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

by Michael A. Hiltzik

“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 paintbrush and whitewash, someone would set forth his idea or project—whether it was in a formal meeting or a hallway bull session was unimportant—to mobilize a few intrigued colleagues in an attempt to make it happen. If you saw a glimmer of how to implement a new operation in microcode, you would gather a few expert coders in a room and have at the problem until every whiteboard in the place was filled with boxes and arrows and symbols as arcane as Nordic runes. If you had a big project with a lot of soldering to be done, everyone who knew how to wield a soldering gun strapped on his holster. If an idea worked, the team stuck together for the next three or six months to complete the job; if not, everyone simply dispersed like free electrons in search of a new creative valence. Thacker viewed this system as “a continuous form of peer review. Projects that were exciting and challenging receive...