
Alan Kay answers “What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?” - vshan
https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-when-Steve-Jobs-visited?share=1
======
Animats
I got the tour of PARC in 1975, years before Jobs. Smalltalk wasn't really
working yet, but some Altos and Ethernet were running. Kay described Ethernet
as an "Alohanet with a captive ether". They had a file server and a laser
printer starting to work. So what they had was the beginnings of an office
environment of the 1990s.

Kay's point at the time is that this was what you could do if you were willing
to spend a large amount of money per user on hardware. It wasn't cost-
effective yet. Someday it would be. Xerox was willing to spend the money, so
when the hardware became available, they'd own the market.

This wasn't the first GUI. They'd downsized the 1968 Mother of All Demos to a
machine that sat alongside a desk.[1] When Engelbart did that, it required a
room-sized mainframe, a video link from the mainframe to the demo site (a very
big deal in 1968), and a sizable crew of support people to keep it all
running. All to support one user.

This technology reached production with the introduction of "workstations".
The first was the Terak, in 1977, which ran an interpretive environment called
the UCSD P-System. This was a byte code interpreter for Pascal. Fast compile,
slow execution, basic graphics. Perhaps the ancestor to Turbo Pascal for DOS.
PDP-11 technology underneath. I used one briefly. 1979 brought the Three
Rivers PERQ, which was a lot like an Alto and sold as a commercial product. It
had another 16-bit CPU inside, from ICL in the UK, and was another
interpretive Pascal system. I never saw one; it was considered something of a
dud.

When the Motorola 68000 came out, it was clear to a lot of people that there
was finally a big enough microprocessor to build a workstation. At last, a
32-bit address space. (Or at least 24; early machines didn't use the high
byte.) The Apollo Domain, in 1980, was the first of those. That was the first
real workstation. It had its own OS, its own networking (a coax token ring),
its own file system (exclusive use locking across the network worked, unlike
UNIX), and its own GUI. Apollo had their own MMU and their own paging system,
which was really hard due to the M68000 not handling page faults properly. It
was way ahead of anything else at the time. But the small organization behind
it just had too much work to do building all that software and hardware. When
I used one, it was clear this was the future, but it wasn't there yet.

Then came Sun, and a whole slew of UNIX workstations. UNIX was really the
wrong tool for the job, but it was available and cheap. (Not yet free.)

Meanwhile, Apple was trying to get a low-end workstation working. The Apple
Lisa (1983) was the result. It was sort of a cost-reduced Apollo - its own OS,
its own MMU (a whole board, which ran the price up), and its own GUI. Also its
own disk drive, the one time Apple tried to build a hard drive in house. That
didn't go well. The Lisa was impressive and useful, but it cost too much to go
mass market. The real UNIX workstations came with big screens, and the Lisa
had a dinky screen like DOS-type computers. Meanwhile, IBM was eating Apple's
lunch, replacing the obsolete Apple II with dumb DOS machines. No GUI, but
enough compute power to run a spreadsheet and, importantly, a hard drive. Now
people could do basic business work.

Apple's response, the Macintosh, was the world's greatest toy computer. It
shipped in 1984 with 128K of RAM, one floppy drive (you needed two to get
anything done), an operating system with no CPU dispatcher, no memory
protection, and a nice GUI. But no hard drive. It was really slow and spent
most of its time reading floppies and displaying an hourglass "wait" icon. It
almost killed Apple. Sales were very low; Apple had planned to sell about
47,000 units a month, but only sold about 5,000. What saved Apple was the
first desktop laser printer, the LaserWriter, in 1985. (PARC had a laser
printer in the mid-1970s, but it was based on a big copier engine and bigger
than a desk.) In 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus, which could, at
last, support an external hard drive. That was the first successful product in
the line, and launched the desktop publishing industry.

In parallel to all this, there was another line of technology, now forgotten -
"word processing". Wang and IBM were the big players in this. This started
with typewriters with some memory, around 1971, and by 1977, Wang had the Wang
Office Information System. This involved many semi-dumb terminals connected to
a shared unit with a CPU and file server. Those could in turn be networked,
and documents sent around the system. Very cost-effective, because each
terminal was cheap. This was a huge win for offices which did a lot of
document preparation, and Wang was, for a while, a very successful company.

So Xerox tried to move into that space with the Xerox Star, in 1981. This
brought the Alto technology into an office environment. Worked fine, cost too
much. Like the Wang system, it was very closed. This was deliberate. Word
processing and office system were used by secretaries and clerks. They had to
Just Work. Exposing end users to the internal complexity of the system was
considered a bad idea.

The cultural change which brought system administration to the masses wasn't
seen coming. It was inconceivable in the early 1980s that clerical people and
small business operators would have to worry about what was going on inside
the box. But as the DOS-type machines got more powerful and moved into
offices, for about two decades everyone had to become a sysadmin. Apple tried
to hide more under the covers, but it didn't really work all that well in the
early years.

Today, of course, the complexity has mostly been put back in a sealed box, and
you can give a Chromebook type tablet to a 5 year old and they'll be able to
work it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

~~~
Animats
One of the early goals for workstations was a "3M" machine - a megabyte of
RAM, a megapixel of display, and a megahertz instruction rate. That was about
the point at which GUI workstations started to be really useful. The Alto and
the original Mac were both below that level. The Apollo Domain, the Sun I, and
the Macintosh II were slightly above it.

(The price of RAM was a big problem in those days. All the early DOS machines
and Macs were RAM-starved. The workstation people plowed through that problem
with money, and RAM was a big fraction of machine cost. Now it takes a
gigabyte to run Hello World, but, whatever.)

~~~
ido
I think it was MIPS[0] rather than Mhz.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#MIPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#MIPS)

------
coldcode
That's why it takes two types of people to make something successful and
lasting. One to come up with and do the invention, and someone to take it and
make a product that affects the world. Neither does much without the other.
Xerox had all the amazing tech and did absolutely squat with it. Jobs saw a
demo and made it an actual thing you could use, whoever many errors he made in
the process. Same is true with Steve and Steve, one did the tech and one made
it a company. Rarely can one person do both and be successful.

~~~
hkmurakami
The one example I know of where the two skills were founded in the same person
was Satoru Iwata of HAL/Nintendo.

Brilliant programmer/hacker, tech/User experience visionary, and a corporate
operator chief.

------
tyingq
More detail on changing the system while running, and a comment at the bottom
from Alan Kay retelling this same story:

[http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-
and-r...](http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-
rewriting.html)

"Dealers of Lightning" also a has a chapter on Job's visit:
[https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-
Computer...](https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-
Computer/dp/0887309895) Try the "look inside" for "Steve Jobs Gets His Show
and Tell".

------
fragmede
If you are interested about this era of computing, I recommend _The Dream
Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal_
which covers a lot of the ground of getting to the famed Xerox Parc GUI demo,
though that's barely more than a footnote in the context of the rest of the
book.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/)

------
cabaalis
I thought it was interesting that 2 objections raised by Steve Jobs so he
"could feel in control" are actually normal UX items and have been ever since.
(smooth scrolling, selecting text being an outline)

Maybe this is a difference between someone totally focused on feel and
experience versus pure computer science.

~~~
blackguardx
I haven't seen many systems that use an outline for selection. Alan indicated
that their original version inverted the selection (he uses the word
"complement") as do most systems today.

~~~
nikofeyn
most systems today use highlight.

~~~
dllthomas
... of which "inverting the text" is an implementation

------
protomyth
_The Smalltalk used in this demo was my personal favorite (-78)_

Is there a document that shows the differences between The Smalltalk-78 and
Smalltalk-80, and what made Smalltalk-80 worse?

~~~
abecedarius
Wish I knew! One difference is that -80 had metaclasses. (They weren’t in -76
but I’m not sure about -78.) I’d say metaclasses are more complication than
they’re worth.

------
pupppet
After more or less six years of running this demo, a designer (Steve) steps in
and makes a couple suggestions that very much improved the experience,
suggestions that took only a few seconds to implement in Alan’s own words.
Alan seems to poopoo Steves’s visit but it highlights exactly why the computer
industry needed Jobs.

~~~
tyingq
I don't discount Jobs' influence, but I think people tend to dismiss the
degree to which luck is involved. Jobs certainly made plenty of mistakes, but
was in the right place, at the right time, enough times to overcome them.

I tend to think if you take Jobs, or Gates, or any other icon out of the
picture, somebody else would have filled the void. And the end state might be
slightly different, but not that much. Maybe Kildall, CP/M, and GEM would have
filled part of the Apple void, for example.

~~~
protomyth
Every successful person had some event(s) that are lucky. Dismissing a
person's accomplishments because they got lucky in some way is disingenuous.
Unlucky people get hit by cars and never fulfill their potential.

Jobs defined how the mass market 8-bit computers looked for example[1]. GEM
wouldn't exist without the Mac, and well, CP/M was actually the first choice
but some people have one bad day.

If the giants of the industry didn't exist then we'd be living in an alternate
reality with different pillars to support later people. I often think about
Rome. They had all the technology to move to something like the steam engine.
Maybe someone in the empire got close and just had some bad days, but it never
really got done until much later. People who see something different are not
interchangeable. You might get close, but all the experience that brought
someone to a point isn't going to be duplicated. Parallel inventions happen,
but even they are not exact duplicates (e.g. a different notation for
Calculus).

1) it is almost a iPhone type display on how 8-bit computers looked before the
Apple ][ and then after. This is no way says anything about my opinion of
which 8-bit computer was the best.

~~~
fragmede
A slightly more "we're-living-it" example is to look at Elon Musk and Tesla.
Mr. Musk has succeeded in convincing the auto industry to make electric cars.
Not all by himself, mind you, certainly the EU emissions regulatory
environment had something to do with the "convincing", but nor were those
regulations dreamed up in a world where Tesla did not exist.

Fisker tried and failed at around the same time Tesla was making the roadster,
so while there is certainly an element of luck to Elon Musk's success, saying
it's all due to luck undercuts the fact that he's also worked very, _very_
hard to get where he is - there are stories about him sleeping in the factory
so he can do QC inspections himself.

I'm doubtful that electric cars would be in the same position they are in
today, if this single individual, Elon Musk, had not existed, but that's
impossible to prove - there were hobbyists who were converting Mazda Miatas
and Honda Civics to electric engines, without Mr. Musk, would one of those
hobbyists have "made it big" and managed to the auto industry into the future?

~~~
timthelion
But this _still_ potentially "luck". Or perhaps "luck" is a very bad term.
Imagine that Musk had a twin name Allen who happened to start a company called
"pay-now". And "pay-now" was hit with a lawsuit related to the patent on
eshops and had to shut down. Allen would never have started Tesla. Would we
even know about Allen? He wouldn't even be rich. His behavior, timing, actions
ect. were identical to those of Musk, but his outcome was greatly different.
There are probably several Allens out there. Now, consider, what if Musk was
identical, but he had never started paypal at all. Instead he, after studying
electric drive trains for 20 years, made a proposal to investors that an
electric car company should be started. This Allen would be MORE qualified
than Musk to start an electric car company, but lacking capital to back the
investments, he would be LESS likely to succeed!

~~~
fragmede
I hate to break this to you, but the American myth; that if Allen is just as
smart, and works just as hard as Elon Musk, then they both get to be just as
successful, is a sham; a lie. There are definitely many Allens out there, but
shame of failure means we barely ever hear that story. There are people dumber
and lazier than you or I, that have far more money than you ever will, or at
least did far less work to get there. Not to be cynical about the world, but
there's more to life than fame or fortune.

There is undoubtedly luck involved in business, I can agree with that. FedEx's
Vegas story from their early days could easily have gone the other direction,
and then they wouldn't even rate a mention in a book about the history of
shipping.

However, I disagree about studious Allen - someone who studied drive trains
for 20 years _is_ less qualified than serial entrepreneur Mr. Musk, who had
two successful businesses under his belt before coming on board Tesla simply
due to his experience running businesses. That Mr. Musk was already wealthy
from those businesses which gave him a leg up with Tesla seems unfair to
everyone who didn't start off independently wealthy, but c'est la vie. (There
have been several articles recently about the dearth of new software company
IPOs, due to how much the big 3 control the industry.)

Starting an auto manufacturing business was never going to be a bootstrapped
operation the same way a two-person software startup in a garage could be, so
having funding to hire a good drivetrain engineer is simply part of it. Having
studied electric drivetrains for 20 years, maybe Allen ends up a very early
employee at his brother's car company, and if that goes public, then Allen
will be very rich - say he's still holding on to 50k shares of pre-IPO TSLA,
he's doing quite well for himself, despite not being famous. Not nearly as
well as Elon Musk, but he's doing well enough.

That's not to say Allen couldn't learn about news skill so he can run a
business, or about, say, the intricacies of lithium battery manufacturing, but
studying drivetrains for 20 years doesn't make a CEO. CTO for a drivetrain
subcontractor perhaps, but sales and marketing and managing people; all those
soft skills that aren't hard-core engineering building a product are actually
_vital_ to a company's success. (There was even a post on HN early today
saying just that very thing.)

Elon Musk's success with SpaceX's success comes from rejecting prevailing
industry knowledge - that reusable rockets just won't work. Everyone else in
the industry, especially those that had been studying rockets for 20 years,
knew that as fact.

------
rdiddly
He complains no one asked him until now, but the question is a bit like asking
John Lennon "Wow what's it like to work with Ringo?" Well it's like busting
ass writing most of the songs, and Ringo shows up and records the drum part
and smiles, and becomes everybody's favorite Beatle.

 _This analogy is not guaranteed. No refunds._

~~~
rdiddly
Your downvotes prove my point. Popularity is a hell of a drug.

------
pcunite
What is amazing to me is that the "invention" of the computer used the already
established norms of our physical reality as it's guide. From the second image
description:

"once _windows_ are created they overlap on the screen like sheets of paper"

As we turn computers into android robots, its clear that the credit never
belong to man himself. The Wonderful idea was already known by God, who gave
man the sense to emulate a good thing.

~~~
timthelion
But overlapping window managers are hardly the best and only solution. I
prefer tiling window managers. Did god invent tiling as well?

