Dealers of Lightning (15 page)

These events kicked off what corporate historians dubbed Xerox's "lost
decade." The 1970s, a period of conspicuous creativity at PARC, would
be better remembered at headquarters as an era of shriveling market
share, financial stagnation, and unceasing litigation over patent and
antitrust claims. Presaging the coming storm, the company had missed its
revenue and profit targets for November and December 1970. The pan­icked Stamford headquarters, no longer under the control of the engi­neers and sales executives of Joe Wilson's era but of accountants and
financial engineers, moved rapidly to rein in spending.

The danger to PARC in this period was even graver than a simple
hold on new hiring. Few of its tiny staff ever knew how close the
research center came to being exterminated before it even reached
puberty. For among the cost-cutting steps the finance-minded execu­tives proposed to the board of directors was the closure or sale of the
new Palo Alto facility. There did not seem to be anything to lose or
much point in carrying on: The fixed investment was still negligible;
the buildings leased; the value to Xerox still conjectural. (Had not Pake
warned them not to expect a return for at least five years?)

But at the last minute one director stood up to interpose his incon­testable authority before the hangman. John Bardeen was a towering
figure of scientific research, perhaps the most accomplished engineer
of his time. In 1971 he already had one Nobel Prize under his belt, for
co-inventing the transistor at Bell Labs with William Brittain and
William Schockley. (Another would follow in 1972, for his contribu­tions to the theory of superconductivity.)

Bardeen crisply informed his fellow directors of his opinion that divest­ing PARC would be an irresponsibly short-sighted act. Its budget was $1.7
million, barely a flyspeck on the bottom line. By contrast, its potential was
limitless. "This is the most promising thing you've got," he said (as Jack
Goldman, also a board member, nodded silent and relieved assent).
"Keep it!" The center was saved.

While that small drama played itself out in Stamford, PARC's first
few recruits got to know each other amid rented furniture and vacant
offices. In time the administrative divisions Pake established would
congeal into battle lines of contentious perspectives and personalities,
but that was still far in the future. "We were all intermingled with each
other, so it wasn't as if one group was in one part of a building and the
systems people were in another part and the computer people were in
another part," recalled David Thornburg, who slid in just under the
wire of the hiring freeze and arrived for work shortly after New Years
Day as employee number twenty-five. "We were a small enough group
so everyone knew everyone else."

For a glittering instant it seemed as though PARC might fulfill Pake's
dream of a Utopia where physicists and computer scientists communed
in quest of a common science. They mixed freely in PARC's small yet
somehow all-encompassing world, a place full of possibilities and mys­terious conjunctions. Thornburg was still unpacking his things on his
very first day when Biegelsen, who on the strength of his three months'
tenure already ranked as a seasoned PARC veteran, showed up at his
office door.

"I just came to introduce you to your next-door neighbor," Biegelsen
said, leading Thornburg into the adjoining warren. "This is George. I
thought you guys should get together because you shared a similar
research interest in grad school."

Thornburg was perplexed. He understood George to be working on
speech recognition and he had come in as a thin-film metallurgist.

"Really?" the neighbor asked. "What did you do your work in?"

That was all the voluble Thornburg needed to set off on a thorough
explication of his doctoral career, not excepting the time he had to change
themes in midcourse thanks to the pre-emptive publication of a thesis on
the same subject by a guy from Oregon named George White.

"I'm pleased to meet you," his neighbor said, smiling. "I'm George
White."

What particularly delighted the new staff was the atmosphere of deter­mined informality and lack of pretension. That PARC seemed more like
a university department than a corporate research facility was unsurpris­ing, given that most of the staff were being exposed to the non-academic
world virtually for the first time in their lives. Since all but two of the prin­cipal scientists (John Urbach, an optical expert from Webster, and Lucovsky) were newcomers to Xerox, Pake and Jones took to sending them on
field trips to Rochester, Webster, El Segundo, and the Electro-Optical
Systems division in Pasadena, just to give them some feeling for the cor­porate culture. But the center of their existence remained the two build­ings on Porter Drive.

"We would get together once a week and just sort of share what was
going on in the lab," Thornburg recalled. "It became almost a quasi-
social event." PARC was so new that no one had been issued security
badges or company identification. With scant equipment of any value
on the premises, the building stayed unlocked and hospitable to out­siders. "We were physically adjacent to Stanford University, so there
were
visitors dropping in and
out of
the lab all the time.
A lot of
us
even
came to feel we were sort of
like
university instructors
who
got to
spend all our time doing research
without
having to teach classes.
So
we
operated as though this were an
open
environment
where we were
free to share what we were doing
with anyone we
wanted to."

Or
occasionally
too
free. One morning
in
early 1971 the weekly meet­ing was addressed by Jack Goldman,
who was
in the habit of paying fre­quent visits to his new incubator.
Goldman's
talk
—
perhaps inspired by
PARC's
recent close call—had to
do with the need
to start generating for­mal reports and white papers to
reassure Stamford
that the money being
spent out west was buying genuine
intellectual
achievement.

Someone Thomburg did
not recognize
interrupted
Goldman
with a
suggestion.
"He
said, 'Well,
if you ask me, Jack'—
the rest of
us
never
called him anything but 'Dr.
Goldman'—'If
you ask me,
Jack,
what we
should do is build a computer-based
query system
where
we
can
tag
the
different levels of the report,
so somebody who
just wants
an
executive
summary could get that and
someone who wants
more could
get
the full
report.'
He
was basically talking
about a hypertext-like
environment.
We
were all sitting there thinking this
is pretty
good stuff, and Goldman was
up front, chomping on his cigar,
saying 'Yeah,
that's a good idea.'
"

The
moment the meeting
broke up Thornburg
saw
his
friend
Bob
Bauer
shoot out into the hallway.
Curious, he
followed, and finally found
Bauer
leaned up against a wall, laughing
so hard
he could hardly catch his
breath.

"What's so funny?" Thornburg asked.

"You
know that guy who said,
'Well, if you
ask me,
Jack?'"

"Yeah, who is he?"

"He
doesn't work here," Bauer said.
"He
just came over from Stan­ford to have lunch with somebody in
computer
science.
They said, 'We
got a meeting, stick around,' so he followed them in. Goldman is prob­ably going to want to give him a bonus or something, and
the
guy
doesn't even work for Xerox!"

But the paradise of collegiality was more mythical than real, or at
least it
was
destined to be short-lived. Jack Goldman had not acceded
to Pake's desire to have physicists and other traditional scientists on the
premises because he subscribed to any notion of marrying the old sci­ence to the new. Instead he saw it as a way to rapidly ramp up PARC's
head count by kidnapping available talent from Webster while recruit­ing the computer and systems experts he was counting on to make
PARC's reputation.

"The idea was that when you brought new people in you wanted them
to have someone to talk to," Goldman said. "So we sort of seeded the two
scientific departments"—that is, physics and optics—"with people from
the company, a few of the shining lights from Rochester who were
desirous of moving. They were very good guys and I suffered a certain
amount of criticism for taking them away from Webster and essentially
lowering the average IQ of the Webster group." But he sensed that the
physicists and computer scientists would end up in a profound philo­sophical and scientific tug of war. If Pake believed he could paper over
such an elemental conflict, Goldman thought, he was mistaken.

The hiring freeze ended after a couple of months. In that period the
downsizing in the research industries had sharply intensified, in part
because the Mansfield Amendment restricting Pentagon spending to
specifically military research had begun to bite nationwide. Pake and
Squires resumed recruiting with the same cautious deliberation as
before.