The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 77
Kay wrote a description of the Dynabook, titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” that was partly a product proposal but mostly a manifesto. He began by quoting Ada Lovelace’s seminal insight about how computers could be used for creative tasks: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” In describing how children (of all ages) would use a Dynabook, Kay showed he was in the camp of those who saw personal computers primarily as tools for individual creativity rather than as networked terminals for collaboration. “Although it can be used to communicate with others through the ‘knowledge utilities’ of the future such as a school ‘library,’?” he wrote, “we think that a large fraction of its use will involve reflexive communication of the owner with himself through this personal medium, much as paper and notebooks are currently used.”
The Dynabook, Kay continued, should be no larger than a notebook and weigh no more than four pounds. “The owner will be able to maintain and edit his own files of text and programs when and where he chooses. Need we add that it be usable in the woods?” In other words, it was not just a dumb terminal designed to be networked into a time-shared mainframe. However, he did envision a day when personal computers and digital networks would come together. “A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) to the home.”63 It was an enticing vision of the future, but one that would take another two decades to invent.
To advance his crusade for the Dynabook, Kay gathered around him a small team and crafted a mission that was romantic, aspirational, and vague. “I only hired people that got stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea,” Kay recalled. “A lot of daytime was spent outside of PARC, playing tennis, bike riding, drinking beer, eating Chinese food, and constantly talking about the Dynabook and its potential to amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.”64
In order to take the first step toward realizing the Dynabook, Kay proposed an “interim” machine. It would be about the size of a carry-on suitcase and would have a small graphical display screen. In May 1972 he made his pitch to Xerox PARC’s hardware bosses to build thirty so that they could be tested in classrooms to see if students could do simple programming tasks on them. “The uses for a personal gadget as an editor, reader, take-home context, and intelligent terminal are fairly obvious,” he told the engineers and managers sitting in beanbag chairs. “Now let’s build thirty of these things so we can get on with it.”
It was a romantic pitch confidently delivered, as tended to be the case with Kay, but it did not dazzle Jerry Elkind, the manager of PARC’s computer lab. “Jerry Elkind and Alan Kay were like creatures from different planets, one an austere by-the-numbers engineer and the other a brash philosophical freebooter,” according to Michael Hiltzik, who wrote a history of Xerox PARC. Elkind did not get stars in his eyes when imagining children programming toy turtles on Xerox machines. “Let me play devil’s advocate,” he responded. The other engineers perked up, sensing that a merciless evisceration was in the offing. PARC’s mandate was to create the office of the future, Elkind noted, so why should it be in the business of child’s play? The corporate environment lent itself to the time-sharing of corporate-run computers, so shouldn’t PARC continue to pursue those opportunities? After a rapid-fire series of such questions, Kay felt like crawling away. When it was over, he cried. His request that a set of interim Dynabooks be built was denied.65
Bill English, who had worked with Engelbart and built the first mouse, was by then at PARC. After the meeting he pulled Kay aside, consoled him, and offered some advice. He needed to stop being a dreamy loner and instead should prepare a well-crafted proposal with a budget. “What’s a budget?” Kay asked.66
Kay scaled back his dream and proposed an interim-interim plan. He would use $230,000 that he had in his budget to emulate the Dynabook on a Nova, a footlocker-size minicomputer made by Data General. But the prospect didn’t really thrill him.
That is when two stars from Bob Taylor’s group at PARC, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker, popped into Kay’s office with a different scheme.
“Do you have any money?” they asked.
“Yes, about $230K for Novas,” Kay replied. “Why?”
“How would you like us to build your little machine for you?” they asked, referring to the interim Dynabook that Elkind had shot down.
“I’d like it fine,” Kay allowed.67
Thacker wanted to build his own version of a personal computer, and he realized that Lampson and Kay also had the same general goal in mind. So the plot was to pool their resources and proceed without waiting for permission.
“What are you going to do about Jerry?” Kay asked about his nemesis Elkind.
“Jerry’s out of the office for a few months on a corporate task force,” said Lampson. “Maybe we can sneak it in before he gets back.”68
Bob Taylor had helped hatch the plan because he wanted to push his team away from building time-sharing computers and devise instead “an interconnected collection of small display-based machines.”69 He was thrilled to get three of his favorite engineers—Lampson, Thacker, and Kay—collaborating on the project. The team had a push-pull dynamic: Lampson and Thacker knew what was possible, while Kay set his sights on the ultimate dream machine and challenged them to achieve the impossible.
The machine they designed was named the Xerox Alto (although Kay stubbornly continued to refer to it as “the interim Dynabook”). It had a bitmapped display, which meant that each pixel on the screen could be turned on or off to help render a graphic, a letter, a paintbrush swipe, or whatever. “We chose to provide a full bitmap, in which each screen pixel was represented by a bit of main storage,” Thacker explained. That put a lot of demands on the memory, but the guiding principle was that Moore’s Law would continue to rule and that memory would get cheaper in an exponential way. The user’s interaction with the display was controlled by a keyboard and mouse, as Engelbart had designed. When it was completed in March 1973, it featured a graphic, painted by Kay, of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster holding the letter “C.”
Alan Kay (1940– ) at Xerox PARC in 1974.
Kay’s 1972 sketch for a Dynabook.
Lee Felsenstein (1945– ).
The first issue, October 1972.
By keeping children (of all ages) in mind, Kay and his colleagues advanced Engelbart’s concepts by showing that they could be implemented in a manner that was simple, friendly, and intuitive to use. Engelbart, however, did not buy into their vision. Instead he was dedicated to cramming as many functions as possible into his oNLine System, and thus he never had a desire to make a computer that was small and personal. “That’s a totally different trip from where I’m going,” he told colleagues. “If we cram ourselves in those little spaces, we’d have to give up a whole bunch.”70 That is why Engelbart, even though he was a prescient theorist, was not truly a successful innovator: he kept adding functions and instructions and buttons and complexities to his system. Kay made things easier, and in so doing showed why the ideal of simplicity—making products that humans find convivial and easy to use—was central to the innovations that made computers personal.