Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

by Michael A. Hiltzik

PARC was founded by men whose experience had taught them that the only way to get the best research was to hire the best researchers they could find and leave them unburdened by directives, instructions, or deadlines.

“Most of the time I was there ARPA was going for projects with an order-of-magnitude impact on the state of the science,” he reflected. “We had made a decision that we would not go for incremental things. But as soon as you get mission orientation you’re focusing on very narrow objectives.”

He said we should decide never to make something at PARC that isn’t engineered for a hundred users.

“A Class Two disagreement is when each can explain to the other’s satisfaction the other’s point of view. Class Two disagreements enable people to work together even when they disagree. Class One is destructive. Most disturbances and international crises and most of the pain and suffering and difficulty in the world are based on Class One disagreements.

The word derived from “mung,” MIT hacker slang that meant “Mash Until No Good” and signified the making of large, permanent, and (generally) malicious changes to a computer file.

No corporate lab exists today that resembles the PARC of the 1970s and 1980s, not even the PARC of the 1990s, where great advances are being made in physics, information science, and graphic technologies. There are several reasons for this, some having to do with the life cycle of technological change. For the science of computing is no longer at the historic inflection point it occupied at the start of the 1970s, when every step on the road of discovery was the equivalent of a giant leap into a new world.

A more important reason, however, is that the corporate landscape has changed, perhaps inalterably. No company, no matter how wealthy, dares devote even a fraction of its wealth to a search for knowledge that may not produce a return to the bottom line, as Xerox did.