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“People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given. It’s part of the way our nervous system works. But it’s dangerous to take it as a given because then it controls you, rather than the other way around. That’s McLuhan’s insight, one of the bigger ones in the twentieth century. Zen in the twentieth century is about taking things that have been rendered invisible by this process and trying to make them visible again.
“Parents ask me what they should do to help their kids with science. I say, on a walk always take a magnifying glass along. Be a miniature exploratorium….”
At first glance, devoting so much time and money to reproducing a computer available on the open market seemed sheer profligacy. But from Taylor’s point of view, the assignment to produce a real machine had given his engineers a unique opportunity to parse out their own strengths and weaknesses in ways Taylor could never have devised himself. What emerged at the end of the program was a seamless, remarkably powerful unit. “In a small group the dynamics are like those on a good basketball team,” Kay observed. “Everybody has to be able to play the whole game. Each person should have certain
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In the course of one frustrating encounter Kay blurted out the line destined to become his (and PARC’s) unofficial credo. “Look,” he said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it!”
This was also part of Taylor’s scheme. Once accepted into the lab, you were immune to the petty harassments common to university departments. “You were part of the extended family,” related John Shoch, a member of Kay’s lab. “No one ever asked, ‘Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?’” The alternative, Taylor believed, was for one-upmanship to hobble the unfettered exchange of ideas. “If someone tried to push their personality rather than their argument, they’d find that it wouldn’t work.”
“There isn’t an organization newly begun where you don’t find those honeymoon years where there’s a special bond among people,” reflected Jeffers, who recognized the phenomenon from the Peace Corps. “It was true there, it was true in PARC. It’s true in anything that’s new. It’s a great period. Everyone should be a part of something at the beginning.” This atmosphere of professional and personal fellowship was a powerful factor behind some of the center’s earliest projects, including MAXC. They called the process of informal collaboration by the name “Tom Sawyering.” Like Tom with his
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“It was so typical of PARC,” Kay recalled. “If you didn’t know how something was done, you just rolled your own.”
“really a frightening group, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity. The people here all are used to dealing lightning with both hands.”
“They had a system with a million lines of code in it built by a team of people hired off the street,” he said. “The whole thing took four years, and in my experience any project that had those properties had another property, which is it wouldn’t work. I predicted it wouldn’t work and they wouldn’t be able to ship it.”
