Founders at Work.pdf

282 Founders at Work
them as possible. So when you go through that list of people who were there at
PARC during those early years, it’s sort of a who’s who of folks who eventually
migrated on to other things—as did John and I—into other parts of Silicon
Valley.
By the fall of 1977, in my office there, I had a personal computer with a
bitmap display—oriented like a sheet of paper, not like a television set for the
obvious Xerox reasons. I had a software program running on it that was as good
as Microsoft Word—in fact it was developed by the fellow who left PARC and
went to Microsoft and built the Office product line for them, Charles Simonyi.
I had a great mail system on it that could mail to anybody in the ARPANET
community, as well as within Xerox. It was on the precursor of the 3Com
Ethernet technology, developed by Bob Metcalfe, who later left PARC and
started 3Com. The network connected the personal computers to laser printers.
We had a 60-page-a-minute black-and-white laser printer, a 10-page-a-minute
color printer. We had a file server where you could store files and share them
for projects. All of these computers were connected in both an internal and
external network throughout Xerox Corporation and into the ARPANET, which
was the precursor of the Internet. All of this was at Xerox PARC in 1977.
That fall, we put on a demonstration for the Xerox senior management.
Periodically they would bring in about 250 of the leading managers around the
world for a conference and a little bit of socializing. We were given one of
the days to put on a vision of what the future could be for Xerox. We leased two
DC-10s (personal computers weren’t so small back then) and flew all this stuff
out to Florida and set up the equivalent of a trade show to show Xerox management
what we had.
It was a very enlightening experience. The body language of the Xerox executives
was to fold their arms over their chests, sort of stand back, look at this
stuff, make some pithy remarks. If you’ve ever been in sales, you know that this
is someone who doesn’t want to buy, is probably a little afraid of what he’s seeing
because he doesn’t completely understand it, and hopes it goes away quickly.
Since this was a social event as well, everybody was invited to bring their
spouses and significant others. I think all of those 250 executives were men at
the time. Most of them had wives, many of whom had worked in offices. They
loved this stuff. They sat down and played with the mouse, they changed a few
things on the screen, they hit the print button and it looked the same on paper
as it did on the screen. They said, “Wow, this is really cool. This would really
change an office if it had this technology.”
When that event was over and we had the postmortems and discussions
with Xerox management, it became pretty obvious that we were in an uphill
battle to get them to understand what they had and what its potential was.
Remember that 1977 was 4 years before the introduction of the IBM PC and
long before the Macintosh. In fairness to the management, I think we as
researchers were a little naïve about what it would take to get these things from
conceptual operating prototypes all the way to full-production, supportable
products. But we sort of hoped that they would hire the people who could
do that.