Xerox PARC’s engineers on how they invented the future and Xerox lost it (1985)

related (and more true than ever?)

http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...

SRI did a boatload of work: USPS zip code automation, BART cards, ATM's, distributed enterprise computing in the 1980's, etc. Unlike its peers, it kept defense contracts below roughly 40% of its overall business. Even PARC was mostly awash in DARPA funds.

If Parc had failed at dissemination we'd all still be using the command line.

The windows/icons/mouse/menus paradigm disseminated just fine. It wasn't necessarily completely original - see also, Mother of All Demos - but they showed it could be implemented in real systems with real usability benefits.

Laser printers and networking also disseminated just fine.

What didn't disseminate was the development environment. That's not necessarily a surprise, because an environment that delights creative people with PhDs isn't going to translate well to the general public.

Ultimately Smalltalk, MESA, etc were like concept cars. You could admire them and learn from them, but they were never going to be viable as mainstream products.

Windows and Mac filled the gap by producing dumbed-down and overcomplicated versions of the original vision, which - most importantly - happened to be much cheaper.

Xerox get a lot of criticism for missing the potential, but it's easy to forget that in the 70s word processors typically cost five figures, and minicomputers equivalent to the Dorado cost six figures.

Maybe the future would have been different if someone had said "We need to take these ideas and work out how to build them as cheaply as possible."

But realistically commodified computing in the 70s ran on Z80s and still cost five figures for a business system with a hard drive.

The technology to make a cheaper version didn't exist until the 80s.

The problem since Parc is more that there has been no equivalent concentration of smart, creative, playful people. Technology culture changed from playful exploration to hustle and "engagement", there's less greenfield space to explore, and - IMO - there are very few people in the industry who have the raw IQ and the creativity to create a modern equivalent.

It's pretty much the opposite problem. Instead of exploring tech without obvious business goals, business goals are so tightly enforced it's very hard to imagine what would happen if completely open exploration was allowed again.

>But Kodak was fixated on the mistaken notion that consumers would want to print their 'Kodak moment'.

Yes and no. They also invented the PhotoCD.

Kodak doubtless did a lot of things wrong. But transitioning from largely a chemical and film consumables business--they actually owned a chemical company at one point--to digital was always going to be tough. Very little of their expertise and distribution channels was transferrable to digital.

Fujifilm did better by applying its emulsion knowhow to some healthcare products. And also came out with a pretty nice line of mirrorless cameras. But it had tough financial times too and was a much smaller company to pivot.

At the time (~1999) digital photography was starting to take shape on the consumer side, the only option for viewing digital photos was on a CRT computer screen. Also at the time, the idea of anyone other than “nerds” having a computer and wanting to view photos on them was completely foreign to executives in the company (this was the overwhelmingly popular view of almost everyone at the time, not just Kodak executives). IMO, this was by far the primary issue that caused Kodak to miss out.

Source: I worked in the Kodak HQ at this time.

I'd like to think these ideas have been around and well-known for decades, and we're starting to see the hardware rise up to support them. If you told someone in 2001 that Linux would be rewritten in say, Java, with a garbage collector it would have been dismissed as starkly inefficient. Nowadays we have hardware that makes certain safeties negligible on performance (memory tagging, bounds checking, etc). Nowadays we can make an OS out of Java and it will stand just fine. Or Rust. Faster hardware means we run slower (and safer) software. Not everything gets isolated into an ASIC, of course.

I really wonder if we're not ready for a compression phase. Simpler, safer, expressive sets of ideas to unify OS/stack/network/UI.

Yes, Cedar was impressive, like the adult version of the Oberon system. I wonder if the source code of the Cedar environment is available somewhere. There is an interesting report by Atkinson (and Jacobi, who is on the panel in the posted video) where they migrated the environment to Unix using C as an intermediate layer. This is apparently the version used for the demonstration. But I couldn't yet find this source code anywhere. Maybe someone has a link.

copiers and paperless offices: who can forget "It's a miracle!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAt-lB9JIqw)

I visited the "Blue Room" as a young coder and was treated with respect.. very positive for me and much appreciated.

I recommend "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop. It is excellent (and recommended by Alan Kay himself).

I commented Dealers in parallel, because of the narrative I'd argue it's one of the best tech histories every written. While Soul of the Machine was better reviewed, Dealers was more compelling.

I did enjoy your book by the way - thank you for writing it.

I'll add the Innovators by Walter Isaacson to the list as a general take on persons involved in the history of computing. It was well written and the stories within were exciting to read.

Cool. Just bought this.

A note for folks, the eBook of "Inventing the Future" is $US 3.95 or it can be read on Kindle Unlimited

It's great when people price eBooks cheaply like this.

I think he deleted his comments or something, his account was alan-1

The Dream Machine from Stripe Press is good.

This is the comment you were looking for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275

+1 to this one too. It is specifically focused on on Xerox PARC only. The Dream Machine covers broader scope of ARPA, ENIAC, MIT, etc.

I first came across this book in a library (a while ago) and basically read the whole thing on the spot. From my entirely biased perspective as someone with a "vintage computer" collection, it's the best book ever. The staggering magnitude of the accomplishments and inventions of PARC are almost as fascinating as fiction. The ineptitude of Xerox management in figuring out what to do with the output of PARC was similarly unreal.

Bell Labs was able to commercialize (or at least license IP) from some of their work with reasonable return, but eventually lost momentum from the series of spinoff-layoff-mergers. How does an organization successfully manage or balance that kind of research productivity with commercialization in the long term? Is there any management literature on that in particular?

I know some places like Microsoft and Google have had research programs for quite some time, although of course Google mostly fails to adequately support products that come out of Google X before killing them off or scaling them back (such as Glass), and I'm not sure how much of what Microsoft Research does is actually commercialized. Notably, Butler Lampson, who was one of the key folks at PARC, has been with Microsoft Research since 1995.

Agreed. I used Instaweb to clean it up and make it printable. Then I sent it to my Kindle because it was still 30 pages.

I used the Android "Privacy Browser" app to view it, because Chrome was unusable.

Privacy Browser doesn't enable JavaScript by default, and reduces frustration with many sites.

"optimal" results are a fallacious indicator: optimal for now can mean a disaster in the near future, think about the actual just-in-time industry crisis for instance.

I do not say that's was happen since I do not really know nor NLS (of course I've seen the Mother of all the demos, but not much more especially in technical terms) nor Smalltalk workstations (I've dig a bit more there, emulation included, but lacking comparison with NLS...) however is a generally valid principles: in nature it does not win the better but the more adaptive. In humans terms some very good stuff might simply fade into oblivion because they are too ahead of their time for most people or are against someone's interests.

To spot a more modern example maybe a bit more easy to know by most HN-ers just see Java history, it's original idea and the subsequent practical fail due to the fact nobody really care the original idea adopting instead just the boilerplate. Plan 9 was another example.

IMVHO the real points was:

- pioneers have seen desktop computers, not services, with the human at the center, not a vendor or a service, more specifically connected people with powerful tool some in politics is named social tissue needed for democracy, something essentially all élites from all countries fear most;

- pioneers have cared about their idea, vision, not much their present time short terms needs, as a result most people have no idea about the future they envisage and have tried to meld what they are told about the future to their present created ridiculous stuff and encouraging some to go that way (see General Magik virtual office for instance);

- pioneers have not cared at all about scaling their gear, witch means how to make them en masse, creating a supply chain, ... as a result profiting from them was essentially an artisanal game no one can really sustain and at government level no one is much interested either.

Another today examples: we have seen in the recent 50+ years past various efforts to make small, cheap VTOL aircrafts, i.e. "flying cars". Now we see even financial institutions embracing them in their sauce, well so far such experiments have proven feasible and to a certain extent VERY interested for all. So far most think they are impossible. Useless. Unsafe. .... As a result the general reactionary behaviors of essentially any large community from élites (who feel well in general and fear loosing their status if something change) to generic human beings (who generally think the change is bad, not needed, they simply fear it if is a real change) annihilate or at least postpone in a very far future any real revolution.

Culture is typically the mean to make things happen but so far we seems to be unable (beside the fact that most do NOT want that happen) to really spread a substantial culture though the masses. We know how to do that in small cohort but not in larger ones. We still miss a way to connect those small cohort to the humanity enough to make the magic happen...

I've studied HCI and Engelbart's work for quite a long time, and I'm not sure I would fully agree that things would have been better had Engelbart continued working on NLS, or if NLS had won out.

One simple example is with copy and paste. NLS had a highly complex and error prone copy-and-paste system. A lot of the commands in NLS were modal (vs modeless), and thus error prone. See this article for more info: http://worrydream.com/refs/Tesler%20-%20A%20Personal%20Histo...

Another issue was basic usability of NLS. Engelbart's vision was on continuous bootstrapping, continually aiming to create more powerful and expressive systems. This vision was pretty good for technical people, but also comes at the cost of basic ease of use and entry for newcomers. For instance, think about how many problems non-technical people still have with today's PCs and smartphones, many of which strive for "walk up and use" kind of usage.

Having been in research for over two decades now, my position is that we researchers will often identify the right problem and get the right general direction, but not always the right form. For instance, in the late 90s at Berkeley, folks correctly identified cluster computing as the future, and that we should aim to create abstractions to host Internet services to make them more scalable and robust. The specifics went in a very different direction (e.g. cloud computing, Kubernetes, etc), but the general thrust was right. As another example, my colleagues and I correctly identified rapid prototyping and testing tools for user interfaces as a major need, and while we inspired a lot of ideas with our work (pen-based sketching), industry went in a very different direction (see Figma and Axure and InVision).

I think the same is true with Engelbart's work. He was definitely a pioneer and helped open up people's imaginations as to what was possible with computing, but was off on a lot of the details and specifics that really matter for adoption. And that's ok because to a large extent, that's one of the many reasons we as a community and society do research.

I had an experience with this a couple decades ago. I was using a piece of Xerox software that came on a CD in a book. The license meant you had to buy a copy of the book for every runtime version, and IIRC it came with some kind of non-commercial use requirement even then. An organization we worked for wanted to use it, so we talked to Xerox, eventually getting to one of their lawyers. He told us it would cost ~$150k _to write the license_. Who knows what it would have cost to actually license the product. Needless to say (so I'll say it), we went with someone else's software product.

I work at PARC, and I hard disagree. My "CEO" of our division is an impressive salesman that just had everyone at our conference coming to our booth.

You forget a more broad stanza: false revolutions happen, like you say, real ones are feared and avoided by most. On one side actual élite (in business, politics etc, a generic tag to say "most well position somewhere in something") fear the substantial change because it might both succeed pushing them aside since they became useless or fail crushing the along if they have tried it; on the other side most people adverse changes.

Anyone might be pushed to buy a phone/something alike, considering it just a small addition to their daily routine, anyone might be pushed to buy a desktop/something else in general like the classic joke from the early web "hi! I want to buy a website" "hum, ok... To do what?" "Oh, I do not want to use it, all start buying one so I need one to remain in the market, is for customers not for me". But a substantial revolution is another story. Just see in daily life how many time you hear people say "I've always do this like that" and so on even if it's clearly an absurd thing or something that can&should be done but in a very different manner. Even small things.

At PARC time was the filing cabinet/suspended folder era, where people deeply think in paper+mechanic terms, the idea of files and folders (mimicking aforementioned filing cabinet and suspended folders) might pass easily, the idea of dynamic documents is simply unthinkable and fearful "I might loose something", "people might cheat", ... similarly the idea to send emails might pass easily, a better fax system, but the idea of computing inside again can't pass. For most a GUI can only pass, even today, as a single sheet of paper, something we can draw, compose, but not something else. Spreadsheets succeed even if they are absurd in IT terms for countless reasons while DB+simple languages for equivalent needs does not for the very same reason.

PARC vision, for the little I know propose a substantial revolution, not an evolution of its present state of thing. That's their real "fail"... To succeed they need to find a way to demonstrate and spread their tech until it became well known enough. Like in the past in France where no peasant have accepted the new vegetable imported from America: potatoes. Rumors spread it's dangerous etc. Things change only when the army drop them around the country in manure piles and soldiers came back after enough time to collect and eat potatoes. Sunflowers in Russia have experienced a similar fate.

I disagree with the lie-to-your-face characterization. Steve Jobs was always telling the truth as he saw it at the time. He was just uncommonly good at making you believe it.

Henry Ford also wasn’t lying at any point, and was not a Steve Jobs figure either. He was widely loved (prior to his anti-semitic statements, to be fair) by the common folk for telling it like he saw it.

IBM, I’m not sure what this refers to. The Watsons were salesmen, but were not widely considered dishonest, certainly not Jr.

Tesla, yes, Musk is full of shit at all points. People don’t seem to love him for it.

Microsoft's entire existence has been "see what some dreamer has dreamt, and mass-produce it for the average homo sapiens"

Right time, right problem, good management, enormous funds, Bay Area hippie culture, access to Stanford, uninterrupted time, and luck.

At PARC they were able to peer 10 years into the future. That was a big deal for 1969-1979. Looking 10 years forward recently is less transformative. Not much changed between 2012 and 2022.

My impression was that people were able to make a living while devoting the vast majority of their effort turning their vision into a reality. If one really has a passion for their work that's about as close as one can get to being paid to play all day. Try doing that just about anywhere in tech today.

Similar to a research university. Many PARC researchers left PARC to commercialize their inventions.

Phenomenal book. Snagged it after a similar thread on HN and honestly woke me up to the previous generations of great minds that paved the path before me.

>My guess at what in the early days of personal computing, i.e., ~1985, really caused the rapid growth: Replacing the typewriters.

In business, word processing really came in with the minicomputer-based word processors from the likes of Wang and the other minicomputer makers. Though they were by no means universal.

When the IBM PC came out in 1981, yes people used it for word processing but spreadsheets, especially Lotus 1-2-3, were really the killer app.

In the mid-term, the replacement of typewriters with computers led to the secretary's job description going away (phone answering machines helped too). Somewhere I read (warning: this may be apocryphal) that secretaries were exactly one of the reasons Xerox never cashed in on the personal computer (or the Xerox Star): Xerox managers had secretaries to do their typing, and couldn't imagine doing it themselves; nor could they imagine giving their secretary a piece of hardware that cost as much as the secretary's yearly salary. (The Xerox Star cost somewhere in the range of $15k, I'm just guessing what a secretary's salary was back then. And never mind that factory laborers used machinery that cost at least that much.)