July Meeting Preview

During the 1970s, Xerox Corp. attracted many top computer scientists to a laboratory known as PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Given generous funding and the freedom to innovate, this team developed many of the ideas that drive today's computer systems: bitmapped displays, laser printers, local area networks, the mouse, the desktop metaphor, icons, WYSIWYG editing, overlapping and popup windows...the list goes on.
    Despite its historical significance, few books have attempted to chronicle this exciting effort. The best known was Smith & Alexander's Fumbling the Future. A recent entry is Dealers of Lightning, by Michael Hiltzik, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.
    Hiltzik's effort surpasses all other accounts I've seen. He breathes life into each of the major players in the drama, providing just enough background to make them real. He successfully captures the excitement of innovation, the conflicts of cultures, and, ultimately, the frustration of seeing Xerox fail to capitalize on what they had built.
    I confess that I have an abnormal interest in this subject. From 1976 to 1979 I worked for Xerox, attempting to design and develop the first commercial product based on the results of PARC's innovation. 

I used many of the prototype systems described in Dealers of Lightning, and I knew many of the people Hiltzik describes. His characterizations strike me as dead-on (and more insightful than my own). He accurately captures the internal conflicts of a company attempting to move from a near-monopoly in the office copier business to the forefront of the fast-moving technology field.
    If you read Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, you understand how a great writer can get his readers caught up in the seemingly dull business of computer development (in that case, Data General minicomputers). Dealers of Lightning applies a similar treatment to a group of computer scientists that had far greater influence on the computers we use today. (It seems interesting that some of PARC's most influential work predated or was concurrent with the effort described in Soul.)
   If you have any interest in computer history, I highly recommend Dealers of Lightning. If you're not sure, try browsing a few pages at your bookstore. I think you'll be hooked.

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