Our Editorship changes hands, we learn more about a new way to connect with each other, and we hear how our shareware will be there for everyone on the World Wide Web. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times includes us on his tour for his book, Dealers of Lighting, about the evolution of personal computing technology. Meanwhile the FBI was paying us a stealthy virtural visit.

Sacpcug Listserv .

Noting the many hands raised to show they didn't know about our email service, Frank devoted some time to it. Our Listar service is generically known as a Listserv. He noted that the Listserv has been slow as of late because not much information was changing hands. He asked for another show of hands as to how many members had signed up. About a dozen raised their hands.

"For those who don't know what Listserv is," Frank explained, "it is like a membership group of messages. When you join a Listserv, you become a member of a group of messages that get sent out, sometimes once a day, sometimes once a week. Some can drop 50 messages a day on you. Others you may not hear from more than once or twice a month." A Listserv is always about some topic of common interest to the subscribers who log on via computer modem to an ISP (Internet service provider).

Frank acknowledged CalWeb.com as the ISP which handles our mail, thanking them for this free service they provide for us. The software they use is called Listar. He went on to explain how it worked. "When somebody sends a message to the Listserv - say I were to send a message - everybody that is a member of that Listserv would immediately get that message. It would be sent to their mailbox. If 2 or 3 or 4 people sent a message to that Listserv, they would be rounded up for that day and sent out in a digest form the very next day." A subscriber can also receive individual messages. "The purpose is to share information," Frank explained.

Frank spoke of the usefulness of our Listserv with an example. "You might have a problem with your Seagate hard drive, and might post a message with the symptoms and problems you've been having, and everybody who gets that message will see it." Someone with some help for that could reply, he continued. "It is an excellent way to get a lot of information out to a lot of people in a short amount of time."

"If, after joining, you decide a particular Listserv is not for you, it is a simple matter to un-subscribe in the same method you subscribed. We have flyers that have the information on exactly how to subscribe. You need to have an email address to join, and that's about all you need. You send a message to listserv, or Listar, at CalWeb.com, and that message would just have the one line: Subscribe, space, SPCUG, space, and then your email address."

PC Jamboree

"We have a PC extravaganza coming up in September, something we have never done before. It will be on a Saturday, and there is a lot of details about it. We haven't firmed up everything about it, but we have firmed up that it will be around noon, on Saturday. Edwin Holloway has done the most work on it, and I'd like him to come up and tell you about it."

"We have handouts on the PC Extravaganza," Edwin said in a brief statement, "and as the flyers say, it will be September 18^th at the Access Sacramento Facility. We will be putting a note up on our Web site to let you know more about it and to get more information. You can contact me at edwin@calweb.com." The event has the potential of a regular event for the user group.

"I hope to have a PC Clinic there," Frank added. "If you have a problem with your computer and it looks expensive to fix, bring it down and we'll have a group of experts who will try to fix it. And we hope to have some classes taught by experts on beginning the Internet, possibly advanced Internet, possibly tips and tricks for Win 98 and 95, that sort of thing. I'm really hoping this takes off well."

The Shareware Scene

Frank brought up Brian Smither, the user group's shareware librarian. Along with other developments in the users group, the shareware library is encountering its growing pains too, and shareware librarian Brian Smither doing his best to keep up with the changes.

Virtual Shareware Library. "On the Web site, we're planning to put what is called a virtual shareware library," Brian announced. Sacpcug.org will now have page of links where computer users can download their own copy of the programs. It was the group's hope that copies of these shareware programs could be downloaded from sacpcug.org, much like they were from Sacra Bytes BBS. But that would impose an additional 150 Mb overhead on CalWeb, whose generosity is already beyond the call of duty. As in the past, the software is evaluated and approved to be part of the library. The older software not available on current links is still available form our physical library.

The Zip Collection. Brian has received inquiries about a way to get the entire library in one collection. He is undertaking an experiment to offer the library on a Zip disk. Because of size limitations, some of the older programs won't be included. He'll be there at the next meeting with some initial copies. It will cost members $15 for the initial disk. Updated editions can be obtained with the exchange of the prior disk plus $5.

Class-Action Benefit. You may be a beneficiary of a class-action lawsuit against Iomega. If you are an original owner of Iomega's DittoMax tape backup unit (including Sony's StorStation), you may view Iomega's website (www.iomega.com) and find the link for "legal issues and lawsuits." Iomega made claims that the DittoMax would read and write QIC tape formats when those units clearly could not. Full details are on Iomega's Web site, including the resolution before the court.

Editorship Transition

"Next on our list is Eric Butow, our editor," Frank said. "I'm not a parent, so I don't know what it's like for one of your children to get married and know that you've lost something, but you've gained something. And I guess that's the situation we're in now, and I'll let Eric explain."

"Thank you, Frank," Eric said, stepping onto the stage. "This is my last report to you as editor of Sacra Blue - that must be what we're losing," saying that we'll have a new editor to heckle for your volunteer help. "That must be what we're gaining. It's been two and a half years and doesn't seem like that amount of time has gone by. We've seen a lot of changes in that time, and one of them is this meeting room here," referring to the present site of the meetings at the Sacramento Area Realtor's building.

On-line Migration. "It's been a very interesting experience, I can tell you that. We've gone from a 64-page magazine down to a 32-page slick gloss magazine with an on-line complement called eBlue. I think you probably noticed that eBlue was online when you got your issue of Sacra Blue. The good news is that even though we are losing Dave Eden, Stan Morris tells me that we are getting plenty of applicants to help out, not only with the Web site, but with eBlue as well. So I think that both will be in good hands. Of course, Dave Eden is going to be moving on. He is the president of our Davis Chapter for now, so he's not going away, but he is stepping aside and it looks like we have a lot of good things coming up with Brian Smither putting the software library on our Web site, and a lot of other exciting possibilities down the road.

Talented Person Available. "I am now somewhat free, as this is my last duty as editor of Sacra Blue. And yesterday I became unemployed! So now I am free in almost every sense of the word. I will find something to keep myself occupied and keep the money rolling in. If you have any questions for me regarding Sacra Blue, let me know. I can help, or pass you on to Chris Graillat, our new editor.

"Chris is the ninth editor of Sacra Blue. She comes from the Bureau of State Audits at California State Government, where she works full time now, and we are really excited to have her aboard. Dion Gomez is our new associate editor, and they will be working closely to bring you Sacra Blue with all the high quality you have come to know and expect. So Chris, heckle away!" said Eric, as he brought Chris on stage.

Chris' Appeal. "Thanks. I guess I'd like to start off by thanking Eric, again, for his 30 issues of Sacra Blue. I know, just from the little experience I've had, that it takes a lot of devotion to get an issue out, so he really deserves all the praise he gets.

"I'm pleased that Dion is going to help me. Dion has his own printing business, so he has a lot of expertise in this kind of thing. I think I'm lucky too. I'd like to have Sacra Blue bring you the kinds of things that you want, so I think one of the first tasks I have in front of me is to get a survey together to find out just what you want in a magazine. And volunteer help is always appreciated, so if anyone is interested in writing a certain column for the magazine, please get in touch with me. I look forward to being your editor and hopefully it will be a really good experience for all of us."

"Okay, so it was a poor analogy," admitted Frank. "We're not really getting married. It is, however, a big deal for us to lose an editor and bring a new editor on board. This organization thrives on Sacra Blue, and I think you all understand that. We thrive on this publication far more than any other organization I know of. So that's a key role, and I have high hopes for Chris and the publication.

Frank seemed to be making a shift from the usual business agenda. "You remember Larry Clark," he's the guy I took over from. He has some information to pass on."

"One of our past female editors married her predecessor," beamed Larry. "So Eric, there's still hope for you!"

An Acknowledgment for Eric. "I probably derived the greatest benefit from Eric's editorship," Larry said, more seriously. "I was president for 24 of the 30 months that Eric edited Sacra Blue, and I knew I could always count on him to deliver a great-looking magazine. Considering some of the other problems we had to deal with during those two years, it was a great relief to me not to have to worry about Sacra Blue.

"I've been both president and editor, and I know Tony Barcellos will agree the president's job is a piece of cake compared to editing. Eric and I had a few differences during that time, but I doubt anyone did more for the group during my term than he did. If you don't attend Steering Committee meetings, you can't appreciate all the projects Eric was involved in above and beyond the editing process.

"And so we really want to recognize him with this plaque. This commemorates not only his 30 months of editorship, but his many other services to the group. The left side of the plaque bears the actual original printing plate used to print the final issue of his term, and on the right side is an inscription which he may actually choose to read.

"Thank you very much," said Eric, visibly humbled. "It says: 'Presented to Eric Butow, editor-in-chief, in appreciation of 30 outstanding issues of Sacra Blue, February 1997 to July 1999, from the SPCUG.'

"This is very touching. There is a blank space on my wall that this just perfectly fills. Thank you very much. It's been an honor and a privilege serving you. I hope to get involved with the group in some other way in coming months. We'll see what happens now that I'm a free agent. I want to thank Larry for all his support, and to thank all the people, writers, advertisers, staffers, everybody, who helped make Sacra Blue what it is. They should be congratulated with a round of applause as much as I am. (Hearty applause.)

A Newsletter Award. As Eric and Larry left the stage, Frank continued with still another kudos. "Two weeks ago I went to the (United States) Southwest User Group conference. There were 217 people there, representing about 50 different user groups. Of those user groups, we were allowed to enter a contest for Web page and the magazine. I'm pleased to tell you that our magazine placed fourth."

Upcoming Events

Frank introduced technologist Milt Hull. "Let's hear from Milt on upcoming presentations. Milt also sets up all our audio-visual equipment and gets it ready for you. You may not realize that Milt is usually here about 5:30 to get everything set up.

More freebies. "It's a tough job," smiled Milt. "Just listening to Frank - he hit on a couple of things that I thought I'd tell you. By volunteering for this organization, you actually get free software. So feel free to volunteer. Speaking of free software, in tonight's giveaway of Microsoft Vizact 2000, is a copy of Internet Explorer 5!" It sure beats waiting for it to download.

"For tonight's meeting we are supposed to have a crime expert from the FBI, who may be here in stealth or not here at all." Milt's eyes rolled slightly. "We also have Michael Hiltzik, and I'll present him later. We are selling his book on, among other things, Xerox Parc, and you might be able to get him to autograph the book!

August Topics. "Next month we have high speed connections, different technologies of it. I asked to Pacific Bell to talk to us about DSL technologies. And there are cable modems, microwaves, satellite links. Satellites are an interesting topology. You actually use it for downloading, you can't use it for uploading, so you still have to use a telephone line for uploading, but most of the time you're downloading anyway, so it might be a possibility.

Falling Topics. In September we'll be talking about wireless networking. We'll have ShareWave. They are using radio signals, and JVC uses infrared signals. In October we have Jim Lauderback. I have a bet going on as to if he'll show up. I've offered him before and he never showed up. And also WildFire. They have the go-back utility software. In November, the month of COMDEX, the SETI people will be here, the ones who have that screen saver that actually sends data and computes back and forth if you are connected on the Internet. It does distributed computing. Since it is COMDEX, that's when I look for speakers to set up for the next year.

Michael Hiltzik's discourse on the advent of personal computer technology easily held us spellbound throughout his talk. He shares both his interesting experiences in the research of it and his illuminating findings about it. They are covered in his new book, The Dealers of Lightning (Harper, 1999). The following is the text of his talk to the users' group, edited only for clarity and ease of reading.

What I'm pitching tonight is a history that happens to be of a lot of things you all are seeing and using every day. It helps to know the history of this technology and how difficult it actually is to bring a great idea and a great innovation to the commercial marketplace. This is something the greatest scientists and engineers that I got to know that were at Xerox PARC had a lot of trouble with, as Xerox did, clearly. And it is a problem that has yet to be solved, whether we are talking about companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems or Adobe or what-have-you. It is the question of technology transfer.

Where it all began. I'm always tempted, when asked to talk about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), to entitle my speech The Myths of PARC. That's because what people really know about the place falls into that category. Of course, I'm not talking about the fact that so much of what we take for granted today in terms of our personal technology was invented at Xerox PARC, because that is much is quite true. Xerox PARC invented the personal computer as we know it. They called it the Alto. Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface, including What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get functionality, and the use of the mouse as a command device. Xerox PARC invented the laser printer, the Ethernet, and the IP portion of TCP/IP. This is the technical protocol that converted the old ARPANET - which was the government computer network - into the Internet. And yet balancing all these truths are a number of misunderstandings about Xerox PARC's relationship with its parent company. And this is the aspect that goes to the really interesting part of the story, which is the tough issue of technology transfer, how great inventions get into the commercial world and become the things that we need to have.

Lunch with Jobs. To illustrate that, I'd like to tell a story about Steve Jobs and how he unwittingly inspired me to write this book. The occasion was a lunch that we held for him at the Los Angeles Times back in September of 1996. I had just returned from an assignment overseas - I had been overseas for about six years - and had been asked to come back and take over our technology column at the (Los Angeles Times) paper. I cadged an interview with Jobs so I could pump him for answers to some of the burning technological-industrial questions of the day. Today these seem quaint. I was going to ask him about Microsoft versus Netscape, and what he thought of the impending death of the Apple computer company.

The problem I ran into was that Steve refused to answer any of my questions. All he wanted to do was talk about his new company, Pixar, which had just released Toy Story, a "megahit," in fact he brought with him to the lunch John Rassiter, the director, and Ed Cadmul, who was the Chief Technical Officer of Pixar, and who was responsible for all of the computer graphics technology. So every time I raised my hand to ask him a question about one of these great issues, he'd push back from his vegetarian meal, put his arms out so he was touching the shoulders of his two compadres, and say, "All that stuff is ancient history to me. The great thing is about being involved in Pixar is that I'm never going to have to be involved with Apple again for the rest of my life." (Laughter) That's just one of many examples I'm going to cite tonight as proof that, in the computer business, sometimes you just don't know nothin'.

What did happen during that lunch is that Jobs mentioned that Ed Cadmul, his CTO, was a distinguished graduate of a university - which I'd thought of as an academic backwater - the University of Utah. But as it turned out, Utah was a hotbed of very high-grade computer graphics research at the time. Thanks to a grant and some programs from ARPA. Jobs began running down the names of some of the people who had been there, and it was a really distinguished list. John Warnot , the founder of Adobe; Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and now Healthion ; Allan Kay , an Apple Fellow and a great visionary who is now at Disney.

Among the people who had taught or administered there was Bob Taylor, who at ARPA had created and funded the ARPANET. Sorry, Al Gore, it was really Bob Taylor who invented the Internet. Of course, as Jobs pointed out, all of these people had gone on from Utah to work at Xerox PARC. So that gave me one last chance, and I mentioned that I had heard the story of how Steve Jobs had gotten himself a demo of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC, at a famous moment, and turned what he had seen into the GUI for the Lisa and Macintosh. So I asked if he had any thoughts on why he thought Xerox had been unable to make any money off these great inventions. Well, talk about a straight line! For the next 20 minutes nobody at the table could get a word in edgewise. Steve Jobs was like a whirlwind. He'd clearly thought long and hard about this question, and has plenty to say about where he thought Xerox had gone wrong. Meanwhile, I was thinking that anything that could get him talking about something that (a), wasn't himself, (b), wasn't his vision, and (c), wasn't his company - had to be pretty interesting. (Laughter) I decided to pursue this idea of writing about this mysterious and uncanny place.

The Myths. When I started researching the subject by talking to people who had actually been at Xerox PARC, I got two equal and opposite reactions. Half of them said it's about time someone told this story really well, which put a certain amount of pressure on me, and the other reaction was, is there anything really new to say about Xerox PARC? The problem was that while everyone knew the basic story: "Xerox had today's technology, was too dumb to do anything with it, and fumbled the future." That was a caricature of what really happened there. I mention this because one of the people who accepts this version of things and is actually a great proselytizer of this version, is Steve Jobs. And in fact, much of what he said at the LA Times lunch that day was absolutely wrong.

Myth #1: Xerox made no money from PARC. Wrong. In fact, the company has made millions of dollars from one invention alone, the laser printer.

Myth #2: Xerox cared so little about PARC that it didn't even bother to patent its inventions. Now this would come as a great surprise to the team of three patent attorneys who were on the premises almost from its inception. But at any rate, the Ethernet was patented, the laser printer was patented, the Alto personal computer was protected by four patents, and in fact Xerox always understood very well what it had at PARC.

How about this one: Xerox never commercialized the PARC personal computer. Wrong. In fact, the company had mounted a five-year, multibillion dollar program to turn the Alto into an office product. And it succeeded! That product, which some of you may have seen at some point, was called the Xerox Star. It was introduced in April 1981, to massive critical acclaim, but its problem wasn't Xerox's stupidity, but something else. Four months later, IBM introduced its own personal computer. The IBM was inferior in almost every detail: it wasn't graphical, wasn't networked, didn't come bundled with a suite of integrated graphical programs. But where the Star cost $16,500 per workstation - and was aimed at a market of procurement officers of the Fortune 500 companies - the IBM PC cost less than $5,000 and was aimed at the individual market. And that created a milestone in history that no one, not even IBM, anticipated.

The Facts. I don't want to come off sounding like an apologist for Xerox. As I tried to make clear in my book, much of Xerox's handling of PARC's technology was ham-handed, and even hostile. This was a company beset by political warfare on the inside, and economic crisis on the outside. It probably couldn't have made much of PARC's technology even if it wanted to. On the other hand, I think the myths about Xerox and PARC often keep us from talking about what Xerox did right with PARC. Let's go into this a little bit.

First, Xerox did something that very few other large corporations have had the courage to do in recent years. It hired a group of talented scientists, and told them to go forth and do whatever they wanted. When PARC was launched, its first director, George Pake , specifically told Xerox management that they shouldn't expect a single marketable product to come out of that lab for at least five years, maybe ten. He insisted on hiring whomever he wanted, and paying them well over Xerox scale; he refused to allow his scientists to be saddled with deadlines or productivity requirements. He refused to allow them to be reassigned to work on copier development, even though that was manifestly the central business of his employer.

Of course, Xerox didn't get what it expected from all of this. It got one of the greatest collection of research scientists since Edison dined alone, to coin a phrase, but this was not a Xerox-style group. The company by that time had a stern culture of white shirts and ties. These guys were taking to working barefoot and in their undershirts. They grew beards, and weren't above partaking in the recreational drugs of the era, sometimes even in the building. Now how far they were from the traditional Xerox culture was illustrated by one of my favorite anecdotes from those years. This happened when they allowed a writer from nowhere else but Rolling Stone to wander the hallways of PAC, unbeknownst to Xerox headquarters. The writer was Stewart Brand, who you may know from Whole Earth Catalog fame. And while he was walking around, looking at what these guys were doing, they were filling him with all sorts of mischievous talk about how they were going to invent the kind of technology that was going to bring down the corporate state. You can only imagine how this went over in the hallways at headquarters (laughter) over in Stanford, Connecticut, especially since it was getting published, with photographs, in a magazine that the Xerox old guard was inclined to think of as a drug-culture rag.

The Original Clone. On the other hand, this was an incredibly resourceful group from an engineering standpoint. When they needed a mainframe computer to start their work - and Xerox refused to buy them the one they asked for, because it was manufactured by a competitor - they cloned one. They did it themselves, without reverse-engineering the original, and they did it at a fraction of the cost of buying one.

When an office relocation put Gary Starkweather, who was working on the invention of the laser printer, into a building a mile away from his partner, Ron Ryder, who was writing the printer driver software, the two of them simply went up to their rooftops and put lasers and mirrors into a set of off-the-shelf telescopes, aimed them at one another, and cobbled together what has to be the world's first infra-red data link. (Laughter.) Starkweather told me the whole setup cost about $300.

Yet it is important to keep in mind that very little that came out of the computer systems science labs was radically new technology, in the sense that the atom bomb was new technology in 1945. When the lab first came together in 1971, one of the first things they did was make a sort of survey of all the off-the-shelf technology that was in existence, and laid them out for their bosses in a series of white papers. Although most of what they read about was unavailable to the average consumer, all of it at least had already been invented. We're talking about lasers, semiconductor memory, high-quality display screens, and much more. But before PARC, no one had figured out how to assemble these things into systems and devices that would actually enhance the way we live and work. (Our italics)

Now this leads to one of the aspects that I think made PARC unique. Its scientists always remained highly focused on creating devices for ordinary people to use. Now this is different from extending Xerox's product line, they were still making copiers, but they were harnessing together all the technologies they had at hand, so that they weren't just engineers building systems that other engineers would love.

Everyday workers. When Larry Tesler and Tim Mott were designing Gypsy, the interface for PARC's word processor - which was then known as Bravo and today is known as Microsoft Word (laughter) - they made an unprecedented effort to go out and observe how ordinary office workers would actually use writing and editing software. They did this at a Xerox publishing subsidiary in Boston known as Guinn and Company, which I recall as publishing some of the primers that I used in first grade. If you want to know why, to this day, the terminology in word processing programs, of selecting and moving text is known as cut and paste, the reason is that Tesler and Mott had watched the editors at Guinn do exactly that with scissors and paste pots on the manuscripts in their office, and they simply transferred over the exact same activity to a high-tech computer.

The credo that PARC was building systems for the ordinary led directly to several other radical ideas. Radical at the time. One was that the single most important purposes of the central processing unit in a computer was to drive a visual display. Why? Because the sense organ that provides the greatest bandwidth into the human brain is the eyeball. It's hard for us now to conceive how ridiculous most engineers considered the idea that you would devote three-fourths of a computer's memory, and two-thirds of the computing cycles to driving a display. But to Bob Taylor and his engineers at PARC, there was scarcely any point in running a computer unless it communicated with its user interactively in a visual sense. Today that notion seems mundane, then it was heretical. But PARC was the first lab to really internalize the lessons of Moore's Law. They understood that if the memory needed to drive a full-screen display would cost $7,000 in 1972, when they were doing it, it might only be $3,500 in 1982, ten years later. And as Bob Taylor put it, that's great. That gives us ten years to figure out how to use it. (Laughter)

So the sub text of everything that was done in Xerox PARC in those years was to bring the computer down to human scale. It was no longer going to be a demigod of a timesaving system in a computing room; it was going to be on everyone's desk. And what really tells us how successful they were, is to recognize how little the computing paradigm that they invented has changed in 27 years. They had a personal computer with a high-quality display and a graphical user interface, linked by network, to printers, file servers, and other peripherals. In fact, one of the most common remarks I heard from the engineers I interviewed was that they were amazed that they were still working on the same system they had invented in 1973. Nothing had really changed!

Sunset PARC. Now, the conditions that existed at Xerox PARC could not have lasted indefinitely, and indeed they didn't. PARC was so independent that their independence sowed the seeds of its own arrogance. Over time it grew not closer to the culture of Xerox, but farther apart. It was inevitable, and I think even natural, that the first generation of researchers there would grow frustrated and take their inventions out into the world themselves. So we have come full circle back to some of the ideas I started out with. The myths of Xerox PARC. There's an image of the company as a company uniquely bumbling at exploiting a new technology. It's certainly an inviting one; it could almost have come from Hollywood. Cast the corporation as a big, dumb villain. And the record is certainly damning. Xerox had the Alto, but IBM launched the personal computer revolution. Xerox had the graphical user interface, with mouse, icons, and overlapping windows, but it was Apple and Microsoft that launched the Macintosh and Windows operating system. Xerox invented WYSIWYG, Microsoft brazenly turned it into Microsoft Word and conquered the office market with it. Xerox invented the Ethernet; today it is not a factor in the battle for a market share in the networking hardware business. That's Cisco and 3Comm. Even the laser printer is a tainted triumph, thanks to the five years Xerox dithered in bringing it to market, so IBM got there first.

Nor is there any question that many of the decisions that Xerox executives made about what to do with PARC technology were short-sighted and politically inspired. My favorite such story dates from 1975 when a Xerox executive named Jim O'Neil, who had come from Ford, vetoed the sale of five prototype laser printers to Lawrence Livermore Lab. Now that was a sale that would have turned the printer from a prototype into a commercial sensation. But O'Neil was concerned that the contract might cost Xerox $150,000 over a five-year term. That's at a time when the company's profits were running at about $350 million a year. Yet, for all that, to chalk up the mixed fate of PARC technology purely to Xerox's blundering is misleading. It encourages others to believe that the commercializing of advanced new technologies is easy, providing only that a company has the will to do it. It encourages people to think that a company's early domination of a high-tech market will reward it with unassailable competitive positions for decades to come. It presupposes that a company should invariably be able to recoup its investments and all its basic research. And that's a mind set that I think is to lead to not more effective corporate-funded basic research, but simply to less of it.

Let's return to Steve Jobs. In the course of the PBS Triumph of the Nerds, he said the following, and I quote: "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. It could have been, you know, a company ten times its size. It could have been IBM. Could have been the IBM of the 90s, could have been the Microsoft of the 90s."

But let's look at the companies that at one time or another actually did dominate the personal computing industry. IBM - the IBM PC became the industry standard almost instantly upon its introduction, but as of now IBM's market share in desktop personal computing is approaching the asterisk size. Apple's Macintosh, the most successful commercial expression of PARC's design, was launched in 1983, by 1985 was the world's most popular personal computer. Far from parlaying that advantage to a lasting franchise, until very recently Apple's very existence was in doubt, and who knows, it may still be.

Anyone remember Leading Edge? Kaypro? Atari? Wang? Commodore? AT&T? Sony and Exxon - all tried to grab a share of the PC market by throwing their muscle behind the packaging of cutting edge technology and all suffered embarrassing flops. Clearly, it would not have become easy for Xerox, under any conditions, to become "the Microsoft of the 90s." Now, what about Microsoft? Not even Microsoft is without challenges that may make it someday a wounded giant. If you saw the front page of the Wall Street Journal today you saw a story on how software is migrating online. That's a challenge to Microsoft's domination, not to mention the antitrust case, the appearance of new platforms in which its domination is less than absolute. In fact, whether Microsoft is going to be the Microsoft of the 90s - I don't think we'll know until well after the turn of the millennium.

It seems to me that if you survey history, corporations are seldom able to remake themselves as thoroughly as Xerox would have had to do to become a computer company. And you know what? That's not bad. That's good. New technology needs to be exploited by new companies, so that new visions and new ways of thinking get applied. But to put it another way, aren't we lucky Xerox failed? Would we really have wanted this entire computer paradigm, hardware and software, personal computers and the Ethernet, file servers and print servers, to remain under the patented control of a single company that viewed its market not as you and me, but as Fortune 500 companies? Would this technology have advanced very much further than it has? Would it have reached its market faster? And what about the researchers at PARC? It was frustration with the stultifying regime of the large company that led John Warnok and Chuck Eshky to quit Xerox PARC. They founded Adobe. The vision of the millions of dollars to be made by selling Ethernet hardware led Bob Metcalf, the inventor of Ethernet, to quit Xerox PARC. He founded 3Comm. Larry Tessler and Bob Belville quit Xerox PARC - they moved to Apple and helped to design the first Lisa and the Macintosh. Charles Simone took the word processing program he had invented and called Bravo to a little 40-person company in Washington state and turned it into Word. In fact, scores of Xerox PARC refugees who left the huge corporation are among the first generation of entrepreneurs who helped create the phenomenon known as Silicon Valley. And that, I think, is the real legacy of Xerox PARC. And I think we should embrace it. Thanks. (Applause)

Q: Question (about intellectual property)

A: Yes, well, in fact there is a famous moment when Apple was suing Microsoft. Xerox was watching that lawsuit very carefully, and in fact, as you know, there is a legend which I think is true, that Bill Gates said to Jobs: What are you doing? Don't you know, we both stole it from Xerox? (Laughter) So you are right; that was a horse that was not going to finish, and in fact, it got thrown out of court, and not because they stole it from Xerox, but because the prevailing legal judgement at that time was that software could not be patented and the look and feel of software, which was what that issue was, could not be patented or protected.

Q: If you believe that PARC did move the industry forward in a quantum leap, we have PARC still existing, more or less, we have Bell Labs, IBM Yorktown Heights, many of the major companies had their research labs, but nobody seems to have put together the kind of critical-mass person that Xerox PARC had at the time. Do you think any company will ever try anything like that again, and will it be a positive or negative experience?

A: There are about four answers to that one. For one thing, it is true that corporate America has basically taken a negative lesson from Xerox PARC, and quite unjustly. If you are going to spend the money for a research lab like that, you should get only things you can exploit and you really are constrained to exploit them. And that, I think, is a big mistake. But there are other factors that I think explain why there isn't a PARC like PARC today and maybe never will be. There's the "Shakespeare factor," for want of a better term, which as I see it - whether there can ever be another Shakespeare - the answer is no. Shakespeare is unique. Everything is going to be measured against him. And every corporate research lab is always going to be measured against Xerox PARC.

You also have to keep in mind that at the time these guys came together in 1971, the computer business and computer science was a really unique inflection point. It was brand new and at a stage where every technological advance was going to represent a great leap in knowledge. In fact, a lot of the people at the time who went into computer science - this is at a time when there were very few, if any, computer science programs in the United States - they did it because they had a choice, as bright young people, of going into either physics or math, or something new. Butler Lampson , who was one of the stars of that era, said, "Well, I could go into physics, and was expected to go into physics, but physics was a science that was 300 years old, and all I could do was to make a little incremental advance in its progress. But I could look at computer science and say that nothing has really been done, where my efforts will really be much more rewarded." So that was an element. That was a time I don't think we'll see again, at least not in this industry.

You also have to keep in mind that in 1971, Xerox was really the only game in town in terms of an institution or entity that could pay up for talented researchers. The government was cutting back on its research budgets, so universities were cutting back. There was a serious recession in the land, so corporations were cutting back. And yet Xerox still had this cascade of cash flow from what had been the most successful industrial product of all time, and that was the Xerox 914 copier and its offspring. Now you just don't see that. Even companies that have great cash flow also have boards of directors who are going to say, "Why do you have these guys out gazing at the stars when we've got software to develop, or hardware, or we need somebody to look at second-order effects in copiers." You name it. So I think it's going to be very hard to replicate it.

Frank resumed with our business: "There are a couple of items on the laptop that we'll fill in with if the FBI speaker is not here."