Fun and Games with Email and Printers

By the mid-1970s the Altos in the offices of most PARC re­ searchers had been customized to their tastes. Richard Shoup’s Alto had a color display. Taylor’s Alto had a speaker-which played “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” whenever he received an electronic mail message.

And, as many people have found in the 10 years since the Alto became widespread at PARC, personal computers can be used for enjoyment as well as work. The PARC researchers were among the first to discover this.

“At night, whenever I was in Palo Alto,” Goldman said, “I’d go over to the laboratory and watch Alan Kay invent a game. This was long before electronic games, and these kids were inventing these things all the time until midnight, 1:00 a.m.”

“Xerox had the first electronic raffle nationwide. At Xerox, I received my first electronic junk mailing, first electronic job acceptance, and first electronic obituary.”—Bert Sutherland

“l enjoyed observing a number of firsts,” Sutherland said. “Xerox had the first electronic raffle nationwide. At Xerox, I received my first electronic junk mailing, first electronic job acceptance, and first electronic obituary.”

When the Xerox 914 copiers came out in the early 1960s, “I was a copy freak,” said Lynn Conway who joined PARC from Memorex Corp. in 1973 and is now associate dean and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ‘‘I liked to make things and give them out, like maps—all kinds of things. And in the Xerox environment in ‘76, all of a sudden you could create things and make lots of them.”

Dozens of clubs and interest groups were started that met on the network. Whatever a PARC employee’s hobby or interest, he or she could find someone with whom to share that interest electronically. Much serious work got done electronically as well: reports, articles, sometimes entire design projects were done through the network.

One side effect of all this electronic communication was a disregard for appearances and other external trappings of status.

“People at PARC have a tendency to have very strong personalities, and sometimes in design sessions those personalities came over a little more strongly than the technical content,” said John Warnock, who joined PARC in 1978 from the Evans & Sutherland Corp., where he worked on high-speed graphics systems. Working via electronic mail eliminated the personality problems during design sessions. Electronic interaction was particularly useful for soft­ware researchers, who could send code back and forth.

Warnock, who is now president of Adobe Systems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., described the design of lnterpress, a printing protocol: ‘‘One of the designers was in Pittsburgh, one of them was in Philadelphia, there were three of us in this area, and a couple in El Segundo [Calif.]. The design was done almost completely over the mail system, remotely; there were only two occasions when we all got together in the same room.”

Electronic mail was also invaluable for keeping track of group projects.

“One of the abilities that is really useful is to save a sequence of messages on a particular subject so that you can refer to it,” said Warren Teitelman, who joined PARC in 1972 from BBN Inc. and is currently manager of programming environments at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View. “Or if somebody comes into a discussion late and they don’t have the context, you can bring them up to date by sending them all the messages,” Teitelman added.

But electronic mail sometimes got out of hand at PARC. Once, after Teitelman had been out of touch for a week, he logged onto the system and found 600 messages in his mailbox.

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