《Dealers of Lightning》翻书笔记

作者：Michael A. Hiltzik
出版社：HarperBusiness
副标题：Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
发行时间：2000年4月5日
来源：下载的 epub 版本
Goodreads：4.13（1292 Ratings）
豆瓣：无

概要

xerox PARC 不仅仅发明了整个互联网，更是延续出了一批世界顶级互联网企业的创立和发展，包括 Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Adobe, 3COM 等等，本书的目标就是去探寻和重现这段历史，第一章介绍了 PARC 从组建到失落的前13年，也是 PARC 最神奇的13年，第二章列举了 PARC 的主要成就，第三章描述了 PARC 对世界的巨大影响

作者介绍

Michael A. Hiltzik (born November 9, 1952) is an American columnist and reporter who has written extensively for the Los Angeles Times. In 1999, he won a beat reporting Pulitzer Prize for co-writing a series of articles about corruption in the music industry with Chuck Philips. 普利策奖得主

Twitter：https://twitter.com/hiltzikm
Blog：http://latimes.com/hiltzik

个人观点

xerox PARC 可以说是发明了整个互联网，但是因为没有很好的将这些发明产业化而错失了整个互联网，由于 xerox 总部对其的忽视，甚至没有将所有这些发明申请专利，最终让 Apple 和 Microsoft 渔翁得利，这段历史听说过无数次但是从来没有认真去了解过，所以找到了这本书翻了一下，收获非常大

PARC 发明的东西不仅多而且极富创见：个人电脑、图形用户界面、鼠标、激光打印机（后来发展成了 CD DVD）、以太网（后来的局域网）、Smalltalk and OOP（后来造就了 C++ and Java ）、页面描述语言（后来的 PostScript） 、图标、下拉菜单、所见即所得编辑器（WYSIWYG）、语音压缩技术等等，最终造就了硅谷传奇和整个互联网行业的大爆发，这种以科研的一己之力推动技术跃进的事情，在整个人类历史上并不多见

造成 PARC 巨大成功的原因，书中概括的有四个：

• One was Xerox’s money, a seemingly limitless cascade of cash flowing from its near-monopoly on the office copier.
• The second was a buyer’s market for high-caliber research talent.
• The third factor was the state of computer technology, which stood at a historic inflection point.
• The final factor was management.

但是我阅读以后感觉还有第5个原因：「越战」，战争让政府的科研预算大幅缩减，并且研究人员被迫要参与很多军事项目的项目，让许多优秀的科研人员离开政府进入学界和产业界，PARC 的创始人 Bob Taylor 就是这样的例子，他原本是隶属于美国国防部的 ARPA（国防高级研究计划局） 的主管，后来被 xerox 招募创建 PARC 才有了后来的所有故事

Bob Taylor 可谓是 PARC 的灵魂人物，也是当时整个计算机和早期互联网世界最大的猎头，无数人被他的愿景所折服：The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography. Taylor 的主要支持者是 George Pake，他代表 Xerox 招募 Taylor 的原因是：identifying the best researchers in the computing field.

PARC 最终被认为是 xerox 一次失败的原因：
The best-publicized aspect of PARC’s history is that its work was ignored by its parent company while earning billions for others. To a certain extent this is true. The scientists’ unfettered creativity, not to mention their alien habits of mind and behavior, fomented unrelenting conflict with their stolid parent company. Determined in principle to move into the digital world but yoked in practice to the marketing of the copier machine (and unable to juggle two balls at once), Xerox management regarded PARC’s achievements first with bemusement, then uneasiness, and finally hostility. Because Xerox never fully understood the potential value of PARC’s technology, it stood frozen on the threshold of new markets while its rivals—including big, lumbering IBM—shot past into the computer age.

个人一直认为产业是这个世界的未来，产业在获得了足够的独立性以后，将大量的资金投入到创新之中，犹如现在 Google、特斯拉、IBM、微软 在做的事情，而政府研究院和学术界因为缺乏产业的目标驱动和足够的独立性而逐渐的丧失影响力，研究 xerox PARC 的这段历史，对判断人类未来的发展历史意义重大

在 George Pake 的资料最后看到这么遗憾的一句话：Late in life, Pake began writing two different books, both with the collaborator Andrew Szanton. One of Pake's books was a life memoir, the other a book of advice for those running research centers, "think tanks" or other small groups of highly intelligent and independent people, and trying to coax them to work collectively to achieve organizational goals. George Pake's death interrupted both book projects. 不知道是否还能从别的地方找到这种类型的好书

摘录

How it burst those boundaries in the early 1970s to become something more closely resembling a national resource is part of its special mystique. Four factors contributed most to PARC’s explosive creativity. One was Xerox’s money, a seemingly limitless cascade of cash flowing from its near-monopoly on the office copier. The second was a buyer’s market for high-caliber research talent. With the expenses and politics of the Vietnam War cutting into the government’s research budget and a nationwide recession exerting the same effect on corporate research, Xerox was one of the rare enterprises in a position to bid for the best scientists and engineers around.
The third factor was the state of computer technology, which stood at a historic inflection point. The old architectures of mainframe computers and time-sharing systems were reaching the limits of traditional technologies, and new ones were just coming into play—semiconductor memories that offered huge gains in speed and economics, for example, and integrated circuits that allowed the science’s most farsighted visionaries to realize their dreams for the first time. Never before or since would computer science be poised to take such great leaps of understanding in so short a period.
The intellectual hothouse of PARC was one of the few places on earth employing the creative brainpower to realize them.
The final factor was management. PARC was founded by men whose experience had taught them that the only way to get the best research was to hire the best researchers they could find and leave them unburdened by directives, instructions, or deadlines. For the most part, the computer engineers of PARC were exempt from corporate imperatives to improve Xerox’s existing products. They had a different charge: to lead the company into new and uncharted territory.

That Xerox proved only sporadically willing to follow them is one of the ironies of this story. The best-publicized aspect of PARC’s history is that its work was ignored by its parent company while earning billions for others. To a certain extent this is true. The scientists’ unfettered creativity, not to mention their alien habits of mind and behavior, fomented unrelenting conflict with their stolid parent company. Determined in principle to move into the digital world but yoked in practice to the marketing of the copier machine (and unable to juggle two balls at once), Xerox management regarded PARC’s achievements first with bemusement, then uneasiness, and finally hostility. Because Xerox never fully understood the potential value of PARC’s technology, it stood frozen on the threshold of new markets while its rivals—including big, lumbering IBM—shot past into the computer age.
Yet this relationship is too easily, and too often, simplified. Legend becomes myth and myth becomes caricature—which soon enough gains a sort of liturgical certitude. PARC today remains a convenient cudgel with which to beat big business in general and Xerox in particular for their myriad sins, including imaginary ones, of corporate myopia and profligacy. Xerox was so indifferent to PARC that it “didn’t even patent PARC’s innovations,” one leading business journal informed its readers not long before this writing—an assertion that would come as a surprise to the team of patent lawyers permanently assigned to PARC, not to mention the center’s former scientists whose office walls are still decorated with complimentary plaques engraved with the cover pages of their patents. (As is the case with most corporate employees, the patent rights remained vested with their employer.) Another business journal writes authoritatively that the Alto “failed as a commercial product.” In fact, the Alto was designed from the first strictly as a research prototype—no more destined for marketing as a commercial product than was, say, the Mercury space capsule.
Another great myth is that Xerox never earned any money from PARC. The truth is that its revenues from one invention alone, the laser printer, have come to billions of dollars—returning its investment in PARC many times over.

On a sunny afternoon in July 1996 the same photograph looked down at a gathering of that same talent in the open-air restaurant of a Northern California winery. There were some changes from when it was first shot, however. This time the picture was blown up bigger than life, and the people celebrating under its amused gaze had aged a quarter-century.
They were there to mark the retirement of Bob Taylor, the unlikely impresario of computer science at Xerox PARC. Among the guests were several of his intellectual mentors, including a few who ranked as genuine Grand Old Men of a young and still-fluid discipline. This group included Wes Clark, an irascible genius of hardware design who started his career when even the smallest computers had to be operated from within their cavernous entrails; and seated not far away, the flinty Douglas C. Engelbart, the uncompromising prophet of multimedia interactivity whose principles of graphical user interfaces and mouse-click navigation were disdained in his own time but have become ubiquitous in ours.
Most of the company, however, consisted of Bob Taylor’s chosen people. They were unabashed admirers whose careers he had launched by inviting them to sit beneath his commodious wing.

Taylor perceived the need for something entirely new. “I started talking functionally,” he said. He asked himself: Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain? Obviously, the eyeball. If one then contemplated how the computer could best communicate with its human operator, the answer suggested itself. “I thought the machine should concentrate its resources on the display.”
The computer traditionalists goggled at him. Most were mathematicians or physicists and thus perfectly content to employ calculators the size of cement trucks in quest of the next prime number. In 1968, when he and his mentor, the eminent psychologist J.C.R. Licklider, published an article entitled “The Computer as a Communications Device,” the kind of interactive display he was talking about would have consumed memory and processing power worth a million dollars even if limited to the size of a small television screen.
“It took me a couple of years to get them to come around. The designers said, the display? That’s crazy, the display is peripheral!
I said, No, the display is the entire point!” The rest of his career would be devoted to making sure they never forgot it.

“Real research people tend to interact with the world at large,” he observed. “They know what’s happening on the university campuses and get invited back and forth, so they become an avenue through which you can attract new ideas into the company. Research is a funnel through which you can bring in people who normally won’t talk to the guys down in the trenches designing equipment,” he said. Xerox had not been getting new ideas, and it showed. By allowing its researchers to isolate themselves the company had become as musty as a sealed tomb.
Goldman had only agreed to join Xerox because he saw a glimmer of hope in McColough’s forward-looking determination. The gentlemanly Canadian-born executive had lured Goldman away from Ford by pledging to place corporate research on an entirely new footing. Goldman may have felt somewhat out of place at headquarters—short, rotund, and profane, quick-witted and sharp-tongued, and educated at Yeshiva University, he certainly made a contrast to the patrician, Ivy-Leaguish executives that commercial success had attracted the Xerox management cadre. But McColough had promised that as chief scientist he would have the authority to conduct research from the bottom up, following wherever science led him, rather than top-down, which only served the interests of the company’s old guard. That made the offer hard to resist.

“When I went back I asked Peter McColough why he wanted to start a new research center,” Pake recalled later. “I said, ‘You’ve got a research center here that has developed xerography. To build a new one you’ll have to have a new research library and new research machine shop and all the other things. Lot of fixed costs you have to duplicate. Wouldn’t it be easier to expand the laboratory in Rochester?’
“McColough turned to me—and I remember this conversation very well, it’s indelible in my memory. He said, ‘George, I think these people here in Rochester have had a heady success with xerography. But I’m not sure they’re adaptable enough to take on new and different technologies. If we’re going to bring new technologies into Xerox it would be better to do it in a whole new setting.’” McColough’s reply might have come directly from the Jack Goldman playbook. Despite himself, Pake was utterly taken with McColough and Wilson and deeply flattered by their apparent willingness to place him in charge of a multimillion-dollar corporate asset after only one interview, especially since he told them he would expect to be held to a liberal standard of success.

Pake and Taylor each came away from this initial interaction favorably disposed toward the other. Pake was impressed by Taylor’s excellent contacts within the computing fraternity and his apparent authority to disburse millions of dollars with a minimum of fuss. (Formally speaking, Taylor was still Ivan Sutherland’s deputy at the time.) Taylor saw Pake as a pragmatic administrator capable of cutting through red tape to assist a program and a researcher he valued highly. They obviously could have had no inkling of how, within a few short years, their lives would intertwine as colleagues and adversaries.

But by 1969 Bob Taylor was feeling burned out. He had spent more than four years at ARPA’s Information Processing Technologies Office, nearly three of those as director. His annual research budget of $30 million had become the single most important force in U.S. computer research. But the research agency was changing around him. The inescapable catalyst was Vietnam.
In 1967 the war had reached into the comfortable civilian enclosure of ARPA and touched Taylor personally. The Johnson White House had appealed for help with a logistical nightmare that had nothing to do with materiel or troop deployment. The issue was information.
The Vietnam military command, it seemed, had got itself bogged down in a statistical quagmire. “There were discrepancies in the reporting coming back from Vietnam to the White House about enemy killed, supplies captured, bullets on hand, logistics reports of various kinds,” Taylor recalled. “The Army had one reporting system; the Navy had another; the Marine Corps had another.” Unsurprisingly, this system produced ludicrous results. Estimates of enemy casualties exceeded the known population of North Vietnam, while the reported quantities of captured sugar reached levels equivalent to three-quarters of the world supply. “It was ridiculous. Out of frustration the White House turned to the Secretary of Defense to clean this mess up. The Secretary of Defense turned to ARPA, because ARPA was a quick-response kind of agency. The director of ARPA asked me to go out to Vietnam and see whether or not any kind of computer technology could bring at least some semblance of agreement, if not sanity, to this whole process.” Joined by his assistant, Barry Wessler, and three Pentagon-based representatives from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, Taylor made several trips to the war zone. The situation was even worse than he expected. The military was literally drowning in information. Data flowed into depots and never flowed out. Pilots returning from missions would get debriefed their reports entered on punch cards; then their co-pilots would get debriefed and their reports recorded.
But no one did anything with the information, which piled up without anyone bothering to figure out how or even why these reports should be collated and organized.
Taylor assigned technical teams to the trouble spots to straighten out the chaos, although not without meeting resistance. Occasionally some base commander would refuse to grant ARPA’s civilian analysts access to his precious cache of useless data, at which point Taylor, who traveled on government business as a one-star general, would be forced to step in and pull rank.
Taylor and his group solved the military’s problem, after a fashion.
They installed a master computer at the U.S. military command headquarters at Ton Son Nhut Air Base and made it the lone repository of all data. “After that the White House got a single report rather than several,” Taylor remarked. “Whether the data were any more correct or not I don’t know, but at least it was more consistent.” But the experience left him feeling increasingly uneasy about his role at the Pentagon. “My first trip out to Vietnam I was thinking, ‘Well, we’re doing a good thing for these oppressed people. We’re out here to clean this mess up.’ But by the second or third trip I realized this is a civil war and I didn’t want to have much to do with it. Nor did I think my country should have anything to do with it.”
Adding to his frustration was the war’s increasing toll on ARPA.
For most of the decade the agency’s civilian character had insulated it from the deepening rifts within the military establishment. But as the war encroached more and more, the agency had to fight for resources. By the close of the 1960s the Pentagon had slashed ARPA’s budget to half of what it had been at mid-decade.

He felt it was the right time to leave. He had held his job longer than both his predecessors combined. The ARPANET was securely launched under Larry Roberts’s unwavering eye, In September the network’s first four nodes—at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah—went operational. Taylor accepted an invitation from Dave Evans to help Utah undertake a research coordination effort of conveniently vague scope. In late 1969 he left Washington for good and headed for Salt Lake City. He was still there a year later when George Pake tracked him down.
“I heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t altogether happy at Utah,” Pake recalled. This was certainly the prevailing opinion among Taylor’s friends, who found it hard to imagine him careening through the stolid precincts of Salt Lake in his blue Corvette. On campus his recommendations to cancel some programs and merge others together caused, he freely admitted, “some dissatisfaction.” Clearly Dave Evans had done him a favor by facilitating his departure from Washington. But beyond that, Bob Taylor was marking time.
Pake’s purpose in inviting Taylor to Palo Alto was to pick his brains rather than offer him a job (although he did not rule out the latter possibility). He had been unable to solve his most pressing administrative problem: identifying the best researchers in the computing field. It was one thing to compile a list of the country’s best computer science programs—the same few names kept coming up, including Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and Stanford—but quite another to appraise the individual talents within, or to know which projects pointed toward progress and which were intellectual cul-de-sacs. Pake recognized that Taylor’s job for five productive years had involved making exactly those sorts of judgments.
A few days later Taylor was ushered into Pake’s office on Porter Drive. There were two men in the room other than his host—Frank Squires, the personnel chief, and Bill Gunning, a pleasant and unassuming engineer with twenty years’ experience in analog and digital electronics who had been appointed manager of PARC’s Systems Science Lab.
“They sat me down and Pake said, ‘We bought a computer company,’” Taylor recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s too bad. You bought the wrong one.’ I told them that SDS wasn’t interested in interactive computing, and that’s what I’d be doing.” Without humility he proceeded to summarize how he believed SDS and Max Palevsky had gone astray, the memory of his bitter encounter with the computer magnate (then still a Xerox director) apparently still fresh. As his hosts listened patiently, he outlined his vision of a future in which interactive computers harnessed to nationwide networks enhanced the communication of human to human.
Pake, for one, took his caustic critique of SDS in stride. He had already encountered the people in El Segundo and largely agreed with Taylor’s assessment. The lecture on distributed personal computing was a different matter. No one in the room valued Bob Taylor as an important theoretician and his digression elicited only their mental shrugs. “We were interested in him not because of any vision he had of distributed computing,” recalled Squires, “but because of the people he knew—and that meant every significant computer scientist in the United States.”
When the meeting ended they were sure they needed him on board. He was equally certain his plain talk had ensured he would never hear from them again. “I left thinking, ‘I don’t want them and they don’t want me,’” he said. Therefore he was all the more surprised when Pake called him a few days later in Salt Lake.
“I want you to come help build the computer lab,” he said.
Pake’s offer sounded straightforward enough, but there were oddly ambivalent feelings on both sides. Taylor understood that the titular head of the PARC computer lab would have to spend most of his time “attending to matters with corporate types and educating Pake,” rather than directly supervising research. This was a job he considered out of his competence and disinclined to learn. Fortunately enough, it was not exactly what Pake had in mind, either.
The job, he told Taylor, would involve recruiting an entire laboratory staff—including his own boss. Taylor would be hired in an associate management position, but Pake took pains to warn him that on paper he was underqualified even for that and would have to prove himself before advancing.
“I didn’t exactly say to him, ‘You don’t have the right research credentials for the job I’m about to offer you,’” Pake recalled. “What I did say was: ‘Bob, it seems to me that what you need to do is to develop real research credentials if you want to go on. Why don’t you come into this laboratory as associate manager and help me recruit its manager, your boss, and undertake a research program that would develop these credentials for you?’” What he meant, of course, was chiefly that Taylor lacked a respectable Ph.D. In Pake’s hard science universe, where researchers laid their bricks upon foundations that had been built as long as three centuries earlier, a doctorate was a certificate of genuine originality and achievement. That was not true in the fledgling science of computing, which was erecting its own academic foundation as it went along. Nor did Pake’s viewpoint apply very well to Taylor’s unique abilities as a master motivator of top research talent, which could never be encompassed within the rubric of any advanced university degree. In the coming years this absurd yet unspoken issue of Taylor’s nonexistent Ph.D. would help poison the two men’s relationship. It would never cease to color Pake’s assessment of Taylor’s abilities, which only added to Taylor’s belligerence toward the Ph.D.-laden physicists who he viewed as sucking down half of the PARC budget as members of the “General Science Lab.” He was determined to prove that his ragtag bunch of engineering gunslingers could out-research any credentialed physicist in town, and he would never let an opportunity pass without reiterating the challenge.
For the moment, however, enraptured by the chance to finally realize his own vision of computing with a hand-picked team, he tried to ignore Pake’s condescension. He and his protégés had encountered these quaint prejudices of “hard science” bureaucrats on every university campus. All he asked to be spelled out was Pake’s understanding that Xerox’s cherished “office of the future” would embrace networking and interactive computers. Pake agreed without devoting much thought to what those terms implied.

单词列表:

words	sentence
virgin snow	One of them compared it many years later to the sheer joy of making the very first footprints in a field of virgin snow
smoldering	hecked a few last electrical connections on his machine, his cigarette smoldering nearby
high-caliber	The second was a buyer’s market for high-caliber research talent
caricature	Legend becomes myth and myth becomes caricature
half-obscured	his boyish face half-obscured by a cloud of pipe smoke
winery	in the open-air restaurant of a Northern California winery
softball	recalled how at softball Taylor would
organ	Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain
emeritus	step down as the chief technical officer of Xerox, make him emeritus
delicate	That placed McColough, then the Xerox president, in a delicate spot
sprang from	while encouraging his superiors to believe the new lab sprang logically from Xerox’s existing
upbeat	He was too upbeat
siege mode	Xerox at that moment was a company in siege mode