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Alan Kay on re-creating Xerox PARC's design magic at CDG
- mathgenius 11y ago"Kay has also tried to help companies re-bottle the lightning that crackled within Xerox PARC during his tenure there." I worked for a while in one of these companies. It was really nice having Alan Kay around, and some of the other geniuses he was working with at the time. But, there was also massive amounts of money at stake, and far too much heavy shit going down on a daily basis for any of the more weird guys (like me) to get very far. Although, i did make a ton of money for that company (me and one of the other weirdos), when it came time for the rest of the developers to join in it was like "what the fk is this ?" haha. good times.
- calibraxis 11y agoInteresting, what does this mean: "far too much heavy shit going down on a daily basis for any of the more weird guys (like me) to get very far"?
- Jare 11y agoSounds like copious amounts of MBAs were involved.
- marincounty 11y agoI can usually spot a company that has too many MBAs. I once heard a teacher say, "There's nothing more useless to an organization than an MBA! Oops, I didn't mean that they way it came out." This was a business school teacher. I don't believe that, but today, with so many of us knowing the tricks, and what not they teach in these programs; if I owned a company, my MBA count would be low. The accounting/statistics aspect of these programs is fine, but the cheap sales/staff ploys that these programs teach are just irritating, and very noticeable.
- protomyth 11y agoI have always wondered if a TV/Movie director or producer would make a better manager for a software team than an MBA.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoPeople like Catmull of Pixar have tried to write books about this. Managing creative people - which may include some software people - is not the same as managing a pool of lawyers or accountants. Software has a problem because too many managers think all software people are interchangeable development units. In reality there's a universe of psychological difference between corporate biz-logic devs and the kind of creative lunatics who used to work at PARC - and all shadings between the extremes. Put good people in the wrong environment and they'll be worse than useless. Same for all the other many possible dimensions.
- hga 11y agoSoftware has a problem because too many managers think all software people are interchangeable development units. I've observed that a lot of bad software development managers were previously failed software developers. Perhaps one reason they view us as interchangeable is because developers of that level of quality are indeed interchangeable? Related to my observation that offshoring can make sense if you note that most corporate development projects fail (not much less than half outright, more than half when you add the "declare victory" messes), and that offshoring is a cheaper way to fail.
- api 11y agoAbsolutely. Anyone who can ship real things would be superior. The MBA is basically capitalism's answer to the Soviet "party apparatchik."
- mathgenius 11y agoHeavy shit: serious faces, quiet but stern money making, regular momentous meetings in small rooms with closed doors. Weird guys: hairy, randomly communicative, oddly passionate.
- jacobolus 11y agoThe linked Bloomberg article has a hilarious quotation at the bottom: > Exploring odd things isn’t likely to help SAP attract more cloud customers in the short term, says Bill Hostmann, an analyst at researcher Gartner. “What SAP really needs is more execution,” he says. “A lot of people took inspiration from PARC. Did Xerox directly benefit from that? Not really.” Bill Hostmann has no clue. Xerox got the laser printer out of PARC, which ended up as a multibillion dollar business for them.
- davelnewton 11y agoFor awhile. Xerox didn't realize the potential of what they had--it took time to realize their vision, by which time it was too late for Xerox. They failed to capitalize on their entire portfolio.
- rayiner 11y agoThe bigger problem for Xerox was that in 1975, about five years after establishing PARC, the DOJ forced them to license their entire patent portfolio to Japanese competitors. That dramatically changed the dynamic at Xerox, which had been able to think big ideas while riding its copier monopoly. Xerox, AT&T, and to a lesser extent Google are strong examples of competitive markets being bad for innovation. Bell Labs didn't survive the AT&T breakup in the same form, and I doubt Google would be able to screw around with self-driving cars and wearable computing if they didn't have network effects protecting them from competition.
- api 11y agoPeter Thiel likes to make this contrarian point: competition forces you into a deflationary downward spiral where you must spend all your energy fighting with and therefore duplicating your competitors. An example of the latter would be Google Plus, which was an attempt to compete with Facebook by badly imitating them. Government is the ultimate monopoly, and government research can spend time trying to send people to space, look back to the origins of the universe, and so on.
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- hyperion2010 11y agoPoint 2 uses the exact phrase I have use to describe my experience of visiting Valve : "Artist colony." Take smart creative people who often don't fit well elsewhere and let them go.
- pjmlp 11y agoXerox PARC systems were great and it is a pity that the mainstream didn't adopt them as such, only a few pieces. Every time I dig into their archives I come out marvelled with how programming might have felt in those Workstations. Memory safe programming languages for the whole stack (+ Assembly of course), automatic memory management, OS wide REPL, visual debuggers, code correction, modular systems... Specially since Smalltalk and Oberon (Native and BlueBottle) allowed me to have a glimpse of it.
- erikpukinskis 11y agoYep. The standard we accept for what constitutes a "workable" development environment has essentially trended towards "what is the crappiest workflow that can be tolerated by a professional programmer working 40 hours per week on it". There's no real incentive to market programming tools that have a higher standard for usability, because there's no ecosystem of sensible "there is consensus that this should be a a thing and this is a sane way to do it" programming tools, so you can't work at that level anyway. Someday there will be a market again for sane development environments but right now everyone just powers through the learning process until they get to the level of "my mind is warped enough that I can comprehend a build file this evil" level because that's where the money is at anyway. It's a chicken and egg problem. No ecosystem no market. It's just an accident of history that such a thing ever existed in the first place. A waypoint on the way to the era of industrial mindfuck programming.
- praptak 11y agoThis is a thing that happened once. What if it just cannot be recreated?
- david927 11y agoIt created trillions in value. Why not try?
- _yosefk 11y agoCreated for whom, and... did it, really, all by itself? I think it's kinda overblown, to put it mildly.
- david927 11y agoWell, this is the problem with our industry. Any physicist will know who Niels Bohr was and what he did. Not our industry. Computer Science has become a field for twenty-year-old's whose memories span months, or ego-driven Sheldon Cooper's who can't be bothered to credit anyone for anything. Frankly, I'm embarrassed to work in this industry.
- _yosefk 11y agoYeah, Alan Kay says things to that effect, too. Another way to look at it is, assigning all the credit for those "trillions in value" to Xerox PARC (my oh my, creating so much value and capturing so little? how did that happen?) is a warped way to look at the history of computing and thus is the perfect example of the problem that makes you "embarrassed to work in this industry." As to Niels Bohr... I think the transistor or the concept of decidability are more like what physicists do/achieve than OO or WIMP interfaces. One can disagree with that but one can also agree with that, I think, even if their age is above 20, their memory spans whole years etc. etc.
- effie 11y agoActually, not every physicist knows what Niels Bohr did. I know a very smart and hardworking physicist who did some complicated math on details of particular renormalization procedure in quantum field theory but could not explain how Bohr's model of hydrogen works. As to the Computer Science detriment, aren't you confusing computer science with a programming job? Do you really mean that the science is done by 21 year old people with no long term memory? I find that hard to believe.
- rumcajz 11y agoQuestion: Why don't we see this rate of invention in open source community? It is already (apart of it corporation-sponsored part) an artistic community, people work on stuff they like, there's no business pressure and so on.
- pjmlp 11y agoBecause the majority of the open source community are either people building up their CVs or working on side projects. Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money. Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Also a reason (among many others) why the market didn't adopt their technologies.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago> Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money. Rather, I'd say it needs people working full time. With things like basic income, this can be decorrelated from "money" a good deal.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoThe researchers at PARC needed lots of money. For example, they built the Alto. They then used the Alto as a tool to design lots of other great things. A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto
- rjsw 11y agoBuilding an Alto then required lots of money, you can prototype fairly complicated things now on a cheap FPGA.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoYes. Of course. But, to quote Wayne Gretzky: I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. You can build today's complicated things cheaply. But if you really want to achieve a quantum leap you need to think 10 years out. It is not cheap to build today the prototypes of things that will be desirable in 10 years. That is what Xerox PARC was doing. It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software. Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity. Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.
- tluyben2 11y agoI had this experience in my own company for a very very brief time when we had enough money for it. We were (trying) doing innovation in the our R&D dep first but after that I tried to make that into something more. Unfortunately in a commercial entity (as is indicated in the article) this is extremely hard to do as when the time for new budgets arrives my co-founders would ask where the tangible (as in money) results were. Results did come and in the end it did actually break even but the freedom was stripped too soon to really make something happen. Sounds like the ultimate job to be honest. And that at SAP of all places. I worked with SAP software and consultants and probably as many here who worked with SAP as well will probably agree; that is a far shout from this invent lab...
- chrisseaton 11y agoIf you want freedom to do research without yearly commercial results expected there are still places like Microsoft Research and Oracle Labs where you can do this.
- DonHopkins 11y agoI can't imagine Larry Ellison letting anything out of Oracle Labs unless they invent a new way to permanently tie customers into existing legacy software.
- mst 11y agoYeah, but Larry is really imaginative at finding ways to use awesome technologies to do that. (haha only serious ...)
- bitwize 11y agoThey're probably workibg on longevity treatments for a patient base of one: Larry Ellison.
- chrisseaton 11y agoI work at Oracle Labs and almost everything I do is done fully in the open, open source on GitHub, with lots of papers, blog posts and conference talks to explain how it all works.
- david927 11y agoThis is like hearing that a major record label gave The Beatles (all four living) a recording contract. You would scratch your head and ask why it didn't happen earlier.
- Animats 11y agoPARC was in the glory days of corporate research labs. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Almaden, Sarnoff Labs, HP Labs, etc. Research labs that were part of big companies. I was lucky enough to visit many of those in their prime. I got to tour PARC in 1975, years before Steve Jobs did, when I took a summer course in computer architecture taught by William McKeeman. He was the architect of a generation of Burroughs CPUs, and knew everybody in CPU design. So I met Alan Kay before anybody had heard of him. He had a vision, but it wasn't quite what most people think it was. He said the big advantage they had was that they were funded heavily enough to build the single-user computers of the future now. The Alto was over $20K (some said $50K) per unit, which was insanely expensive for a single user computer. It took another decade to get the cost down. Kay's group saw as their job to get the software ready for when the hardware came down in price. Kay was thinking that the killer app for personal computers was going to be simulations. He later had a demo graphical hospital simulation, which was a discrite-event simulator where patients came in with a complaint ("I am a victim of Bowlerthumb"), and went through Admitting, Examination, Surgery, etc. out to Discharge. Smalltalk is based on Simula, an Algol-derived simulation language, and was originally intended for discrite-event simulation. Document preparation and mail were a sideline.[1] Kay was operating in an empty world. Almost nobody else was throwing money at what software should look like a decade or two hence, for a class of machines that didn't exist yet. That was a huge advantage. Anything good that was done there advanced the state of the art. Kay's group was only a small part of PARC. There were other people in the large building working on copier technology and the physics behind xerography. (Unfortunately for Xerox, they didn't invent organic photoconductors, which made xerography machines much smaller and cheaper. IBM did.) Kay's group had considerable engineering resources to draw upon, machine shops and electronics shops and chemistry labs that could make things. They were able to have their own CRT tubes made for the Alto. It's a lot easier to invent when you have that kind of substantial engineering backup. That's why they were able to build a laser printer - they were in an engineering facility that could build both a CRT and a copier. Kay's group just did the software and some of the electronics. That's hard to reproduce - all that engineering backup. It's only available within a big business that makes real stuff. Today, Samsung and Fujitsu have labs like that, but few US companies, at least in the electronics/computer sector, do. There are a few military operations with such capabilities - China Lake Naval Weapons Center is one; they can design, build, and flight-test something in-house. So that's why it's hard to reproduce PARC - you need an empty field of research, and heavy engineering backup. [1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf
- DonHopkins 11y ago> My attempts to do Xerox PARC-like things over the years, like Interval [Research Corporation] with [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen, most of them have failed for one of two reasons. it’s either so antithetical to the corporate culture that nobody really wants it. Or in Paul Allen’s case, he wanted to monetize everything. He treated [Interval] as an innovation center or product engineering division. He never understood the process of doing invention research. A company should have an invention center because it’s a wild card. I went out to dinner at SIGGRAPH in the early 90's with some people from Xerox PARC and some people from Interval Research. When one of the Interval people quipped "We're the Xerox PARC of the 90's", one of the Xerox PARC people took issue with that and corrected them: "Actually, we consider ourselves to be the Xerox PARC of the 90's."
- DonHopkins 11y agoThere's a difference between: Department of Simulation Research and: Department of Research Simulation
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoHere's a fair question to ask Alan Kay: He had roles as a "fellow" at Apple and Disney and HP. What did he do to recreate Xerox PARC's "magic" while at these places?
- drivebyubnt 11y agoHe was a fellow at Atari too, without helping them very much. Alan's a great guy, a great speaker, and he made fundamental contributions to OO with Smalltalk. But probably his single biggest contribution was that he funded the creation the Alto out of his group's budget. (So as a VC rather than a scientist or manager.)
- teddyh 11y agoThe thing to recreate would, in my opinion, not be Xerox PARC, but the SRI bootstrapping idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agdPQuFr0yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agdPQuFr0yg
- manibatra 11y agoI really agree how universities are stressing on a particular programming language rather than taking a more generalist approach. One of my friends transferred from a university in Queensland, Australia to Sydney. She could not transfer the credits of one of her courses (Intro to Comp Sc) as she had taken the course in Java and not in python even though if you look at the concepts , there was a significant overlap.
- dang 11y agoOne of their projects was on the HN front page a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10293368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10293368.