The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 78

Xerox sent Alto systems to research centers around the country, spreading the innovations dreamed up by PARC engineers. There was even a precursor to the Internet Protocols, the PARC Universal Packet, that allowed different packet-switched networks to interconnect. “Most of the tech that makes the Internet possible was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s,” Taylor later claimed.⁷¹

As things turned out, however, although Xerox PARC pointed the way to the land of personal computers—devices you could call your own—the Xerox Corporation did not lead the migration. It made two thousand Altos, mainly for use in Xerox offices or affiliated institutions, but it didn’t market the Alto as a consumer product.^II “The company wasn’t equipped to handle an innovation,” Kay recalled. “It would have meant completely new packaging, all new manuals, handling updates, training staff, localizing to different countries.”⁷²

Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, “The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”⁷³

At a lavish Xerox corporate conference in Boca Raton, Florida (where Henry Kissinger was the paid keynote speaker), the Alto system was put on display. In the morning there was an onstage demo that echoed Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and in the afternoon thirty Altos were set up in a showroom for everyone to use. The executives, all of whom were male, showed little interest, but their wives immediately started testing the mouse and typing away. “The men thought it was beneath them to know how to type,” said Taylor, who had not been invited to the conference but showed up anyway. “It was something secretaries did. So they didn’t take the Alto seriously, thinking that only women would like it. That was my revelation that Xerox would never get the personal computer.”⁷⁴

Instead, more entrepreneurial and nimble innovators would be the first to foray into the personal computer market. Some would eventually license or steal ideas from Xerox PARC. But at first the earliest personal computers were homebrewed concoctions that only a hobbyist could love.

THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS

Among the tribes of the Bay Area in the years leading up to the birth of the personal computer was a cohort of community organizers and peace activists who learned to love computers as tools for bringing power to the people. They embraced small-scale technologies, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and many of the tools-for-living values of the Whole Earth crowd, without being enthralled by psychedelics or repeated exposures to the Grateful Dead.

Fred Moore was an example. The son of an Army colonel stationed at the Pentagon, he had gone west to study engineering at Berkeley in 1959. Even though the U.S. military buildup in Vietnam had not begun, Moore decided to become an antiwar protestor. He camped out on the steps of Sproul Plaza, soon to become the epicenter of student demonstrations, with a sign denouncing ROTC. His protest lasted only two days (his father came to take him home), but he reenrolled at Berkeley in 1962 and resumed his rebellious ways. He served two years in jail as a draft resister and then, in 1968, moved to Palo Alto, driving down in a Volkswagen van with a baby daughter whose mother had drifted away.⁷⁵

Moore planned to become an antiwar organizer there, but he discovered the computers at the Stanford Medical Center and became hooked. Since nobody ever asked him to leave, he spent his days hacking around on the computers while his daughter wandered the halls or played in the Volkswagen. He acquired a faith in the power of computers to help people take control of their lives and form communities. If they could use computers as tools for personal empowerment and learning, he believed, ordinary folks could break free of the dominance of the military-industrial establishment. “Fred was a scrawny-bearded, intense-eyed radical pacifist,” recalled Lee Felsenstein, who was part of the community organizing and computer scene in Palo Alto. “At the drop of a hat he would scurry off to pour blood on a submarine. You couldn’t really shoo him away.”⁷⁶

Given his peacenik-tech passions, it is not surprising that Moore gravitated into the orbit of Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth crowd. Indeed, he ended up having a star turn at one of the weirdest events of the era: the 1971 demise party for the Whole Earth Catalog. Miraculously, the publication had ended its run with $20,000 in the bank, and Brand decided to rent the Palace of Fine Arts, an ersatz classical Greek structure in San Francisco’s Marina District, to celebrate with a thousand kindred spirits who would decide how to give away the money. He brought a stack of hundred-dollar bills, harboring a fantasy that the rock- and drug-crazed crowd would come to a judicious consensus on what to do with it. “How can we ask anyone else in the world to arrive at agreements if we can’t?” Brand asked the crowd.⁷⁷

The debate lasted ten hours. Wearing a monk’s black cassock with hood, Brand let each speaker hold the stack of money while addressing the crowd, and he wrote the suggestions on a blackboard. Paul Krassner, who had been a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, gave an impassioned talk about the plight of the American Indians—“We ripped off the Indians when we came here!”—and said the money should be given to them. Brand’s wife, Lois, who happened to be an Indian, came forward to declare that she and other Indians didn’t want it. A person named Michael Kay said they should just give it out to themselves and started handing out the bills to the crowd; Brand retorted that it would be better to use it all together and asked people to pass the bills back up to him, which some of them did, prompting applause. Dozens of other suggestions, ranging from wild to wacky, were made. Flush it down the toilet! Buy more nitrous oxide for the party! Build a gigantic plastic phallic symbol to stick into the earth! At one point a member of the band Golden Toad shouted, “Focus your fucking energy! You’ve got nine million suggestions! Pick one! This could go on for the next fucking year. I came here to play music.” This led to no decision but did prompt a musical interlude featuring a belly dancer who ended by falling to the floor and writhing.

At that point Fred Moore, with his scraggly beard and wavy hair, got up and gave his occupation as “human being.” He denounced the crowd for caring about money, and to make his point he took the two dollar bills he had in his pocket and burned them. There was some debate about taking a vote, which Moore also denounced because it was a method for dividing rather than uniting people. By then it was 3 a.m., and the dazed and confused crowd had become even more so. Moore urged them to share their names so that they could stay together as a network. “A union of people here tonight is more important than letting a sum of money divide us,” he declared.⁷⁸ Eventually he outlasted all but twenty or so diehards, and it was decided to give the money to him until a better idea came along.⁷⁹

Since he didn’t have a bank account, Moore buried the $14,905 that was left of the $20,000 in his backyard. Eventually, after much drama and unwelcome visits from supplicants, he distributed it as loans or grants to a handful of related organizations involved in providing computer access and education in the area. The recipients were part of the techno-hippie ecosystem that emerged in Palo Alto and Menlo Park around Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog crowd.

This included the catalogue’s publisher, the Portola Institute, an alternative nonprofit that promoted “computer education for all grade levels.” Its loose-knit learning program was run by Bob Albrecht, an engineer who had dropped out of corporate America to teach computer programming to kids and Greek folk dancing to Doug Engelbart and other adults. “While living in San Francisco at the top of the crookedest street, Lombard, I frequently ran computer programming, wine tasting, and Greek dancing parties,” he recalled.⁸⁰ He and his friends opened a public-access computer center, featuring a PDP-8, and he took some of his best young students on field trips, most memorably to visit Engelbart at his augmentation lab. One of the early editions of the Whole Earth Catalog featured on its end page a picture of Albrecht, sporting a porcupine brush cut, teaching some kids to use a calculator.