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Dealers of Lightning A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Starcraft invades Amazing Stories   T A B L E__T A L K Can documents created using Microsoft products be traced to your PC? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture zone and find out more   ____________________ Technology news from Apple's open source foray prompts squabbles ____________________   R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Readers fill us in on personal information software -- the good, the bad and the discontinued (03/23/99) Coming soon to computer games -- advertising By Janelle Brown Before you splatter that alien, a word from our sponsor! (03/19/99) Silicon Follies By Thomas Scoville Chapter 3: Hacked in Seattle (03/18/99) A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals? By Andrew Leonard The mysterious death of an online debater sparks a flurry of suspicions and theories (03/19/99) Silicon Follies By Thomas Scoville Chapter 1: Adrift among the cubicles Chapter 2: The disinhibition of market leaders (03/18/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST BOOKS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

The king of computer labs ----------Xerox PARC invented the modern PC but couldn't ----------sell it. A definitive new history explores why. "DEALERS OF LIGHTNING: XEROX-PARC AND THE DAWN OF THE COMPUTER AGE" | BY MICHAEL HILTZIK | HARPER BUSINESS, 448 PAGES BY ANDREW LEONARD | The tale of how Steven Jobs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) and nabbed the ideas that made the Apple Macintosh so "insanely great" is, as Michael Hiltzik observes, "one of the foundation legends of personal computing." Xerox PARC was the birthplace of the first graphical user interface -- including the very concept of using a mouse to click on an icon and the technique of multiple overlapping windows. Xerox PARC also created the Alto, a personal computer that the rest of the computing industry didn't catch up to for decades. Yet Xerox, the corporation, is infamous for failing to capitalize on its own research laboratory's innovations. It could have been a contender in the digital revolution, so the familiar line goes, but it blew it. It's a formidable story for a journalist to tackle -- bits and pieces of it have already appeared in countless magazine articles, books and documentaries. But Hiltzik pulls it off in his new "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age." Hiltzik's book is an exhaustively researched, lucidly written history of what is arguably the world's most famous computer research laboratory. He even achieves that most elusive of journalist goals -- he gets the last word. No one even need consider writing another book about Xerox PARC: It's been done, definitively. One testament to the thoroughness with which Hiltzik goes about his business is the fact that Jobs doesn't even make an appearance until three-quarters of the way through the book. "Dealers of Lightning" is about much more than just how Xerox managed to screw up. It is a book about the birth of the personal computer, the nature of invention, the relationship between corporate bureaucracy and unfettered scientific research and, most compellingly, a group of very smart, talented and creative people -- "one of the most exceptional teams of inventing talent ever assembled in one place." Writing vividly about a research laboratory and a group of programmers, hardware tinkers and managers is, as the programmers like to say, a non-trivial task. It's not an inherently sexy topic, unless you're the kind of person who gets all hot and bothered by the very thought of inventing, say, Ethernet (another Xerox PARC achievement). Some of the key figures in the story of Xerox PARC have already been written about at length, notably Bob Taylor, the man most responsible for funding the initial growth of the Internet, and Alan Kay, the graphics specialist who is widely considered one of computing's most eloquent visionaries. But rarely have they jumped off the page, warts and all, as they do in "Dealers of Lightning." Taylor, for example, is widely renowned for his ability to get researchers working together, motivated and focused. His predilection for office politics infighting is less famous, and far less attractive -- but, as Hiltzik shows, clearly all of a piece. Taylor here is a fully fleshed-out human being; the portrait revealed is an invaluable contribution to the history of computing. At the expense of the poetry of invention, "Dealers of Lightning" focuses extensively on office politics. The power struggles, both at Xerox PARC and at Xerox corporate headquarters, occasionally become stupefying in their labyrinthine complexity. And yet the excruciating detail of endless bureaucratic turf wars is essential for our understanding of Xerox's corporate strategy and evolution. Without the back stabbing and the boardroom finagling, we wouldn't understand why Xerox became a lumbering behemoth unwilling and, in fact, unable to capitalize on Xerox PARC's innovations. There is a compelling contradiction at work. Hiltzik's account makes a strong argument that to get the most creative work done in basic research, one must allow creative people to pursue their own interests without micromanagement or strict accountability to bottom-line profitability. At Xerox PARC, research teams could assemble, break apart and reassemble practically as they pleased -- "if an idea worked," writes Hiltzik, "a team stuck together for the next three or six months to complete the job; if not, everyone simply dispersed like free electrons in search of a new creative valence." N E X T_ P A G E .|. Was Xerox to blame for "blowing it"?