Doing it WithStyle

During my week away over the Christmas-New Year period I had the chance to catch up on reading a couple of excellent computing history books plus the fictional thriller every man and his dog has read by now. These books are:

• Dealers of Lightening: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik
• Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by Mitchell M. Waldrop
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I've got to say that of these three, I got the least out of the Da Vinci Code. I started reading it about a year ago but never got round to finishing it! I guess the hype proceeded it for me and it just seemed like it was far too contrived and unbelievable for me to relate to. I'm not generally into fiction like that either - especially the blockbuster-style stuff that keeps cutting between parallel story-lines in the manner of Hollywood film. It just seemed to cliched and to be trying too hard.

On the upside, I thought that this effort weaves in some very worthwhile revelations about the Christian church's cruel persecution of pagans. Few people seem to be aware of the degree to which our outlook on things like the role of women, the concept of magic and witchcraft as well as views on many aspects of human sexuality are products of the christian church's self-serving manipulation in its sometimes brutal campaign for hegemony. Anyway, Dan Brown's non-fictional elements provide food for thought and have me wanting to learn more about the bits of history that the church would prefer us not to know about. I guess that made the read more worthwhile.

To me, Dealers of Lightening and Complexity was much more genuinely gripping than Dan Brown's bestseller. Both books are both very inspiring and highly relevant to my work and interests. The fact that they describe events that actually transpired and really influenced the state of computing today makes these books all the more gripping and meaningful.

Hiltzik tells the incredible stories of Xerox PARC as you might expect of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. At first I thought it was too slick - too much hype that perhaps skims too far above the stories of how the scientists dreamt up such innovative technology and overcame technical hurdles. After a while I came to appreciate how well researched the book is and how important it is that someone tell the story of this PARC's heyday at a level that almost any reader can comprehend and one that reaches across both the research and the business dynamics of Xerox at the time.

No matter how many times I hear it, the list of PARC inventions never ceases to amaze... laser printer, groupware, the graphical user interface, personal computers, Ethernet networking, word processing, image processing, portable computing, parallel processing, the evolution of the mouse into the pointing device we know today and last but certainly not least, the elegant object-oriented language used to demonstrate GUIs at length to a wide-eyed Steve Jobs and his core Apple engineers: Smalltalk.

For anyone who hasn't heard the story told at length, the chapter titled "Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell" is a real revelation. Not least because of the drama surrounding Job's return on a second day with the support of senior Xerox management demanding a much more in-depth demonstration of everything Adele Goldberg's Learning Research Group had on their yellow disk packs full of graphical Smalltalk applications. There are memorable anecdotes I hadn't read elsewhere such the one from Larry Tesler - who was soon to take his Smalltalk and GUI knowledge with him to work at Apple - who recalls that Macintosh designer Bill Atkinson was standing so close during his demos of graphical Smalltalk applications that he could feel Bill's breath on the back of his neck! The sense of excitement and revelation really comes out in Hiltzik's account.

Although PARC didn't divulge the inner workings of GUI secrets like 'BitBlt', Bill Atkinson took away from it enough inspiration to solve the overlapping window problem himself as well as to win the argument that the mouse should be standard equipment on every Lisa computer. Some say that PARC's influence on Apple was more inspirational than directly technical but after reading Hiltzik's well-researched chapter on the presentations at PARC labs, it is hard to believe that the influence wasn't quite substantial. Although the Apple engineers had apparently read "every paper" that the group at PARC had release, I can easily imagine that PARC didn't need to divulge technical papers or source code to Apple for their talented engineers to 'get it'. From little things big things grow...

Again, PARC's influence on Apple wasn't just from those two presentations by Adele Goldberg's team. Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld writes in 'Revolution in the Valley: the insanely great story of how the Mac was made' that he was inspired by Alan Kay's article about Smalltalk in the 1977 issue of Scientific American. In 1982 he and Apple colleague Bill Budge attended a talk by Alan Kay. He writes that "Alan's speech was revelatory and was perhaps the most inspiring talk I ever attended... After I got back to my office in Cupertino, I transcribed my notes onto a single page and made copies for the rest of the team." That page of neatly handwritten notes is reprinted in his book. I think that inspiration like this probably had a bit more mileage in the early days at Apple than Thomas Edison's famous quote suggests! By the way, Hertzfeld's book also includes a print of a promotional poster titled 'Macintosh Software Team' that features a young Bill Gates praising Apple's "new standard" (the Macintosh) that "captures people's imagination". The GUI idea obviously captured his.

Another things that stands out is the number of big innovations at PARC that resulted from two-person partnerships ie. pairing. Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs with Ethernet, misfits Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith with 'Superpaint', Chuck Thacker and Ed McCreight with the Alto personal computer and of course Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls with Smalltalk. I think this re-inforces the value of pair programming as the optimal working collaboration in creative technical work. I guess it is easy to see why it works so well with the right duo: one person alone has no-one to constantly bounce ideas off and no possibility of a complementary and counterbalancing perspective or skillset. A group of three where only one is 'hands on' on a single task on the other hand, inevitably pushes one of the participants toward a more passive observer role. Dynamic duos are definitely much bigger than the sum of their two parts.

Hiltzik concluded with a chapter titled "Did Xerox Blow It?". Surely this a rhetorical question! I'm sure others who have been closer to PARC and its descendants know more and have strong views on this but to me, Xerox had all but 'blown it' even before PARC was established! From what I can tell, it would have taken nothing less that a wholesale re-engineering of the whole corporation led by the board and top executives who actually understood what commercialising new technology and innovating past the competition actually involves to give Xerox a chance. This sort of turn around requires things like dramatic culture change and somehow getting salespeople to stop thinking about accumulating 'clicks' from copying pieces of paper and start being motivated by other means to sell to less senior individuals a new digital office solution that doesn't even feature paper! This was a real paradigm shift at all levels.

One of the big culture shifts that Xerox needed to make to be successful on a large scale and fend of competitors was actually to start thinking small. Smaller incremental product releases rather than taking years to assemble the world's most elaborate and sophisticated solutions. This directive wasn't there to guide the development of the Xerox Star and it appears that no-one really had this insight until after IBM released its much less sophisticated but far cheaper PCs and the opportunity to take the early lead was lost. Personal computing was a paradigm shift that heavily biased the small and this revelation need to be be carried throughout Xerox as an organisation. Xerox was playing not to lose against the Japanese but to have succeeded with PARC's technology it would have had to play to win.

Corporate change on the scale required to see Xerox lead the world in digital office technology is a big, big job that only the more talented and driven CEOs with a united board have any hope of being able to pull off. Without Xerox top brass being highly motivated in this direction from near the time of PARC's inception, successful commercialisation of PARC's innovations was dead-in-the-water before such innovations were conceived. Even the epic presentation of PARC's incredible digital office at Hollywood production level to the top 250 executives at the Xerox World Conference in Boca Raton, Florida wasn't going to shift the status quo without fundamental corporate change starting well in advance of this lost revelation. I'd recommend Louis V. Gerstner Jr. biography 'Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?' for a description of what it takes to reinvent a huge corporation like this. That is also a very good read.

The 70's and early 80's at PARC were heady days indeed. A zenith in computing research that most likely will never be repeated for reasons that Hiltzik points out in his concluding chapter. Dealers of Lightening is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of computing and especially for Smalltalks. A great book to pass on to mum and dad too to give them some sense of what innovation in computing is all about and where this thing called Smalltalk came from. Anyone interested in Smalltalk should read Dealers of Lightening for the PARC context and Alan Kay's The Early History of Smalltalk for a more in-depth technical perspective.

Now that I've passed Dealers of Lightening on to Michael and David (a fellow Smalltalker at Wizard) I'll have to finish off Waldrop's book. It describes the relatively recent emergence of cross-disciplinary scientific study in the areas of complexity, adaption and emergence (again sorry) in fields from biology to economics to explain phenomena from the emergence of life from a 'primordial soup' to the rise and fall of civilizations! Fascination stuff and great background material for anyone interested in the theory surrounding empirically-based agile software development.