Dealers of Lightning (71 page)

"I finally said to Harold, 'You are making a really big mistake,'" she
recalled. " 'You are throwing away something that this company itself
hasn't had a chance to even consider using. And you'll have to order
me to do it, because I'm not walking in there voluntarily.'

"And that's what he did."

Merry and Tesler had spent the intervening time trying to keep
Steve Jobs distracted with more of the plain-vanilla demonstration.
They had just about had
it
with his constant wheedling when, sud­denly, Adele Goldberg arrived back on the scene. "I can still see her,"
Merry recalled. "She was in pigtails and her face was red as a beet. And
she was holding one of our yellow disk packs with Smalltalk on it."

The demo began. A full-dress Smalltalk show-and-tell was a sight to
behold. There were educational applications Goldberg had written and
software development tools by Tesler. Merry demonstrated her galley
editor, a nifty program with animation capabilities built in so that a user
could incorporate text and pictures into a single document. Almost every
program had capabilities that had never been seen in a research proto­type anywhere, much less in a commercial system. "There was lots to
Smalltalk," Tesler remembered. "You could see it thirty times and see
something new every time."

What was interesting
—
or to Goldberg, ominous
—
was the intensity
with which the Apple engineers paid attention. Bill Atkinson, a brilliant
programmer who would later put his distinctive stamp on the Macintosh,
kept his eyes on the screen as though they were fixed there by a magnetic
field. He was standing so close that as Tesler conducted his assigned por­tion of the demo he could feel Atkinson's breath on the back of his neck.

Atkinson had clearly come prepared. "He was asking extremely intel­
ligent questions that he couldn't have thought of just by watching the
screen," Tesler recalled. "It turned out later that they had read every
paper we'd published, and the demo was just reminding them of
things they wanted to ask us. But I was very impressed. They asked all
the right questions and understood all the answers. It was clear to me
that they understood what we had a lot better than Xerox did."

Given this rare psychic encouragement, the Learning Research Group
warmed to their subject. They even indulged in some of their favorite
legerdemain. At one point Jobs, watching some text scroll up the screen
line by line in its normal fashion, remarked, "It would be nice if it moved
smoothly, pixel by pixel, like paper."

With Ingalls at the keyboard, that was like asking a New Orleans jazz
band to play "Limehouse Blues." He clicked the mouse on a window
displaying several lines of Smalltalk code, made a minor edit, and
returned to the text.
Presto!
The scrolling was now continuous.

The Apple engineers' eyes bulged in astonishment. In any other system
the programmer would have had to rewrite the code and recompile a
huge block of the program, maybe even all of it. The process might take
hours. Thanks to its object-oriented modularity, in Smalltalk such a mod­est change never required the recompiling of more than ten or twenty
lines, which could be done in a second or two. "It was essentially instan­taneous," Ingalls recalled. Of course, it helped that as one of Smalltalk's
creators he was able to make the change as though by instinct. "We were
ringers," he confessed. "We knew that system from top to bottom."

"They were totally blown away," Tesler confirmed. "Jobs was waving
his arms around, saying, 'Why hasn't this company brought this to mar­ket? What's going on here? I don't get it!' Meantime the other guys
were trying to ignore the shouting. They had to concentrate and learn
as much as they could in the hour they were going to be there."

The creation myth of the Lisa and Macintosh holds that Steve Jobs, in
the grip of an epiphany brought on by PARC's dazzling technology,
headed straight back to Apple headquarters and ripped up a year's worth
of planning for the Lisa user interface. Jobs himself recalled how he
returned to his office that afternoon "a raving maniac," insisting the Lisa
be reconfigured to replicate the Altos dynamic display. "It was one of
those apocalyptic moments," he said. "I remember within ten minutes of
seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every com­puter would work this way some day. It was so obvious."

Something of the sort did happen, but without quite so much
sturm
und drang.
The essential appearance and functionality of the Smalltalk
interface—its "look and feel," so to speak—did become reflected in
that of the Lisa and Macintosh.

Lisa’s architects, many of them transplants from the staid purlieus of
Hewlett-Packard, had already designed a graphical user interface, but
their version was far more static than the Altos. Theirs lacked Smalltalk's
dynamic overlapping windows, for example, but radier displayed one
active application at a time, taking up the whole screen.

Nor did the Lisa originally place as much reliance on the mouse. This
was the subject of heated disagreement within Apple. The main pointing
device of the original Lisa interface was something called a "softkey,"
which appeared on the screen as a sort of menu listing the command
options for the user at any given moment: If the active application was a
text editor, for example, it might offer the choices of
insert
and
delete.
The user selected a softkey by using keyboard keys to move an arrow on
the screens, then executed the command by striking "enter." The mouse
was available, but it was scantily used and entirely optional.

Bill Atkinson, whose intense concentration during the demo left
such a strong impression on Tesler, had spent months trying to design
a more dynamic interface. But he had been unable to solve several
programming problems, including how to write text into an irregularly
shaped region of the screen—for example, the corner of one window
peeking out from beneath another. This, of course, was a problem Dan
Ingalls had long since solved via BitBlt (but had never published).
Atkinson later maintained that seeing the overlapping windows on the
Alto screen was for him more a confidence-builder than a solution to
his quandary. He subsequently solved the same problem in his own
way but, as he later remarked, "That whirlwind tour left an impression
on me. Knowing it could be done empowered me to invent a way it
could be done."

The demo also gave him the necessarv ammunition to win the battle
over the mouse. Atkinson thought the device needed to be standard
equipment on every Lisa, rather than an option; only then would
Apple be sure that software developers would always deploy it as an
integral part of the system. After PARC he no longer got an argument
from Steve Jobs, or anyone else."

On the other hand, Atkinson discerned in Smalltalk numerous short­comings he resolved to correct. For one thing, it was painfully slow, an
artifact of the Alto's lightweight memory and the language's "inter­preted" structure, which loaded the central processing unit with more
work than it could comfortably handle. "The system was crippled by a
factor of ten, and it showed," he recalled. "It wasn't fast enough for a
commercial application. You would watch characters appear on the
screen one by one, like on a agonizingly slow modem."*

As for Jobs, he was so "saturated" by the power of the user interface he
had seen that he ignored the other two phenomena he was being shown:
object-oriented programming, which was the essence of Smalltalk, and
networking. The fact that PARC had some 200 Altos connected to the
Ethernet at the time of the Jobs demo made no impression on the Apple
team. Neither the Lisa nor the first versions of the Macintosh were
equipped with network ports. (A famous story had Jobs answering a
question about how to network the Mac by flinging a floppy disk at the
questioner and barking, "There's my fucking network!")

It may be that PARC's most important influence on the Lisa and Mac­intosh was a spiritual one. A design manifesto the Lisa designers pro­duced with a month or so of their visit could have sprung full-blown from
the mind of Alan Kay or Larry Tesler. "Lisa must be fun to use," it com­manded. "It will not be a system that is used by someone 'because it is
part of the job' or 'because the boss told them to.' Special attention must
be paid to the friendliness of the user interaction and the subtleties that
make using the Lisa rewarding and job-enriching."

*"Atkinson has long resented the importance others have attached to his visit to PARC.
"In hindsight I would rather we'd never have gone," he said. "Those one and a half
hours tainted everything we did, and so much of what we did was original research."

And for all the impact that the PARC had on Apple, over the long
run Apple's impact on the PARC scientists themselves may have been
more pronounced. They had started out disparaging Jobs and his cus­tomers, but his fanatic enthusiasm for their work hit them like a light­ning bolt. It was a powerful sign that the outside world would welcome
all they had achieved within their moated palace while toiling for an
indifferent Xerox. Steve Jobs did more than open the floodgates of
ideas out of PARC. He started the exodus of human beings.

Among the first to go was Larry Tesler. During the summer preceding
Jobs s visit, Tesler had traveled around Europe. In a rural French village
he stopped to have his tarot read by a fortune teller. "She was just an
interesting old French lady who made a bunch of predictions, all of
which came true. Maybe they were self-fulfilling prophecies. She told me
I'd leave my job within a year, and I left eleven months later. I couldn't
believe her at the time. I said, 'But I have the very best job . .
.'
But
maybe I was ready."

Early in 1980 Jobs asked Xerox for a license to use Smalltalk in the
Lisa. In an unexpected burst of proprietary pride, Xerox turned him
down. (The company had already divested its equity in Apple, thus
missing out on the computer company's extraordinary run-up in value
at the time of its 1980 initial public stock offering.) Steve Jobs made
his offer instead to Tesler, one of Smalltalk's developers.