Engineering a career at the PC's creation
Published: 05 Jul 2007 17:07 BST
…a large amount of money for Scientific Data Systems, and wanted us to use the machine they were making. We looked at it as a vehicle for a time-sharing machine and decided it wasn't very good. So we built our own, one that was functionally identical [to the PDP-10], but was quite different in implementation. And that took about a year.
We had been interested in smaller machines. We had some machines which were actually personal machines, but they never went very far because they didn't have very good displays. They used an old display technology, where the CRT beam was guided around by a magnetic or electric field to actually draw characters and things like that, but they were pretty crummy characters. They are the sort of things you still see today in air traffic control centres. What we wanted to do was build a machine that could be really a personal machine. I mean, you can call it a personal computer.
You're talking about the Alto now?
That was the Alto. And once we had the Alto, we realised that the system would be much more powerful as they were put together with a network, and so we did the Ethernet.
Again, describe what you and the rest of team were thinking. Did you grasp the potential of what you had created?
Oh yeah. We did understand Moore's Law. We realised most of the implications and that was why we did something which was very daring for the time — which was the bitmap display. We realised that it used three-quarters of the memory of the machine to draw one frame, but that was going to get cheaper real fast. And so it made sense to actually build the software along that paradigm and go through the trouble of getting good fonts and so on.
Once we had the Alto, we realised that the system would be much more powerful as they were put together with a network, and so we did the Ethernet
Chuck Thacker, Microsoft
Once we had that, we also had a technology that had been developed by a guy name Gary Starkweather, who couldn't find a home for it inside the East Coast part of Xerox and so he came to Parc and did most of the optical and electromechanical engineering on the laser printer. We did the electronics. That was kind of a marriage made in heaven because that is the thing that Xerox made a bundle on.
So why didn't the folks at Xerox realise what they had on their hands? So many of the key inventors — you included — finally just said: "Enough, we're outta here."
The problem was that Xerox was a copier company and, at that time, Xerox's main business was under attack because of the Japanese getting into the low-end copier business. I think it was a combination of lack of vision and the fact that we were kind of far away and so we didn't get much face time with the executives in Stamford [Connecticut]. As a result, they really didn't understand what we were doing and they were also not computer people. Most of what they saw, they didn't really understand. The other reason, of course, was, at the time that we did all this stuff, it was really too expensive.
A few years later when you went to join Digital Equipment, DEC was a very hot company but, within a few years, it also was under pressure because of the emergence of the PC. Again you had history repeating itself.
That's right.
But this time it was Ken Olsen who was slow to realise things were changing.
Yeah, Ken Olsen missed it too. To be fair about that, we had workstation machines at DEC and we made them and they were much better than the PC. But they were still too expensive. Ken's comment about why would anybody ever want a computer in their home — that was just misguided. A lot of us knew that computers in your homes were good because we had computers in our home and we used them for work. We played games too. They weren't as exotic as the games you can buy today, but they were there.
What's been most surprising to you about the way the technology industry has evolved during these past 35 years? Have you given much thought to the subject of social networks?
Well, I've been a little bit surprised by some of that stuff. I mean some of it is very scary. But I'm really too old to have a valid opinion about that sort of stuff because those things are really for young people. The unfortunate thing is…
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