Dealers of Lightning
Michael A. Hiltzik · 1999
The story of Xerox PARC, the lab that invented much of what a modern computer is, and the company that let it walk away.
Michael Hiltzik was a newspaper reporter when he wrote this account of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, and it reads like one: patient, well sourced, and built around the people involved. The subtitle is Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.
What it’s about
PARC opened in 1970 with a mandate to invent the technology of the office of the future. Over the next decade its researchers built the Alto, a personal computer with a bitmap display and a mouse, and with it the ideas of the graphical desktop and on-screen document editing. They developed Ethernet to connect those machines, built an early laser printer, and created Smalltalk, a pioneering object-oriented programming environment.
Hiltzik follows the lab’s leaders and researchers through the creative years and then through the harder question: why did so much of this reach the public through other companies? He recounts how Xerox, a copier company, struggled to turn its researchers’ work into products, and how people and ideas moved out of PARC into companies such as Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft.
Why it belongs on coldboot
Many of the products in the 1980s articles have PARC in their family tree. Microsoft Word descends from Bravo, the Alto’s editor. PostScript and MacPaint belong to the same lineage of ideas about screens and printed pages. This book is the best single account of where those ideas came from.
Keep in mind
It is a reporter’s history from 1999, and the story of who deserves credit for what is contested. Participants remember events differently, and the famous account of Apple’s visit to PARC is told in several versions. Read it as a rich, human telling of a complicated story and not as the final word.
Edition linked: paperback (Collins, 2000).