Dealers of Lightning (47 page)

The team prepared for the demo like actors auditioning for a shot at
Broadway. Taylor's engineers could be a harsh audience, scornful of
programs that placed glitz above speed and efficiency. That was why
CSL's ideal was still Bravo, which responded to commands instanta­neously and was as exciting to look at as a page from the phone book.

When the moment arrived Ingalls seated himself at an Alto in the bean-
bag room. Lampson, Thacker, Deutsch, and most of the rest of CSL were
there, along with a few engineers from the other labs. Ingalls started by
creating a few windows and loading them with various programs: One
held a drawing, another a block of Smalltalk code, the third a lengthy
block of text. His cursor wandered over the metaphorical desktop with
fluid ease, pausing to draw a line here, add a word or phrase there. As his
audience watched in rapt fascination at a display that had become as sup­ple as a living creature, Ingalls almost forgot himself. "We were just going
along, giving our demo, not thinking about the fact that we were doing
something nobody had ever seen before." He was deep into a routine cut-
and-paste editing task when he heard a voice shout, "Hey!"

Ingalls paused. Peter Deutsch was on his feet, pointing at the screen.
"Did you just do what I thought you did?" he said.

Only then did Ingalls realize what had happened. In the midst of the
edit he had instinctively pressed the middle button of his mouse. As if
from nowhere, a small rectangle had appeared on the screen listing
several commands. Ingalls had selected "cut" and released the button,
whereupon the tiny rectangle instantly disappeared (along with the
selected text to be deleted). It was something they called the "pop-up
menu," the forerunner of a device common to almost every Windows
or Macintosh program today. "It flashed and disappeared," he recalled.
"That was really a wonderful moment, and it was all done in a half a
second."

In the instant it took for the menu to pop onto the screen and off
again, the entire audience comprehended not only the power of BitBlt
but its practical application in a world of average users. "Everyone in
that room walked out in a daze," recalled Smokey Wallace, who had
been hired from Englebart s lab to help design a commercial office sys­tem using PARC technology. He recognized immediately that what he
had just seen would be an indispensable element of anything he could
put on the market. The very next day he showed up in Ingalls's office.
"Tell me all about BitBlt," he said.

The PARC user interface, with its overlapping windows, mouse
clicks, and pop-up menus, had entered computing history. More than
twenty-five years and many engineering generations later, it remains
the indisputable parent of the desktop metaphor guiding the users of
millions of home and office computers. "From that moment on," Wal­lace said, "nobody ever looked back."

Dick Shoup had it down to a routine. He would pedal his
bicycle up the tree-lined hill to the front of Building
34, lever open the door of the main entrance with his
foot and pedal through without disembarking, then proceed straight
down a narrow hallway, the tires of his bike whishing softly on the
worn carpeting like wind through a sparse wood. Finally he would roll
to a stop next to the graphics lab.

If only his work inside that room could proceed with as few impedi­ments. But no: Dick Shoup had invented a technology that would stand
the science of video on its ear, and he was close to getting fired for it.

The machine was called Superpaint. It deserves a place in history as
the only invention too farsighted even for PARC's Computer Science
Lab. And all because it thought in color.

The notion that an excess of ambition could make a talented inventor
into a pariah at CSL sounds preposterous on its face—more like some­thing that would happen to a Gary Starkweather in a place like Webster,
and the very antithesis of what should have happened at PARC. Yet every
organization of human beings eventually comes to cherish its own ortho­doxies, and PARC was no different. When a group pursues a goal with

the single-minded tenacity the Computer Science Lab possessed under
Bob Taylor, the potential for intolerance is even greater.

"It was hard to be a renegade in that lab," Shoup said years later with
a regretful sigh. "You could be a maverick, but only a maverick of a cer­tain kind. And I guess I was just the wrong kind." '

He had not started as an outsider. Quite the contrary. One could
scarcely imagine a more lace-curtain computer science pedigree than
Dick Shoups: Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon and employment after grad­uation at Berkeley Computer Corporation, followed by selection by Bob
Taylor as one of the elite six to join PARC upon BCC s demise. In the
small society of the Computer Science Lab, this was the closest thing to
coming over on the
Mayflower.

You would have to know Shoup very well before discerning the
heretic's soul underlying those sterling academic bloodlines. One clue
was his interest in things that struck even some of PARC's free thinkers
as a little
outré,
like his Transcendental Meditation group, which gath­ered every morning in a PARC commons room to do its thing to the
voice of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on mail order tapes.

"Dick was a little different from everybody else," related his friend
Alvy Ray Smith. "He's sort of a crusty guy, and he's not political, and
he's very stubborn, and I think this is why he's as good as he is."

Had he known
how
stubborn, Bob Taylor might not have given Dick
Shoup such a long leash at the very outset of his PARC career. Shortly
after Shoup got to CSL Taylor welcomed him into his office to discuss
what he wanted to do. Shoup did not have the clear-eyed convictions
of his colleagues Lampson, Deutsch, and Thacker. Instead he saw so
many fascinating paths laid out before him that he was stymied by the
need to pick only one. Finally Taylor drawled: "Why don't you take a
year to figure out what you want to do?"

With Taylor this offer was never as open-ended as it might seem at
first glance. He figured that great computer scientists left to their
own devices (and subtly guided by the Impresario's hand) would
invariably find their way to the grail of interactive distributed com­puting. But Shoup took his new boss at his word. Within a month or
so he had
decided to pursue a course
of research
in video
computer
graphics.

On
the surface his choice sat squarely
within
the mainstream
of Tay­lors
vision.
After
all, Taylor had
underwritten
through
ARPA the
first
computer graphics "center of excellence"
at Utah
and
hired two of
its
graduates, Bob
Flegal and Jim Curry,
as his very
first
recruits
to
CSL.
Nor
was it entirely random on Shoup’
s part. His
interest in video
went
all the way
back to his high school
days in
western
Pennsylvania, when
he
spent weekends repairing
TV
sets
for his
small-town neighbors.

Adapting video raster displays
to interactive
computers, he knew,
raised a
host of intriguing technical
issues
crying out for further study,
especially if one desired to do interesting things with
the
image.
One
would
need a way to store a whole
frames
worth of digital data in
memory at a time, for example. The
technology
to do so was known as
the
frame buffer. What Shoup proposed was nothing less
than
the
biggest and most flexible frame buffer
anyone
had
ever
seen.

Simply defined, a frame buffer is a box holding a hell of
a
lot of mem­ory.
More
precisely, it is a grid in which the memory is arrayed
to
corre­
spond
with
a
video frame, so that one or more bits of memory account for
every
"pixel," or "picture element," on the display.
Activate
the bits of a
frame buffer in any given pattern and the exact same pattern should
appear
on
the screen. Connect the buffer to a computer and you can
rearrange those same bits—and the corresponding image
—
according to
any
algorithm you can devise, the way you might rearrange colored mar­bles in a partitioned box.

With
the assistance of Flegal, Curry, and a French graphics expert
named Patrick Beaudelaire, Shoup spent more than
a
year devising
and
assembling his memory giant.
The
first prototype
of Superpaint
went
operational in Building 34 on April 10, 1973, just
a
few
days
after
the Alto, which was being built in a basement room directly under his
ground-floor video lab.

While Cookie Monster was marching across the
Alto
screen
to
the
delighted gasps of the
PARC
faithful and their visitors,
Dick Shoup
was
seated alone before a black-and-white video camera, holding up
an
index
card on which he had scrawled, "It works, sort of." The system recorded
the image of his face and the card in buffer memory in accurate detail—
save for the bright red-orange of his droopy mustache and collar-length
hair—and stored it on a conventional computer disk as a pattern of bits.
("It survives to this day," he said in 1998.)

Within a few months he had added a kaleidoscopic variety of video
inputs, including live television, videotape, and videodisc, as well as hard­ware and software to allow him to alter the images he grabbed from the
screen. The finished product was the first fully video-compatible frame
buffer ever built. It was also a vector apart from the computer his col­leagues had assembled in the basement. Where the Alto fit under a desk,
Superpaint occupied two cabinets, each standing five feet tall and hold­ing thirty-three memory cards. Its nearly two and a half million memory
bits (in semiconductor chips worth about $100,000) meant that each
pixel in a video frame with a resolution of 486 by 640 pixels could be
addressed by eight bits. The system required two separate display moni­tors, one to show the image to be manipulated and the second a menu of
electronic "paintbrushes" with which it could be altered in color or pat­tern. "No question about it, this was a big chunk of hardware," Shoup
recalled fondly.

Superpaint was a uniquely agile and adaptable graphical tool. One
could "grab" a frame from a videotape, disc, or directly off a television
screen and manhandle it by changing its colors, flipping or reversing the
image, bleeding it across the screen, even animating it. The key was the
ratio of eight bits per pixel, which allowed the user to tune every dot to
any one of 256 color values. You could freeze a random frame from a
taped episode of, say,
Star Trek,
overlay it on the buffer as if you were
tracing a line drawing on a blank canvas, and recolor Spock's hair green
by assigning new values to the appropriate pixels.

Yet Shoup’s fascination with color and video drew him away from what
Taylor viewed as the Computer Science Lab's principal mandate. Shoup
had participated in the MAXC project like any obedient member of the
CSL team; but by the time the rest of the lab shifted its attention to the
Alto he had withdrawn into his personal world. Taylor was distinctly dis­pleased at the course things were taking.

"Bob
felt the whole lab needed to be
working
in one direction,"
Shoup
recalled.
It
was not simply that he
was working
on his own; more criti­cally, it was felt that the basic premise
of
Superpaint would
never
fit in
with CSL's
goal to build the "office of
the
future." It was one thing
to
study how digital bits could be
manipulated
to create an image
—
the
direction
CSL
had taken since the
day they
mapped Cookie
Monsters
face to the
Alto
screen. To his colleagues
Shoup
was working backwards,
starting with video images and
reducing
them to their digital compo­nents:
What
could an office system
ever do
with
that?