11 ms·

Xerox PARC’s engineers on how they invented the future and Xerox lost it (1985)

247 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

rramadass 4y ago
Excellent Excellent Article! An absolute storm of Creativity where each Genius exponentially builds off of another. The Energy, Enthusiasm and Drive of these Geniuses leaps out at you. Bur as usual A bunch of horse’s asses who don’t know anything about technology were making the decision (direct quote) and squandered it all. Would it be possible to recreate a similar environment in any company today? I highly doubt it. Nobody looks at Research as it was done in Xerox PARC, Bell Labs and HP Labs. Some relevant quotes; Some researchers say PARC was a product of the 1960s and that decade’s philosophy of power to the people, of improving the quality of life. When the center opened in 1970, it was unlike other major industrial research laboratories; its work wasn’t tied, even loosely, to its corporate parent’s current product lines. And unlike university research laboratories, PARC had one unifying vision: it would develop “the architecture of information.” Since projects were not assigned from above, the researchers formed their own groups; support for a project depended on how many people its instigator could get to work on it. “Systems research requires building systems,” he said. “Otherwise you don’t know whether the ideas you have are any good, or how difficult they are to implement. Since MAXC, the center has built prototypes of dozens of hardware and software systems—prototypes that sometimes numbered in the thousands of units. “There was a lab where the Altos were getting built, with circuit boards lying around, and anyone could go in and work on them,” recalled Daniel H.H. Ingalls, If you’re dealing with marketing or planning people, make them kick the tires. All the charts and all the slides aren’t worth a damn One reason that Xerox had such trouble bringing PARC’s advances to market was that, until 1976, there was no development organization to take research prototypes from PARC and turn them into products. “The amazing thing about the PARC environment in 1976-77 was the feeling of power; all of a sudden you could create things and make lots of them. Not just one sheet, but whole books,” said Conway. But some of those who left PARC recalled that a disillusionment had set in. They hadn’t been frustrated with the progression of their careers; rather, they had been frustrated with the rate of progression of their products into the real world.
mfarstad 4y ago
I'll plug the book "Dealers of Lightning" for those who want to read more.
- nikolayasdf123 4y ago
  +1 to this one too. It is specifically focused on on Xerox PARC only. The Dream Machine covers broader scope of ARPA, ENIAC, MIT, etc.
- jinto36 4y ago
  I first came across this book in a library (a while ago) and basically read the whole thing on the spot. From my entirely biased perspective as someone with a "vintage computer" collection, it's the best book ever. The staggering magnitude of the accomplishments and inventions of PARC are almost as fascinating as fiction. The ineptitude of Xerox management in figuring out what to do with the output of PARC was similarly unreal. Bell Labs was able to commercialize (or at least license IP) from some of their work with reasonable return, but eventually lost momentum from the series of spinoff-layoff-mergers. How does an organization successfully manage or balance that kind of research productivity with commercialization in the long term? Is there any management literature on that in particular? I know some places like Microsoft and Google have had research programs for quite some time, although of course Google mostly fails to adequately support products that come out of Google X before killing them off or scaling them back (such as Glass), and I'm not sure how much of what Microsoft Research does is actually commercialized. Notably, Butler Lampson, who was one of the key folks at PARC, has been with Microsoft Research since 1995.
AlbertCory 4y ago
First published in 1985? For more reading: Fumbling the Future: not all that good; reads like a B-school case study Dealers of Lightning: excellent history Inventing the Future (by me!): what it was actually like to be there in the trenches. Fictionalized, but all facts are accurate. Foreword by David C. Smith, the guy who invented icons. That's his son on the cover, playing MazeWar on an Alto.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  I visited the "Blue Room" as a young coder and was treated with respect.. very positive for me and much appreciated.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  https://www.albertcory.io https://www.albertcory.io
- chillpenguin 4y ago
  I recommend "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop. It is excellent (and recommended by Alan Kay himself).
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Second this. I bought it when Alan Kay recommended it here.
- Aloha 4y ago
  I commented Dealers in parallel, because of the narrative I'd argue it's one of the best tech histories every written. While Soul of the Machine was better reviewed, Dealers was more compelling. I did enjoy your book by the way - thank you for writing it.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Thank you. re Soul: Dick Sonderegger, whom I interviewed at [1], knew the real people at Data General who were featured in it. They kinda despised Tracy Kidder. [1] https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link
mepian 4y ago
Alan Kay, one of PARC's most prominent researchers, recommends Waldrop's book The Dream Machine. Actually I think he has an account here on Hacker News.
- voldacar 4y ago
  I think he deleted his comments or something, his account was alan-1
  - samatman 4y ago
    I don't know anything about an alan-1 account, but he has an account as alankay: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay
    - voldacar 4y ago
      You might want to disregard my comment then. But I had that other account bookmarked as his for some reason
      - dang 4y ago
        I think we might have merged those usernames a while back.
        gattilorenz 4y ago
        There's also alan-kay
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    > alan-1 Nice Tron reference
- nikolayasdf123 4y ago
  The Dream Machine from Stripe Press is good.
mikewarot 4y ago
My recent study of history leads me to conclude that had Douglas Engelbart[1] been allowed to keep working on NLS[2], we'd have gotten a far better result. Instead his staff was poached, and PARC was the far less than optimal result. History shows time and time again that the best outcome rarely happens. We still don't have a Memex[3] as proposed by Bush in 1945. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart 2 - https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/nls https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/nls 3 - https://www.darpa.mil/program/memex https://www.darpa.mil/program/memex
- kkfx 4y ago
  "optimal" results are a fallacious indicator: optimal for now can mean a disaster in the near future, think about the actual just-in-time industry crisis for instance. I do not say that's was happen since I do not really know nor NLS (of course I've seen the Mother of all the demos, but not much more especially in technical terms) nor Smalltalk workstations (I've dig a bit more there, emulation included, but lacking comparison with NLS...) however is a generally valid principles: in nature it does not win the better but the more adaptive. In humans terms some very good stuff might simply fade into oblivion because they are too ahead of their time for most people or are against someone's interests. To spot a more modern example maybe a bit more easy to know by most HN-ers just see Java history, it's original idea and the subsequent practical fail due to the fact nobody really care the original idea adopting instead just the boilerplate. Plan 9 was another example. IMVHO the real points was: - pioneers have seen desktop computers, not services, with the human at the center, not a vendor or a service, more specifically connected people with powerful tool some in politics is named social tissue needed for democracy, something essentially all élites from all countries fear most; - pioneers have cared about their idea, vision, not much their present time short terms needs, as a result most people have no idea about the future they envisage and have tried to meld what they are told about the future to their present created ridiculous stuff and encouraging some to go that way (see General Magik virtual office for instance); - pioneers have not cared at all about scaling their gear, witch means how to make them en masse, creating a supply chain, ... as a result profiting from them was essentially an artisanal game no one can really sustain and at government level no one is much interested either. Another today examples: we have seen in the recent 50+ years past various efforts to make small, cheap VTOL aircrafts, i.e. "flying cars". Now we see even financial institutions embracing them in their sauce, well so far such experiments have proven feasible and to a certain extent VERY interested for all. So far most think they are impossible. Useless. Unsafe. .... As a result the general reactionary behaviors of essentially any large community from élites (who feel well in general and fear loosing their status if something change) to generic human beings (who generally think the change is bad, not needed, they simply fear it if is a real change) annihilate or at least postpone in a very far future any real revolution. Culture is typically the mean to make things happen but so far we seems to be unable (beside the fact that most do NOT want that happen) to really spread a substantial culture though the masses. We know how to do that in small cohort but not in larger ones. We still miss a way to connect those small cohort to the humanity enough to make the magic happen...
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
I think people forget that it takes 2 types of people to move tech or for that matter a company to greatness. The product is not the star. There's the dreamer that comes up with a product and then there's the one that sells the dream to the rest of us. They are usually BSer's to the nth degree. They will lie to your face and you will love them for that. They are soooooo loved by some that some men and women dream of having their baby. Think IBM,Apple,Ford,TESLA and many more. Xerox PARC, just didn't have a great BSer in-house.
- chaosbutters 4y ago
  I work at PARC, and I hard disagree. My "CEO" of our division is an impressive salesman that just had everyone at our conference coming to our booth.
  - contingencies 4y ago
    Which field do you work in? Is there an overview of the fields of research currently being pursued?
- kkfx 4y ago
  You forget a more broad stanza: false revolutions happen, like you say, real ones are feared and avoided by most. On one side actual élite (in business, politics etc, a generic tag to say "most well position somewhere in something") fear the substantial change because it might both succeed pushing them aside since they became useless or fail crushing the along if they have tried it; on the other side most people adverse changes. Anyone might be pushed to buy a phone/something alike, considering it just a small addition to their daily routine, anyone might be pushed to buy a desktop/something else in general like the classic joke from the early web "hi! I want to buy a website" "hum, ok... To do what?" "Oh, I do not want to use it, all start buying one so I need one to remain in the market, is for customers not for me". But a substantial revolution is another story. Just see in daily life how many time you hear people say "I've always do this like that" and so on even if it's clearly an absurd thing or something that can&should be done but in a very different manner. Even small things. At PARC time was the filing cabinet/suspended folder era, where people deeply think in paper+mechanic terms, the idea of files and folders (mimicking aforementioned filing cabinet and suspended folders) might pass easily, the idea of dynamic documents is simply unthinkable and fearful "I might loose something", "people might cheat", ... similarly the idea to send emails might pass easily, a better fax system, but the idea of computing inside again can't pass. For most a GUI can only pass, even today, as a single sheet of paper, something we can draw, compose, but not something else. Spreadsheets succeed even if they are absurd in IT terms for countless reasons while DB+simple languages for equivalent needs does not for the very same reason. PARC vision, for the little I know propose a substantial revolution, not an evolution of its present state of thing. That's their real "fail"... To succeed they need to find a way to demonstrate and spread their tech until it became well known enough. Like in the past in France where no peasant have accepted the new vegetable imported from America: potatoes. Rumors spread it's dangerous etc. Things change only when the army drop them around the country in manure piles and soldiers came back after enough time to collect and eat potatoes. Sunflowers in Russia have experienced a similar fate.
efreak 4y ago
This article seems to have been digitized with OCR. I've found several glitches: Smalltalk-8O, 'dis play', and other mistakes caused by OCR that should have been caught by a spelling check. Issues with quotes are apparent throughout the article: quotes ending with `“` instead of `”` (see the first paragraph) spaces between single and double quotes (`“ ‘` and `’ ”`) make lines starting with quotes look odd and leave a lines with just a double quote on it at the end of a paragraph (the second paragraph ends with a `”` on it's own line) I also found this quite interesting: > One innovative use for the network had nothing to do with people sending messages to one another; it involved communication solely between machines. Because the dynamic memory chips were so unreliable in those days, the Alto also ran a memory check when it wasn’t doing anything else. Its response to finding a bad chip was remarkable: “It would send a message telling which Alto was bad, which slot had the bad board, and which row and column had the bad chips,” Thornburg said. “The reason I found out about this was that one day the repairman showed up and said, ‘Any time you’re ready to power down, I need to fix your Alto,’ and I didn’t even know anything was wrong.”
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Aloha 4y ago
Dealers of Lightening is a book I recommend to anyone who has worked in technology. It's an important story to understand, how you can have all the right people, and all the right technology, and literally be a generation ahead of everyone else, and still fail. Having technology that can easily be commercialized at a reasonable price is more important that having the best, newest or fastest technology - you can always iterate later. The Mac was successful not because it was best on a technical level - it wasn't, but it hit the right price point, and the right level of functionality - and at the right time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chairmanwow1 4y ago
  Phenomenal book. Snagged it after a similar thread on HN and honestly woke me up to the previous generations of great minds that paved the path before me.
pjmlp 4y ago
Demo of Mesa/Cedar system, the lesser known system from Xerox ones, written in memory safe systems programming language of the same name, with reference counting and a cycle collector, and those unsafe code blocks. https://youtu.be/z_dt7NG38V4 https://youtu.be/z_dt7NG38V4 Replicates the Lisp and Smalltalk development experience, introduces ideas that were inspiration for Oberon Gadgets, OLE and OpenDoc, had networking, file servers, only downside was being single user workstation. We as industry are still catching up with that experience and overall system safety.
- thrwawy283 4y ago
  I'd like to think these ideas have been around and well-known for decades, and we're starting to see the hardware rise up to support them. If you told someone in 2001 that Linux would be rewritten in say, Java, with a garbage collector it would have been dismissed as starkly inefficient. Nowadays we have hardware that makes certain safeties negligible on performance (memory tagging, bounds checking, etc). Nowadays we can make an OS out of Java and it will stand just fine. Or Rust. Faster hardware means we run slower (and safer) software. Not everything gets isolated into an ASIC, of course.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    They could have made an OS in a managed language decades ago.
    - mcswell 4y ago
      They did. They were called LISP machines.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    It would still be dismissed as starkly inefficient, because the problem isn't technology, rather mentalities. Midori powered Asian Bing as proof of its capabilities, and yet Windows team was dismissal of its capabilities and instead went on reinventing .NET with COM, aka .NET Native and C++/CX alongside WinRT. A kind of ironic given that it was .NET original design (codename Ext-VOS), before they decided to reboot COM with a managed runtime, alongside the J++ issues that caused COOL to become C# instead. Quite interesting feedback from Joe Duffy how everything went down, "Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET" - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi... "RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 > OS and tools for building dependable systems. The Singularity research codebase and design evolved to become the Midori advanced-development OS project. While never reaching commercial release, at one time Midori powered all of Microsoft’s natural language search service for the West Coast and Asia. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity... Ironically, despite still having the Linux kernel underneath and enough C++, Android and ChromeOS are probably the mainstream OSes that are closer to the overall idea, at least in what concerns userspace applications. As on the Microsoft side, WinDev seems to always sabotage those ideas, as you can infer from Joe Duffy talks, and from Apple side although Swift is supposed to play a major role going forward, C, C++ and Objective-C still represent the majority of the stack.
sytelus 4y ago
Does anyone know what was the reward structure at PARC?
- blihp 4y ago
  My impression was that people were able to make a living while devoting the vast majority of their effort turning their vision into a reality. If one really has a passion for their work that's about as close as one can get to being paid to play all day. Try doing that just about anywhere in tech today.
- randomifcpfan 4y ago
  Similar to a research university. Many PARC researchers left PARC to commercialize their inventions.
  - sytelus 4y ago
    Why would researchers want to be at PARC if financially it’s same as universities?
rileyphone 4y ago
What a remarkable list of achievements in the PARC alumni. It's hard to think that amount of computer related talent will ever be concentrated to that level again, especially given the rapid ascent of our field driven in no small part by the innovation that went on at PARC. - Sent from my (not quite) Dynabook
graycat 4y ago
My guess at what in the early days of personal computing, i.e., ~1985, really caused the rapid growth: Replacing the typewriters. The labor of using typewriters was enormous. So, replacing a typewriter with just a PC, maybe with only a floppy disk for file storage, and just an early, crude dot matrix printer saved a lot of money. Next, electronic spreadsheets saved a lot of money. Next, with just dial-up connections, we got email which in many cases was a big improvement, speed, cost on what the USPS, FedEx, etc. provided. ... Now for shoppers, on-line shopping can often yield better shopping results with huge savings in time and effort and also often money. Apparently now some investors are looking at the Internet and remote work as a way for workers and families to get huge savings on costs of housing and transportation. Then, nearly everything in the usual parts and pieces of the economy is open to huge cost savings via automation based on computing and the Internet, in simple terms, having some robot do the work instead of a human. E.g., it's spring and time to plow the field and put in a crop of corn. So, click on an icon, and the tractor fires itself up, plows the field, and then puts in the seed. And the tractor was made nearly entirely by robots, maybe including some 3D printing. Then in the supply chain, the corn goes to feed hogs, chickens, and to fatten up cattle, and the work there also gets heavily automated. Sure, cornmeal can also be used for tasty breading for fried fish and chicken! Uh, maybe surprisingly soon and quite broadly we don't really need more farm workers but fewer and, then, more developers of the automation ...! Developing all the needed automation is not so easy now, in particular, while can save big on Opex can have a big initial Capex. So, we need better tools for developing the automation -- robots, artificial intelligence, whatever call it. Hmm .... With the automation, will (finally) have good numerical data on nearly all parts of the supply chain from a mine, farm, forest, etc. all the way to the dinner table, etc. Then we will notice that with the good, new numerical data, can get some cost savings by the now old subject optimization, mathematical programming, from linear programming, nonlinear programming, ... stochastic optimal control, etc. And with all the good data on the supply chain, should be able to do some analysis and do well investing the commodities markets. It used to be, "Machines should work. Humans should think." Maybe it will be "Machines do the work, and humans enjoy life", e.g., pursue family, art, science, understand the universe, etc. Uh, for that future, we have a lot of software to write!
- ghaff 4y ago
jhoechtl 4y ago
> and Xerox lost it it was a loss for xerox but a win for mankind. Many outcomes of Xerox became patent unencumbered
- mcswell 4y ago
  I had an experience with this a couple decades ago. I was using a piece of Xerox software that came on a CD in a book. The license meant you had to buy a copy of the book for every runtime version, and IIRC it came with some kind of non-commercial use requirement even then. An organization we worked for wanted to use it, so we talked to Xerox, eventually getting to one of their lawyers. He told us it would cost ~$150k _to write the license_. Who knows what it would have cost to actually license the product. Needless to say (so I'll say it), we went with someone else's software product.
Daub 4y ago
The final stage of the creative process is dissemination, and this is what failed Xerox Parc. This is also what failed Kodak, when they failed to capitalise on the digital camera, which they had invented. The core issue is twofold: 1. Entrenched interests within the company. When Microsoft tried to develop their mobile strategy, the head of the Excel division deliberately made the mobile Excel experience a crappy one as he had no faith in Mobile to begin with. 2. Framing the new product within old paradigms. Kodak had it all: a head start on digital image capture, a partnership with Apply (with the QuickTake 100) and shot tons of money. But despite developing a web-based dissemination platform for digital photos, they could not foresee the rise of social sharing. This was a tragedy, as their Box Brownie (released 1900) had the same effect on the photo industry of the time as social sharing would have on the photo industry. But Kodak was fixated on the mistaken notion that consumers would want to print their 'Kodak moment'.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  If Parc had failed at dissemination we'd all still be using the command line. The windows/icons/mouse/menus paradigm disseminated just fine. It wasn't necessarily completely original - see also, Mother of All Demos - but they showed it could be implemented in real systems with real usability benefits. Laser printers and networking also disseminated just fine. What didn't disseminate was the development environment. That's not necessarily a surprise, because an environment that delights creative people with PhDs isn't going to translate well to the general public. Ultimately Smalltalk, MESA, etc were like concept cars. You could admire them and learn from them, but they were never going to be viable as mainstream products. Windows and Mac filled the gap by producing dumbed-down and overcomplicated versions of the original vision, which - most importantly - happened to be much cheaper. Xerox get a lot of criticism for missing the potential, but it's easy to forget that in the 70s word processors typically cost five figures, and minicomputers equivalent to the Dorado cost six figures. Maybe the future would have been different if someone had said "We need to take these ideas and work out how to build them as cheaply as possible." But realistically commodified computing in the 70s ran on Z80s and still cost five figures for a business system with a hard drive. The technology to make a cheaper version didn't exist until the 80s. The problem since Parc is more that there has been no equivalent concentration of smart, creative, playful people. Technology culture changed from playful exploration to hustle and "engagement", there's less greenfield space to explore, and - IMO - there are very few people in the industry who have the raw IQ and the creativity to create a modern equivalent. It's pretty much the opposite problem. Instead of exploring tech without obvious business goals, business goals are so tightly enforced it's very hard to imagine what would happen if completely open exploration was allowed again.
matesz 4y ago
What about Stanford Research Institute??? "Later in the 1970s, Engelbart lost his key engineers to Xerox PARC lab, a lavish and well-funded research center a few miles away. At the head was Alan Kay, 15 years Engelbart’s junior—an upbeat, brilliant guy who knew how to inspire people. The laboratory chief was Engelbart’s former funder from ARPA, Robert Taylor. For Engelbart, networks had always been an inextricable part of his vision. But under Kay’s direction, the engineers created a personal computer, geared toward individual productivity rather than collaboration. Their software included more user-friendly versions of a few of Engelbart’s original ideas, including multiple windows, text with integrated graphics, and the mouse. A cruel joke of the time was that Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center had been a training program for PARC." [1] [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/#:~:text=Later%20in%20the,program%20for%20PARC https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-....
- mistrial9 4y ago
  related (and more true than ever?) http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...
- w10-1 4y ago
  SRI did a boatload of work: USPS zip code automation, BART cards, ATM's, distributed enterprise computing in the 1980's, etc. Unlike its peers, it kept defense contracts below roughly 40% of its overall business. Even PARC was mostly awash in DARPA funds.
tester756 4y ago
I do always associate Xerox PARC and generally Palo Alto with innovation but what actually makes those places so special? why them, not somebody else? What made the difference between them and the rest?
- randomifcpfan 4y ago
  Right time, right problem, good management, enormous funds, Bay Area hippie culture, access to Stanford, uninterrupted time, and luck. At PARC they were able to peer 10 years into the future. That was a big deal for 1969-1979. Looking 10 years forward recently is less transformative. Not much changed between 2012 and 2022.
  - chasil 4y ago
    It was interesting to hear that Smalltalk was originally a language for Children (similar to Logo), and was coded in BASIC. Alan Kay expressed some dismay after his departure that Smalltalk became so much more complex when a compiler was created.
    - igouy 4y ago
      > … and was coded in BASIC. I don't know that there wasn't some initial implementation "coded in BASIC" — Smalltalk 71? otoh — "Smalltalk 72, which was done in BCPL on a Data General Nova." https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Adele_Goldberg#Developing_Smalltalk https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Adele_Goldberg#Developing_Smal...
      - scroot 4y ago
        > I don't know that there wasn't some initial implementation "coded in BASIC" — Smalltalk 71 Dan has said/written before that the "first pass" -- which was done in like a weekend or something -- was done in BASIC just to get a feel for the thing. It wasn't a full blown environment or anything.
        4y ago
syl_sau 4y ago
You've got to appreciate the irony of how an article about historical revolutionary technologies is buried under what has to be one of the most obnoxious web interface I've ever seen. And on top of all that, you realize the website is affiliated with the IEEE. This thing is not even properly printable, even with Print Friendly. I like to imagine Alan Kay stumbling upon this and what his reaction would be...
- pratyushag2 4y ago
  Agreed. I used Instaweb to clean it up and make it printable. Then I sent it to my Kindle because it was still 30 pages.
- chasil 4y ago
  I used the Android "Privacy Browser" app to view it, because Chrome was unusable. Privacy Browser doesn't enable JavaScript by default, and reduces frustration with many sites.
lvl102 4y ago
This pretty much sums up American tech scene: stealing ideas is the best use of capital. I wonder what it is like to live in a society where creativity is actually valued and rewarded.
GnarfGnarf 4y ago
I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. I saw first-hand how the general Xerox organization was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at PARC. It's ironic that every new hire was given a copy of "The Billions Nobody Wanted" (by John H. Dessauer), a bio of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography. At the top, Xerox saw the "paperless office" as a threat to their copier business. They denied my company access to the technical information we needed to make full use of the $500K ($1.7M today) laser printer we bought from them. A pox on Xerox! To their credit, every branch had a terminal linked to an SDS Sigma running the Control Program V (CP-V) timesharing system. I used it to write a BASIC program to calculate optimal copier proposals for salesmen.
- mcswell 4y ago
  copiers and paperless offices: who can forget "It's a miracle!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAt-lB9JIqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAt-lB9JIqw)
  - GnarfGnarf 4y ago
    I actually met the Brother Dominic dude at a trade show.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
w10-1 4y ago
Ideas are free; it's execution that matters. The politics in academia and research are horrid. It's mainly narcissism that drives people to publish rather than hide their stash. Every such group I've seen have the publishers taking everyone's work and putting their name on it. Smart people go find other smart people, and the smartest make a name for themselves by distilling the collective wisdom. But the incentives are wrong. They'd rather be known for the idea than do the work to deliver it (and love to blame the bean counters for their own lack of diligence). Apple today is right to sequester information -- not because it divulges secrets but because it's better culturally to say it's not real until it's a product people can use. They've tamped down the glory-mongering of their pre-Jobs 90's with its bloated Copland and Newton egos. To me that discipline drove Apple to deliver the innovations they have in the 2000's - not Jony's esthetics or Cook's efficiency.

247 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

Excellent Excellent Article! An absolute storm of Creativity where each Genius exponentially builds off of another. The Energy, Enthusiasm and Drive of these Geniuses leaps out at you. Bur as usual A bunch of horse’s asses who don’t know anything about technology were making the decision (direct quote) and squandered it all. Would it be possible to recreate a similar environment in any company today? I highly doubt it. Nobody looks at Research as it was done in Xerox PARC, Bell Labs and HP Labs. Some relevant quotes; Some researchers say PARC was a product of the 1960s and that decade’s philosophy of power to the people, of improving the quality of life. When the center opened in 1970, it was unlike other major industrial research laboratories; its work wasn’t tied, even loosely, to its corporate parent’s current product lines. And unlike university research laboratories, PARC had one unifying vision: it would develop “the architecture of information.” Since projects were not assigned from above, the researchers formed their own groups; support for a project depended on how many people its instigator could get to work on it. “Systems research requires building systems,” he said. “Otherwise you don’t know whether the ideas you have are any good, or how difficult they are to implement. Since MAXC, the center has built prototypes of dozens of hardware and software systems—prototypes that sometimes numbered in the thousands of units. “There was a lab where the Altos were getting built, with circuit boards lying around, and anyone could go in and work on them,” recalled Daniel H.H. Ingalls, If you’re dealing with marketing or planning people, make them kick the tires. All the charts and all the slides aren’t worth a damn One reason that Xerox had such trouble bringing PARC’s advances to market was that, until 1976, there was no development organization to take research prototypes from PARC and turn them into products. “The amazing thing about the PARC environment in 1976-77 was the feeling of power; all of a sudden you could create things and make lots of them. Not just one sheet, but whole books,” said Conway. But some of those who left PARC recalled that a disillusionment had set in. They hadn’t been frustrated with the progression of their careers; rather, they had been frustrated with the rate of progression of their products into the real world.

mfarstad 4y ago

I'll plug the book "Dealers of Lightning" for those who want to read more.

nikolayasdf123 4y ago
+1 to this one too. It is specifically focused on on Xerox PARC only. The Dream Machine covers broader scope of ARPA, ENIAC, MIT, etc.
jinto36 4y ago
I first came across this book in a library (a while ago) and basically read the whole thing on the spot. From my entirely biased perspective as someone with a "vintage computer" collection, it's the best book ever. The staggering magnitude of the accomplishments and inventions of PARC are almost as fascinating as fiction. The ineptitude of Xerox management in figuring out what to do with the output of PARC was similarly unreal. Bell Labs was able to commercialize (or at least license IP) from some of their work with reasonable return, but eventually lost momentum from the series of spinoff-layoff-mergers. How does an organization successfully manage or balance that kind of research productivity with commercialization in the long term? Is there any management literature on that in particular? I know some places like Microsoft and Google have had research programs for quite some time, although of course Google mostly fails to adequately support products that come out of Google X before killing them off or scaling them back (such as Glass), and I'm not sure how much of what Microsoft Research does is actually commercialized. Notably, Butler Lampson, who was one of the key folks at PARC, has been with Microsoft Research since 1995.

AlbertCory 4y ago

First published in 1985? For more reading: Fumbling the Future: not all that good; reads like a B-school case study Dealers of Lightning: excellent history Inventing the Future (by me!): what it was actually like to be there in the trenches. Fictionalized, but all facts are accurate. Foreword by David C. Smith, the guy who invented icons. That's his son on the cover, playing MazeWar on an Alto.

mistrial9 4y ago
I visited the "Blue Room" as a young coder and was treated with respect.. very positive for me and much appreciated.
AlbertCory 4y ago
https://www.albertcory.io https://www.albertcory.io
chillpenguin 4y ago
I recommend "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop. It is excellent (and recommended by Alan Kay himself).
- icelancer 4y ago
  Second this. I bought it when Alan Kay recommended it here.
Aloha 4y ago
I commented Dealers in parallel, because of the narrative I'd argue it's one of the best tech histories every written. While Soul of the Machine was better reviewed, Dealers was more compelling. I did enjoy your book by the way - thank you for writing it.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Thank you. re Soul: Dick Sonderegger, whom I interviewed at [1], knew the real people at Data General who were featured in it. They kinda despised Tracy Kidder. [1] https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link

mepian 4y ago

Alan Kay, one of PARC's most prominent researchers, recommends Waldrop's book The Dream Machine. Actually I think he has an account here on Hacker News.

voldacar 4y ago
I think he deleted his comments or something, his account was alan-1
- samatman 4y ago
  I don't know anything about an alan-1 account, but he has an account as alankay: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay
  - voldacar 4y ago
    You might want to disregard my comment then. But I had that other account bookmarked as his for some reason
    - dang 4y ago
      I think we might have merged those usernames a while back.
      - gattilorenz 4y ago
        There's also alan-kay
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  > alan-1 Nice Tron reference
nikolayasdf123 4y ago
The Dream Machine from Stripe Press is good.

mikewarot 4y ago

My recent study of history leads me to conclude that had Douglas Engelbart[1] been allowed to keep working on NLS[2], we'd have gotten a far better result. Instead his staff was poached, and PARC was the far less than optimal result. History shows time and time again that the best outcome rarely happens. We still don't have a Memex[3] as proposed by Bush in 1945. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart 2 - https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/nls https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/nls 3 - https://www.darpa.mil/program/memex https://www.darpa.mil/program/memex

kkfx 4y ago
"optimal" results are a fallacious indicator: optimal for now can mean a disaster in the near future, think about the actual just-in-time industry crisis for instance. I do not say that's was happen since I do not really know nor NLS (of course I've seen the Mother of all the demos, but not much more especially in technical terms) nor Smalltalk workstations (I've dig a bit more there, emulation included, but lacking comparison with NLS...) however is a generally valid principles: in nature it does not win the better but the more adaptive. In humans terms some very good stuff might simply fade into oblivion because they are too ahead of their time for most people or are against someone's interests. To spot a more modern example maybe a bit more easy to know by most HN-ers just see Java history, it's original idea and the subsequent practical fail due to the fact nobody really care the original idea adopting instead just the boilerplate. Plan 9 was another example. IMVHO the real points was: - pioneers have seen desktop computers, not services, with the human at the center, not a vendor or a service, more specifically connected people with powerful tool some in politics is named social tissue needed for democracy, something essentially all élites from all countries fear most; - pioneers have cared about their idea, vision, not much their present time short terms needs, as a result most people have no idea about the future they envisage and have tried to meld what they are told about the future to their present created ridiculous stuff and encouraging some to go that way (see General Magik virtual office for instance); - pioneers have not cared at all about scaling their gear, witch means how to make them en masse, creating a supply chain, ... as a result profiting from them was essentially an artisanal game no one can really sustain and at government level no one is much interested either. Another today examples: we have seen in the recent 50+ years past various efforts to make small, cheap VTOL aircrafts, i.e. "flying cars". Now we see even financial institutions embracing them in their sauce, well so far such experiments have proven feasible and to a certain extent VERY interested for all. So far most think they are impossible. Useless. Unsafe. .... As a result the general reactionary behaviors of essentially any large community from élites (who feel well in general and fear loosing their status if something change) to generic human beings (who generally think the change is bad, not needed, they simply fear it if is a real change) annihilate or at least postpone in a very far future any real revolution. Culture is typically the mean to make things happen but so far we seems to be unable (beside the fact that most do NOT want that happen) to really spread a substantial culture though the masses. We know how to do that in small cohort but not in larger ones. We still miss a way to connect those small cohort to the humanity enough to make the magic happen...

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

I think people forget that it takes 2 types of people to move tech or for that matter a company to greatness. The product is not the star. There's the dreamer that comes up with a product and then there's the one that sells the dream to the rest of us. They are usually BSer's to the nth degree. They will lie to your face and you will love them for that. They are soooooo loved by some that some men and women dream of having their baby. Think IBM,Apple,Ford,TESLA and many more. Xerox PARC, just didn't have a great BSer in-house.

chaosbutters 4y ago
I work at PARC, and I hard disagree. My "CEO" of our division is an impressive salesman that just had everyone at our conference coming to our booth.
- contingencies 4y ago
  Which field do you work in? Is there an overview of the fields of research currently being pursued?
kkfx 4y ago
You forget a more broad stanza: false revolutions happen, like you say, real ones are feared and avoided by most. On one side actual élite (in business, politics etc, a generic tag to say "most well position somewhere in something") fear the substantial change because it might both succeed pushing them aside since they became useless or fail crushing the along if they have tried it; on the other side most people adverse changes. Anyone might be pushed to buy a phone/something alike, considering it just a small addition to their daily routine, anyone might be pushed to buy a desktop/something else in general like the classic joke from the early web "hi! I want to buy a website" "hum, ok... To do what?" "Oh, I do not want to use it, all start buying one so I need one to remain in the market, is for customers not for me". But a substantial revolution is another story. Just see in daily life how many time you hear people say "I've always do this like that" and so on even if it's clearly an absurd thing or something that can&should be done but in a very different manner. Even small things. At PARC time was the filing cabinet/suspended folder era, where people deeply think in paper+mechanic terms, the idea of files and folders (mimicking aforementioned filing cabinet and suspended folders) might pass easily, the idea of dynamic documents is simply unthinkable and fearful "I might loose something", "people might cheat", ... similarly the idea to send emails might pass easily, a better fax system, but the idea of computing inside again can't pass. For most a GUI can only pass, even today, as a single sheet of paper, something we can draw, compose, but not something else. Spreadsheets succeed even if they are absurd in IT terms for countless reasons while DB+simple languages for equivalent needs does not for the very same reason. PARC vision, for the little I know propose a substantial revolution, not an evolution of its present state of thing. That's their real "fail"... To succeed they need to find a way to demonstrate and spread their tech until it became well known enough. Like in the past in France where no peasant have accepted the new vegetable imported from America: potatoes. Rumors spread it's dangerous etc. Things change only when the army drop them around the country in manure piles and soldiers came back after enough time to collect and eat potatoes. Sunflowers in Russia have experienced a similar fate.

efreak 4y ago

This article seems to have been digitized with OCR. I've found several glitches: Smalltalk-8O, 'dis play', and other mistakes caused by OCR that should have been caught by a spelling check. Issues with quotes are apparent throughout the article: quotes ending with `“` instead of `”` (see the first paragraph) spaces between single and double quotes (`“ ‘` and `’ ”`) make lines starting with quotes look odd and leave a lines with just a double quote on it at the end of a paragraph (the second paragraph ends with a `”` on it's own line) I also found this quite interesting: > One innovative use for the network had nothing to do with people sending messages to one another; it involved communication solely between machines. Because the dynamic memory chips were so unreliable in those days, the Alto also ran a memory check when it wasn’t doing anything else. Its response to finding a bad chip was remarkable: “It would send a message telling which Alto was bad, which slot had the bad board, and which row and column had the bad chips,” Thornburg said. “The reason I found out about this was that one day the repairman showed up and said, ‘Any time you’re ready to power down, I need to fix your Alto,’ and I didn’t even know anything was wrong.”

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Aloha 4y ago

Dealers of Lightening is a book I recommend to anyone who has worked in technology. It's an important story to understand, how you can have all the right people, and all the right technology, and literally be a generation ahead of everyone else, and still fail. Having technology that can easily be commercialized at a reasonable price is more important that having the best, newest or fastest technology - you can always iterate later. The Mac was successful not because it was best on a technical level - it wasn't, but it hit the right price point, and the right level of functionality - and at the right time.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chairmanwow1 4y ago
Phenomenal book. Snagged it after a similar thread on HN and honestly woke me up to the previous generations of great minds that paved the path before me.

pjmlp 4y ago

Demo of Mesa/Cedar system, the lesser known system from Xerox ones, written in memory safe systems programming language of the same name, with reference counting and a cycle collector, and those unsafe code blocks. https://youtu.be/z_dt7NG38V4 https://youtu.be/z_dt7NG38V4 Replicates the Lisp and Smalltalk development experience, introduces ideas that were inspiration for Oberon Gadgets, OLE and OpenDoc, had networking, file servers, only downside was being single user workstation. We as industry are still catching up with that experience and overall system safety.

thrwawy283 4y ago
I'd like to think these ideas have been around and well-known for decades, and we're starting to see the hardware rise up to support them. If you told someone in 2001 that Linux would be rewritten in say, Java, with a garbage collector it would have been dismissed as starkly inefficient. Nowadays we have hardware that makes certain safeties negligible on performance (memory tagging, bounds checking, etc). Nowadays we can make an OS out of Java and it will stand just fine. Or Rust. Faster hardware means we run slower (and safer) software. Not everything gets isolated into an ASIC, of course.
- kaba0 4y ago
  They could have made an OS in a managed language decades ago.
  - mcswell 4y ago
    They did. They were called LISP machines.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It would still be dismissed as starkly inefficient, because the problem isn't technology, rather mentalities. Midori powered Asian Bing as proof of its capabilities, and yet Windows team was dismissal of its capabilities and instead went on reinventing .NET with COM, aka .NET Native and C++/CX alongside WinRT. A kind of ironic given that it was .NET original design (codename Ext-VOS), before they decided to reboot COM with a managed runtime, alongside the J++ issues that caused COOL to become C# instead. Quite interesting feedback from Joe Duffy how everything went down, "Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET" - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi... "RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 > OS and tools for building dependable systems. The Singularity research codebase and design evolved to become the Midori advanced-development OS project. While never reaching commercial release, at one time Midori powered all of Microsoft’s natural language search service for the West Coast and Asia. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity... Ironically, despite still having the Linux kernel underneath and enough C++, Android and ChromeOS are probably the mainstream OSes that are closer to the overall idea, at least in what concerns userspace applications. As on the Microsoft side, WinDev seems to always sabotage those ideas, as you can infer from Joe Duffy talks, and from Apple side although Swift is supposed to play a major role going forward, C, C++ and Objective-C still represent the majority of the stack.

sytelus 4y ago

Does anyone know what was the reward structure at PARC?

blihp 4y ago
My impression was that people were able to make a living while devoting the vast majority of their effort turning their vision into a reality. If one really has a passion for their work that's about as close as one can get to being paid to play all day. Try doing that just about anywhere in tech today.
randomifcpfan 4y ago
Similar to a research university. Many PARC researchers left PARC to commercialize their inventions.
- sytelus 4y ago
  Why would researchers want to be at PARC if financially it’s same as universities?

rileyphone 4y ago

What a remarkable list of achievements in the PARC alumni. It's hard to think that amount of computer related talent will ever be concentrated to that level again, especially given the rapid ascent of our field driven in no small part by the innovation that went on at PARC. - Sent from my (not quite) Dynabook

graycat 4y ago

My guess at what in the early days of personal computing, i.e., ~1985, really caused the rapid growth: Replacing the typewriters. The labor of using typewriters was enormous. So, replacing a typewriter with just a PC, maybe with only a floppy disk for file storage, and just an early, crude dot matrix printer saved a lot of money. Next, electronic spreadsheets saved a lot of money. Next, with just dial-up connections, we got email which in many cases was a big improvement, speed, cost on what the USPS, FedEx, etc. provided. ... Now for shoppers, on-line shopping can often yield better shopping results with huge savings in time and effort and also often money. Apparently now some investors are looking at the Internet and remote work as a way for workers and families to get huge savings on costs of housing and transportation. Then, nearly everything in the usual parts and pieces of the economy is open to huge cost savings via automation based on computing and the Internet, in simple terms, having some robot do the work instead of a human. E.g., it's spring and time to plow the field and put in a crop of corn. So, click on an icon, and the tractor fires itself up, plows the field, and then puts in the seed. And the tractor was made nearly entirely by robots, maybe including some 3D printing. Then in the supply chain, the corn goes to feed hogs, chickens, and to fatten up cattle, and the work there also gets heavily automated. Sure, cornmeal can also be used for tasty breading for fried fish and chicken! Uh, maybe surprisingly soon and quite broadly we don't really need more farm workers but fewer and, then, more developers of the automation ...! Developing all the needed automation is not so easy now, in particular, while can save big on Opex can have a big initial Capex. So, we need better tools for developing the automation -- robots, artificial intelligence, whatever call it. Hmm .... With the automation, will (finally) have good numerical data on nearly all parts of the supply chain from a mine, farm, forest, etc. all the way to the dinner table, etc. Then we will notice that with the good, new numerical data, can get some cost savings by the now old subject optimization, mathematical programming, from linear programming, nonlinear programming, ... stochastic optimal control, etc. And with all the good data on the supply chain, should be able to do some analysis and do well investing the commodities markets. It used to be, "Machines should work. Humans should think." Maybe it will be "Machines do the work, and humans enjoy life", e.g., pursue family, art, science, understand the universe, etc. Uh, for that future, we have a lot of software to write!

ghaff 4y ago

jhoechtl 4y ago

> and Xerox lost it it was a loss for xerox but a win for mankind. Many outcomes of Xerox became patent unencumbered

mcswell 4y ago
I had an experience with this a couple decades ago. I was using a piece of Xerox software that came on a CD in a book. The license meant you had to buy a copy of the book for every runtime version, and IIRC it came with some kind of non-commercial use requirement even then. An organization we worked for wanted to use it, so we talked to Xerox, eventually getting to one of their lawyers. He told us it would cost ~$150k _to write the license_. Who knows what it would have cost to actually license the product. Needless to say (so I'll say it), we went with someone else's software product.

Daub 4y ago

The final stage of the creative process is dissemination, and this is what failed Xerox Parc. This is also what failed Kodak, when they failed to capitalise on the digital camera, which they had invented. The core issue is twofold: 1. Entrenched interests within the company. When Microsoft tried to develop their mobile strategy, the head of the Excel division deliberately made the mobile Excel experience a crappy one as he had no faith in Mobile to begin with. 2. Framing the new product within old paradigms. Kodak had it all: a head start on digital image capture, a partnership with Apply (with the QuickTake 100) and shot tons of money. But despite developing a web-based dissemination platform for digital photos, they could not foresee the rise of social sharing. This was a tragedy, as their Box Brownie (released 1900) had the same effect on the photo industry of the time as social sharing would have on the photo industry. But Kodak was fixated on the mistaken notion that consumers would want to print their 'Kodak moment'.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
If Parc had failed at dissemination we'd all still be using the command line. The windows/icons/mouse/menus paradigm disseminated just fine. It wasn't necessarily completely original - see also, Mother of All Demos - but they showed it could be implemented in real systems with real usability benefits. Laser printers and networking also disseminated just fine. What didn't disseminate was the development environment. That's not necessarily a surprise, because an environment that delights creative people with PhDs isn't going to translate well to the general public. Ultimately Smalltalk, MESA, etc were like concept cars. You could admire them and learn from them, but they were never going to be viable as mainstream products. Windows and Mac filled the gap by producing dumbed-down and overcomplicated versions of the original vision, which - most importantly - happened to be much cheaper. Xerox get a lot of criticism for missing the potential, but it's easy to forget that in the 70s word processors typically cost five figures, and minicomputers equivalent to the Dorado cost six figures. Maybe the future would have been different if someone had said "We need to take these ideas and work out how to build them as cheaply as possible." But realistically commodified computing in the 70s ran on Z80s and still cost five figures for a business system with a hard drive. The technology to make a cheaper version didn't exist until the 80s. The problem since Parc is more that there has been no equivalent concentration of smart, creative, playful people. Technology culture changed from playful exploration to hustle and "engagement", there's less greenfield space to explore, and - IMO - there are very few people in the industry who have the raw IQ and the creativity to create a modern equivalent. It's pretty much the opposite problem. Instead of exploring tech without obvious business goals, business goals are so tightly enforced it's very hard to imagine what would happen if completely open exploration was allowed again.

matesz 4y ago

What about Stanford Research Institute??? "Later in the 1970s, Engelbart lost his key engineers to Xerox PARC lab, a lavish and well-funded research center a few miles away. At the head was Alan Kay, 15 years Engelbart’s junior—an upbeat, brilliant guy who knew how to inspire people. The laboratory chief was Engelbart’s former funder from ARPA, Robert Taylor. For Engelbart, networks had always been an inextricable part of his vision. But under Kay’s direction, the engineers created a personal computer, geared toward individual productivity rather than collaboration. Their software included more user-friendly versions of a few of Engelbart’s original ideas, including multiple windows, text with integrated graphics, and the mouse. A cruel joke of the time was that Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center had been a training program for PARC." [1] [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/#:~:text=Later%20in%20the,program%20for%20PARC https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-....

mistrial9 4y ago
related (and more true than ever?) http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...
w10-1 4y ago
SRI did a boatload of work: USPS zip code automation, BART cards, ATM's, distributed enterprise computing in the 1980's, etc. Unlike its peers, it kept defense contracts below roughly 40% of its overall business. Even PARC was mostly awash in DARPA funds.

tester756 4y ago

I do always associate Xerox PARC and generally Palo Alto with innovation but what actually makes those places so special? why them, not somebody else? What made the difference between them and the rest?

randomifcpfan 4y ago
Right time, right problem, good management, enormous funds, Bay Area hippie culture, access to Stanford, uninterrupted time, and luck. At PARC they were able to peer 10 years into the future. That was a big deal for 1969-1979. Looking 10 years forward recently is less transformative. Not much changed between 2012 and 2022.
- chasil 4y ago
  It was interesting to hear that Smalltalk was originally a language for Children (similar to Logo), and was coded in BASIC. Alan Kay expressed some dismay after his departure that Smalltalk became so much more complex when a compiler was created.
  - igouy 4y ago
    > … and was coded in BASIC. I don't know that there wasn't some initial implementation "coded in BASIC" — Smalltalk 71? otoh — "Smalltalk 72, which was done in BCPL on a Data General Nova." https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Adele_Goldberg#Developing_Smalltalk https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Adele_Goldberg#Developing_Smal...
    - scroot 4y ago
      > I don't know that there wasn't some initial implementation "coded in BASIC" — Smalltalk 71 Dan has said/written before that the "first pass" -- which was done in like a weekend or something -- was done in BASIC just to get a feel for the thing. It wasn't a full blown environment or anything.
      - 4y ago

syl_sau 4y ago

You've got to appreciate the irony of how an article about historical revolutionary technologies is buried under what has to be one of the most obnoxious web interface I've ever seen. And on top of all that, you realize the website is affiliated with the IEEE. This thing is not even properly printable, even with Print Friendly. I like to imagine Alan Kay stumbling upon this and what his reaction would be...

pratyushag2 4y ago
Agreed. I used Instaweb to clean it up and make it printable. Then I sent it to my Kindle because it was still 30 pages.
chasil 4y ago
I used the Android "Privacy Browser" app to view it, because Chrome was unusable. Privacy Browser doesn't enable JavaScript by default, and reduces frustration with many sites.

lvl102 4y ago

This pretty much sums up American tech scene: stealing ideas is the best use of capital. I wonder what it is like to live in a society where creativity is actually valued and rewarded.

GnarfGnarf 4y ago

I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. I saw first-hand how the general Xerox organization was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at PARC. It's ironic that every new hire was given a copy of "The Billions Nobody Wanted" (by John H. Dessauer), a bio of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography. At the top, Xerox saw the "paperless office" as a threat to their copier business. They denied my company access to the technical information we needed to make full use of the $500K ($1.7M today) laser printer we bought from them. A pox on Xerox! To their credit, every branch had a terminal linked to an SDS Sigma running the Control Program V (CP-V) timesharing system. I used it to write a BASIC program to calculate optimal copier proposals for salesmen.

mcswell 4y ago
copiers and paperless offices: who can forget "It's a miracle!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAt-lB9JIqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAt-lB9JIqw)
- GnarfGnarf 4y ago
  I actually met the Brother Dominic dude at a trade show.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

w10-1 4y ago

Ideas are free; it's execution that matters. The politics in academia and research are horrid. It's mainly narcissism that drives people to publish rather than hide their stash. Every such group I've seen have the publishers taking everyone's work and putting their name on it. Smart people go find other smart people, and the smartest make a name for themselves by distilling the collective wisdom. But the incentives are wrong. They'd rather be known for the idea than do the work to deliver it (and love to blame the bean counters for their own lack of diligence). Apple today is right to sequester information -- not because it divulges secrets but because it's better culturally to say it's not real until it's a product people can use. They've tamped down the glory-mongering of their pre-Jobs 90's with its bloated Copland and Newton egos. To me that discipline drove Apple to deliver the innovations they have in the 2000's - not Jony's esthetics or Cook's efficiency.