Dealers of Lightning Quotes

“We’ve decided to go with black and white,” he said. “This project is over.” Smith was stunned. “You’re crazy!” he blurted. “It’s going to be all color from here on out, and you guys can own it all! I can’t believe you’re shutting it down.” “Well,” Elkind replied evenly, “it’s a corporate decision.” Smith had no choice but to leave. With a fellow artist and Superpaint fanatic, David DiFrancesco, he drove off toward Utah in quest of permission to continue his work on a frame buffer installed at the university there. He failed to get it, but instead received an invitation to set up a video program at the private New York Institute of Technology. The department later transferred en masse to George Lucas’s Lucasfilm and even later was spun off as Pixar,”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Kay remained preoccupied with a lesson he had assimilated from Marshall McLuhan: Once humans shape their tools, they turn around and “reshape us.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“every organization of human beings eventually comes to cherish its own orthodoxies, and PARC was no different.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“the Alto was the first one deliberately designed as a general-purpose “personal” appliance: individualistic and infinitely customizable. The computer was no longer a machine to which man had to adapt, but one endlessly adaptable to every user’s needs.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“inherit the world PARC made.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Xerox had the Alto; IBM launched the Personal Computer. Xerox had the graphical user interface with mouse, icons, and overlapping windows; Apple and Microsoft launched the Macintosh and Windows. Xerox invented What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processing; Microsoft brazenly turned it into Microsoft Word and conquered the office market. Xerox invented the Ethernet; today the battle for market share in the networking hardware industry is between Cisco Systems and 3Com. Even the laser printer is a tainted triumph. Thanks to the five years Xerox dithered in bringing it to market, IBM got there first, introducing its own model in 1975.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“IBM launched its Chess machine, renamed simply the Personal Computer, in August 1981, a scant four months after the Star. Judged against the technology PARC had brought forth, it was a homely and feeble creature. Rather than bitmapped graphics and variable typefaces, its screen displayed only ASCII characters, glowing a hideous monochromatic green against a black background. Instead of a mouse, the PC had four arrow keys on the keyboard that laboriously moved the cursor, character by character and line by line. No icons, no desktop metaphor, no multitasking windows, no e-mail, no Ethernet. Forswearing the Star’s intuitive point-and-click operability, IBM forced its customers to master an abstruse lexicon of typed commands and cryptic responses developed by Microsoft, its software partner. Where the Star was a masterpiece of integrated reliability, the PC had a perverse tendency to crash at random (a character flaw it bequeathed to many subsequent generations of Microsoft Windows-driven machines). But where the Star sold for $16,595-plus, the IBM PC sold for less than $5,000, all-inclusive. Where the Star’s operating system was closed, accessible for enhancement only to those to whom Xerox granted a coded key, the PC’s circuitry and microcode were wide open to anyone willing to hack a program for it—just like the Alto’s. And it sold in the millions.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The Star workstation he shepherded to launch was an amazing accomplishment. Enclosed in a squat beige-colored box which, like its ancestral Alto, slid on casters under a desk, the machine came packed with features no one had ever seen before and few envisioned in a commercial office machine. These included a bitmapped screen (in “muted blue,” as Xerox promotional literature described it at the time), a mouse (“an electronic pointing device”), windowed displays, and “What You See Is What You Get” document preparation. The bundled functions included text processing, a drawing program, the first integrated “help” program, and electronic mail. By far the system’s most striking feature was its graphical user interface, the stylized display that communicated with the user via the bitmapped screen. This arrangement of icons and folders built around what the Star designers called the “desktop metaphor” is so familiar today that it seems to have been a part of computing forever. But its pioneering implementation on the Star included some capabilities that had yet to resurface on the market nearly two decades later. Text, formulas, and graphics could all be edited in the same document. (Compare today’s “integrated” software, in”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Blinded by their own technology, the Star’s designers had been almost entirely unaware of the coming revolution of cheap PCs—the equivalent of scaled-down Altos, as opposed to the scaled-up Star. They did not see it coming until the moment IBM announced its blockbuster. At that point it was too late.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Jobs was waving his arms around, saying, ‘Why hasn’t this company brought this to market? What’s going on here? I don’t get it!”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple’s mythmaking rather than PARC’s. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs’s peerless perspicacity as Xerox’s obtuseness. The author who wrote, “You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery…the slickest trick of all was Apple’s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center” perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at what really happened.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“For a chronicler of PARC this presents a unique difficulty. No anecdote from PARC’s history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. The collective memory of the Jobs visit and of its aftermath is so vivid that some former PARC scientists are no longer sure whether they were there themselves, or just heard about it later. PARC engineers and their guests from Apple disagree with each other (and among themselves) about who delivered which portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado; and whether Steve Jobs was desperate to get a look at PARC’s technology, or so dubious about anything produced by a big corporation that he had to be wheedled into going in the first place.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“They said, ‘We just gave you the 8086 last week! How could you report a bug already?’”, Tesler recalled. But Intel had not reckoned with PARC’s do-it-yourself mentality. Years earlier the lab had purchased a rare million-dollar machine known as a Stitchweld, which could turn out printed circuit boards overnight from a digital schematic prepared on Thacker’s SIL program. “It turned out that no one else using the 8086 had Stitchwelds. Everyone else was going through complicated board designs, so they wouldn’t know for months if there was a bug. But at Xerox we gave them that feedback in a few days.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“*It would be several years before overall activity on the ARPANET significantly surpassed what PARC generated within its own building. As late as 1979 the average daily traffic on the PARC Ethernet, which linked 120 Altos and Dorados, came to fully half what was carried nationwide on the entire ARPANET.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Only years later would scientists again need to harness the power of multiple processors at once, when massively parallel processing would become an integral part of supercomputing. Years later, too, the genealogy of Shoch’s worm would come full circle. Soon after he published a paper about the worm citing The Shockwave Rider, he received a letter from John Brunner himself. It seemed that most science fiction writers harbored an unspoken ambition to write a book that actually predicted the future. Their model was Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, who had become world-famous for forecasting the invention of the geosynchronous communications satellite in an earlier short story. “Apparently they’re all jealous of Arthur Clarke,” Shoch reflected. “Brunner wrote that his editor had sent him my paper. He said he was ‘really delighted to learn, that like Arthur C. Clarke, I predicted an event of the future.’” Shoch briefly considered replying that he had only borrowed the tapeworm’s name but that the concept was his own and that, unfortunately, Brunner did not really invent the worm. But he let it pass.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Nevertheless, they felt a powerful urge to impart their wisdom to their friends at ARPA. Thanks to the legal beagles’ strictures, they were reduced to getting their points across by a weird pantomime of asking inscrutable but cunningly pointed questions. “Somebody would be talking about the design for some element and we’d drop all these hints,” Shoch recalled. “We’d say, ‘You know, that’s interesting, but what happens if this error message comes back, and what happens if that’s followed by a delayed duplicate that was slowed down in its response from a distant gateway when the flow control wouldn’t take it but it worked its way back and got here late? What do you do then?’ There would be this pause and they’d say, ‘You’ve tried this!’ And we’d reply, ‘Hey, we never said that!’” Eventually they managed to communicate enough of Pup’s architecture for it to become a crucial part of the ARPANET standard known as TCP/IP, which to this date is what enables data packets to pass gracefully across the global data network known as the Internet—with a capital “I.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Nevertheless, they felt a powerful urge to impart their wisdom to their friends at ARPA. Thanks to the legal beagles’ strictures, they were reduced to getting their points across by a weird pantomime of asking inscrutable but cunningly pointed questions. “Somebody would be talking about the design for some element and we’d drop all these hints,” Shoch recalled. “We’d say, ‘You know, that’s interesting, but what happens if this error message comes back, and what happens if that’s followed by a delayed duplicate that was slowed down in its response from a distant gateway when the flow control wouldn’t take it but it worked its way back and got here late? What do you do then?’ There would be this pause and they’d say, ‘You’ve tried this!’ And we’d reply, ‘Hey, we never said that!”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“That’s because many of them had been secretaries—users of the equipment. These guys, maybe they punched a button on a copier one time in their lives, but they had someone else do their typing and their filing. So we were trying to sell to people who really had no concept of the work this equipment was actually accomplishing. “It didn’t register in my mind at that event, but that was the loudest and clearest signal we ever got of how much of a problem we were going to have getting Xerox to understand what we had.” There was at least one other harbinger of the coming letdown. Toward the end of the evening McColough, Kearns, and a few of the executive staff materialized in the demo room. Their appearance had been prearranged. “They were there to have an opportunity to say, ‘Well, now we’re going to do something, guys,’” Ellenby recalled. “But they didn’t take that opportunity. They just said, ‘Thank you.’ “I was expecting a bit more than that,” he said. “We’d developed a camaraderie that was quite unusual. My people felt pumped up and hyped, like a sporting team. Instead what we got was, ‘Thanks, boys, the war is over, and you can take your horses back.’” Thus did the doubts surface almost before the euphoria of a flawless demonstration had a chance to run its course. Despite McColough’s ringing re-endorsement of “the architecture of information,” his and Kearns’s equivocal farewell told Ellenby and his team that they were naïve to think Xerox would exploit this technology anytime soon. And in this beleaguered and distracted corporation, Ellenby knew, time was the enemy.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“On August 18 the word processing task force, reversing itself under pressure from McCardell and others, declared the 850 the official Xerox word processor. As a Xerox product, the Alto III was dead.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“But instead of accepting the office task force’s recommendation that Xerox throw its weight behind the Alto III, he pushed his own new machine, another nonprogrammable word processor called the Xerox 850—essentially a typewriter with enough memory in it to hold a few pages of a business letter long enough to be proofread.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“That July, Xerox’s Display Word Processing Task Force endorsed the plan. For a few short, glorious weeks, official Xerox policy was to service the growing market for electronic word processing with the Alto III, a programmable personal computer that would bear the same relationship to the competition’s glorified typewriters as a Harley does to a tricycle. Ellenby’s group was on target to engineer an inexpensive computer-cum-word processor and printing system for shipment to customers by mid-1978. Had it done so, Xerox would have beaten the IBM PC to market by three years—with an infinitely more sophisticated machine. But it was not to happen. Bob Potter was not on board and never would be.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The final irony came in 1983, when the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded a technical Emmy jointly to Dick Shoup and Xerox Corporation in recognition of Superpaint’s role as a pioneering technology of video animation. Shoup went to the ceremony in New York, where he sat at the honorees’ table with his invited guest Alvy Ray Smith and a nameless functionary dispatched by headquarters to accept the award on the company’s behalf.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The occasion was the broadcast of a television program about the artistic avant-garde entitled Supervisions, which was produced by the Los Angeles public television station KCET. Smith’s and Shoup’s work on Superpaint had started to win wide notice outside PARC, thanks in part to a tape called “Vidbits” which Smith had compiled from clips of his best work for playing to artists’ gatherings all around California. After one such showing, KCET commissioned the two of them to supply some brief color-cycling effects for Supervisions. They had scrupulously insisted that the producers give Xerox screen credit, assuming that the parent company would appreciate the honor. Instead, Taylor marched into the video lab a day or two after the broadcast and buttonholed Smith. “Xerox wants their logo off every piece of tape,” he said. “Right now.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“They had scrupulously insisted that the producers give Xerox screen credit, assuming that the parent company would appreciate the honor.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Here entered Lampson’s other important objection to Superpaint: He was constitutionally unable to imagine color contributing anything other than window-dressing to the office of the future. Something so trivial, he argued, might just as well be ignored until it was not merely cheap, but free.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“color contributing anything other than window-dressing to the office of the future. Something so trivial, he argued, might just as well be ignored until it was not merely cheap, but free.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The machine was called Superpaint. It deserves a place in history as the only invention too farsighted even for PARC’s Computer Science Lab. And all because it thought in color.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The PARC user interface, with its overlapping windows, mouse clicks, and pop-up menus, had entered computing history.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“Smalltalk would make Kay’s reputation more than Ingalls’s, but Kay never forgot who transformed it from idea to reality. “Nobody would ever have heard of me,” he said later, “if it wasn’t for Dan Ingalls.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age