Dealers of Lightning (24 page)

"How good is your COBOL compiler?" they asked. COBOL was the
tedious programming language used for repetitive and uncomplicated
business programs such as payrolls and budgets. On hearing the ques­tion, Bob Spinrad recognized as though for the first time the enormity of
the task confronting the company. Scientific and research programmers,
like those who worked for SDS and its traditional customers, would not
be caught dead working in COBOL, which they considered a lame lan­guage suitable only for clerks and drones. He shifted uneasily in his chair.

"It's not a question of how good our COBOL compiler is," he told
the visitors.

"Why not?"

"Because we don't have one."

Xerox had thoroughly misunderstood the difference between scientific
computing, in which SDS might with great effort manage to hold its own,
and business computing,
in
which it was a non-starter. The company
could not offer a fraction of the product line any business client would
expect as a matter of course, whether high-speed line printers or robust
database programs. As Spinrad recalled, "A lot of things that were ho-
hum standard operating procedure for companies that served a commer­cial environment just weren't in our lexicon or armament."

The harvest was a profound morale crisis in El Segundo, where
every employee understood what the company's limitations were, how
hard it would be to change course, and how determined Xerox was to
do it anyway.

One weekend McGurk summoned his department heads to a week­end "retreat" in a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport to iron
out the difficulties. They broke into study groups, turned over the
issues late into the night, and reconvened around a very long confer­ence table on Sunday afternoon.

"All right," McGurk said. "One by one, lets have your reaction to
whether we can make this change."

"I said, 'No, I've got a problem,'" Spinrad recalled. "McGurk went
around the table and, one by one, everyone else said the same thing.
'I've got this problem,' 'I've got that problem.'"

McGurk fell silent for a moment, then slammed his fist on the table.
"Okay," he said, "we'll do it!" In this cheerless atmosphere PARC's request for a PDP-10 detonated
like a grenade. It had been only a few months earlier that SDS had
launched its latest scientific computer, the Sigma 7—designed specifi­
cally to
compete head to head with the
PDP-10. Having
been
ordered to
stage a
frontal assault on
IBM's
market,
SDS
now felt tripped up
by
the
rear-guard action launched by its own
corporate
brethren.

SDS
executives wasted no time in
starting a
campaign at headquar­
ters
to kill the proposal.
"I
was for anything
that
would keep them from
buying
that computer," recalled Currie,
who
outlined for the Stamford
brass a scenario in which a computing
trade
magazine like
Dataination
splashed a photograph across its
front cover
of a
DEC
truck pulled up
to the loading dock of Xerox
PARC. Try selling
a Sigma machine to
another customer after that!

Taylor
maintained that his group
considered
the
PDP-10 so
self-
evidently
superior to the Sigma they
never gave
a moment’
s
thought to
how their request would resonate in
El Segundo.
Yet
they
could not
have
been entirely blind to the
fact that the
Stamford bosses regarded
big computers as fungible commodities,
one
very much like another.
After
all, these were the people who
had
bought the wrong computer
company to begin with, then
compounded
the gaffe by urging it
to
compete in a manifestly inappropriate
market. No
one should
have
been surprised that they would regard
PARC's
insistence on buying a
rival company's machine as an act of
sheer
perversity.

The
task of formally vetoing the
request fell to
the company's new chief
information officer, a systems expert
named
Paul Strassmann.
Strass
mann's primary job was to install an
SDS computer
wherever
Xerox
cur­rently ran an
IBM
machine.
He
came
with sterling
qualifications, since
his greatest accomplishment as the computing czar at his previous com­
pany, Kraft Foods,
was to junk its system
of
underperforming
IBM 360
data processing computers and replace
them with Honeywells.

IBM's
failed attempt to get him fired
for
this rare affront had left
Strassmann with no shortage of self-confidence in his own judgment.
A
severe
character whose Teutonic accent
soon won
him the nickname
"the
Prussian" at
PARC,
he imagined his greater role to be that of
Xerox's
technological policeman.
He
harbored no illusions about the stupidity of
forcing
SDS
to compete with
IBM,
a move he regarded as "just a spastic
afterthought" by management. But he also believed his responsibility was
to ride herd on the proliferation of incompatible computers at
Xerox
offices around the globe. He was not about to rubber-stamp a half-
million-dollar purchase order for a DEC computer to please anyone,
research hotshots included. He boomeranged the PDP-10 order back to
PARC with instructions to produce a point-by-point technical justification, in writing.

This turned out to be the start of fifteen years of miscommunication
and hostility between Xerox's east coast and west. "I told them to show
me what the PDP-10 would do that the Sigma 7 wouldn't," Strassmann recalled. "This is what hardass corporate information officers do.
They say, 'Show me a competitive analysis.' But PARC never sent one.
They thought it was beneath them to show a technical analysis to the
headquarters guys. They didn't know how to act like corporate citizens.
They just said, 'Don't ask questions.'"

The battle raged for weeks. The official SDS line was that the PDP's
popularity over the Sigma among researchers was purely an accident
of timing and would soon correct itself. As Currie, a savvy enough
computer man but one whose judgment was colored by his position at
SDS, recalled, "The PDP had come out a little earlier than the Sigma
and they were ahead of us mostly in software." He thought the issue
boiled down to "a question of religion," and the least PARC could do as
a new Xerox facility was try a new theology on for size. In Stamford the
battle was viewed even more simple-mindedly. Headquarters execu­tives thought of software as the gobbledygook that made a machine
run, like the hamster driving the wheel. They could not understand
why the decision between the PDP-10 and the Sigma needed to be
any more complicated than, say, choosing an albino rodent over a
brown one.

But from a technical point of view, the issue was hardly that casual.
Software was the factor that defined the fundamental incompatibility
between the Sigma and PDP machines and the superiority, for PARC's
purposes, of the latter. The architectures of the two computers were so
radically different that software written for the PDP would not prop­erly fit into the memory space the Sigma allocated for data. Even if the
program could be made to run—a doubtful prospect—it would
require nearly twice as much memory to run as fast on the Sigma as it
did on the PDP-10. Given the high price of memory at the time, this
was a major shortcoming.

Although it was theoretically possible to simply "port" all the PDP
software over to the Sigma, the CSL engineers calculated that such a
job would mean rewriting every single line of every PDP program, a
task that would take three years and cost $4 million.

"The only lie in the analysis we did," Lampson later remarked, "was
that we never could actually have done it because you couldn't have
motivated people to do such a pointless thing."

This was, indeed, the very technical analysis Strassmann had
demanded. He received it, too, as part of the lab's capital request—but
because it focused on software costs it was not the sort of analysis he
expected, which would have been a hardware-by-hardware compari­son of the two machines.

"In a way we were cooking the books," Lampson stated later, "but
actually this was a pretty accurate way of turning the facts about doing
computing research into dollar numbers that Strassmann could under­stand."

Meanwhile, Taylor invited a group of El Segundo designers to Palo
Alto for a two-day "discourse" on the technical issues. His goal was to
persuade them that the Sigma and PDP-10 were not really competing
in the same market, and they should therefore back off. Instead of
engaging in the civil dialogue he had hoped for, however, his cocksure
engineers pitilessly dissected the Sigma's shortcomings in front of its
designers and Pake, who was sitting in.