging tech culture in Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand visited Xerox PARC, causing agita back east at corporate headquarters when the article appeared. With literary gusto, he described how PARC’s research had moved “away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.” Among the people he interviewed was Kay, who said, “The people here are used to dealing lightning with both hands.” Because of people like Kay, PARC had a playful sensibility that was derivative of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. “It’s a place where you can still be an artisan,” he told Brand.⁶¹

Kay realized that he needed a catchy name for the little personal computer he wanted to build, so he began calling it the Dynabook. He also came up with a cute name for its operating system software: Smalltalk. The name was meant to be unintimidating to users and not raise expectations among hard-core engineers. “I figured that Smalltalk was so innocuous a label that if it ever did anything nice, people would be pleasantly surprised,” Kay noted.

He was determined that his proposed Dynabook would cost less than $500 “so that we could give it away in schools.” It also had to be small and personal, so that “a kid could take it wherever he goes to hide,” with a programming language that was user-friendly. “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible,” he declared.⁶²