Fumbling the Future Quotes

“Xerox was spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on research, development, and engineering. Yet there was no one, literally, in top management who had ever run a product development program,”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“Dallas turned out to grow a culture that was completely orthogonal to, and independent of, the digital world in general and PARC in particular.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“A wasteful, even silly, contest for technical prowess ensued. At one point, for example, researchers in Palo Alto heard that their Dallas counterparts had fashioned a hand-held input device like the mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart and improved at PARC. Dallas called its tool “the cat.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“If Xerox had asked Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and their colleagues to design a cost-reduced, market-ready computer system, the people who had invented the technology in the first place stood ready to provide it.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“Yet McColough, who had funded PARC’s creation of the Alto system, remained uninvolved while the management machinery of Xerox—the decision systems, the prevailing prejudices, the reigning executives—conspired to keep the company’s great accomplishment a secret from the world.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“We hired people with fire in their eyes,” said one lab member, while another noted, “The people here all have track records and are used to dealing with lightning in both hands.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“David, I feel like the fucking Road Runner. Your corporate staff is like a pack of coyotes. They spend all their time setting traps, trying to get me.” Massaro’s Office Products Division adopted the Road Runner cartoon character as their mascot.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“According to Lampson, this contributed to the “perfect system” syndrome. The Star, he says, “had a lot more innovation than necessary. It’s the natural thing for engineers to do when they’re not constrained. And they were not constrained.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience…. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him.”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

“You’ve got to understand the essential need to do this kind of thing,” stresses Taylor. “If you’re going to use what somebody else is building, you better have some sense of what it’s like because it’s not going to work very well the first time or the second time or the third time. It was vitally important that, since everyone was going to use the system, they had to hear from the people that were designing its bits and pieces what those bits and pieces were like, and how they were going to fit together. And that would generate tons of questions. ‘How am I going to do X, if you’re building Y? How does Y that you’re building fit with Ζ that he’s building?”
― Douglas K. Smith, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer