[Aloha]

When I was 17-18, I read 'Dealers of Lightning' it clued me into the foundations laid for modern computing in the 60-70's in the Bay Area (between SRI, CSAIL and PARC), and markedly changed my own approach to information and computing.

I've always wondered how those who were featured in the book felt about it?

[alankay]

The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA) is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and most accurate.

"Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level but far from the bottom. Its flaws are too much "Heroes' Journey" and a very complex and confused jumping around timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also has a lot of good stories, of which a reasonable number are "true enough".

"Fumbling The Future" is extremely inaccurate.

[Aloha]

Thanks! I'll add that one onto my reading queue.

I actually didn't have too much trouble following Dealers, because it (more or less) mostly followed each project separately, which while creating an interspersed timeline in the book, was mostly coherent within each section.

I did read at least part of Fumbling, but I found it a hard book to thread the needle on, and it was in such stark factual disagreement with what else I'd read that I don't recall finishing it.

I know too many who draw the same conclusions from the Alto and related technologies that fumbling does, so I try to get people to read more about PARC, because I'll hope that once they know more they'll draw much the same conclusions I have - My frustration with much of the traditional criticism of Xerox in failing to commercialize the PARC innovations is it completely ignores both the high cost of the technology (it was literally the technology of the future) and the sales culture of technology at the time.

I don't think any large technology company (which Xerox was broadly) could have made something wondrous out of the innovations PARC created because the people who could recognize the value (and use) of this kind of technology were not the people being sold to, or for that matter doing the buying - nor did they have the budgets to buy a Alto, as was later seen with the Star when it came out.

It took direct to consumer sales (allowing department managers to buy stuff), and lower cost products to allow personal computing to penetrate into the home and corporate america - also the traditional criticism completely ignores that the 9700 (and follow on products) paid for the money spent at PARC several times over.

(incidentally, I believe that this sales culture issue is a prime reason why DEC no longer exists as a company because they failed to see that their market was shifting and could no longer be sold thru the same mechanisms they always had been)

In the end, basic research and the undirected applied science that flows from it is important, even if it has no direct tie to your line of business, because it's the innovation that drives a company forward, and frankly drives humanity forward. I wish more people knew that modern interconnected the world we live in was built on billions spent with no firm idea of what would result from them, and how much of a debt we owe to PARC, Bell Labs and others.

Also, thank you for taking the time to respond to my question!

[alankay]

Yes, the separate timelines of "Dealers" quite missed the cross fertilization and synergies of Parc (which were its main unusual features), so to me, this is a real drawback to this book. On the other hand, "systems" don't parse well into sequences, and Parc was a system, and thus needs something more like a 2D or 3D or 4D chart to do a decent explanation.

There are at least two big issues regarding cost that many people miss: (a) the first is the difference between what should be spent on "prototypes for learning and vetting" and what can be done when designing for manufacturing, and (b) the second is the the difficulty most people had with valuing what personal computing might be for them.

In the first public paper I wrote about the Dynabook I pointed out that Moore's Law meant that powerful tablet sized personal computers would likely wind up costing what a color TV set would cost (they would have pretty similar components, and most of the cost in electronics is in packaging).

But we also had another analogy that we though could work via education: that of the personal automobile in the US. People value cars enough to be willing to pay quite a bit more for them than for most consumer devices. This was very interesting because the ARPA dream of an interactive personal computer connected to a world-wide network was a kind of "information and intelligence vehicle".

If people could see this, then they might be willing to pay what they would pay for a car. Certainly most computer people and most scientists and engineers would be able to assign value in this way. We thought most knowledge workers would eventually be able to see this also, and that there would be an intermediate phase before getting to the TV set kind of technologies.

An analysis of what happened to eventually quash this idea is beyond the scope of this note. (But, to make a point in talks, I've tried to get people to think about what "a car's worth" of personal computer could be like (the average car in the US a few years ago was a Toyota Avalon at $28K, so about 10 times what most personal computers go for).

This is a different slant than the problem that DEC and similar companies had (which was to not be able to understand personal computing in any reasonable form).