Entering PARC today is much like entering any large corporation or research center: a desk where visitors sign in, identification badges for employees, and a requirement that visitors be escorted at all times. Cameras are forbidden.
PARC has had a fluctuating reputation for openness. On the one hand, relatively few articles were published by its researchers in its first five years; on the other hand, the Apple Lisa was conceived in 1979 when Steve Jobs, Apple’s chairman, toured PARC and saw his first bit-mapped display.
In the earliest days, recalled David Thornburg—a former PARC researcher who is now chief scientist of Koala Technologies Corp., Santa Clara, Calif.—PARC carried the open-door policy to extremes. Jack Goldman, Xerox’s vice president for research, had in fact decided to build the research center within bicycling distance of Stanford University to ensure cross-fertilization with the academic world.
“People were coming in and out all the time from the artificial-intelligence lab at Stanford and from other places,” Thornburg said. “There wasn’t as much of a concern for security-we saw ourselves as a university environment where we didn’t have to teach courses.”
Thornburg recalled one incident that exemplifies that open attitude. In the late spring of 1971, Goldman held a staff meeting at PARC during which he stressed the need for a way of communicating the center’s research results to Xerox at large.
Thornburg remembered that Goldman told the staff, “We need to have some kind of reporting-six-monthly reports or monthly reports—so the rest of the company has a way of finding out what’s going on.”
“So this one fellow,” Thornburg related, “who was sitting back in his chair raised his hand and said, ‘Well, if you ask me, Jack, what I think we should do is build a computer-based query system where we write our reports and tag the different levels of the report in terms of their depth, so somebody who just wants a summary review will get a condensed document, and someone who wants an in-depth review will get the whole document.’”
While Goldman praised this innovative suggestion, Thornburg said, PARC researcher Bob Bauer, who was sitting next to Thornburg, suppressed laughter. The meeting broke up, and Bauer “shot out of the room into the hallway and was just laughing hysterically,” Thornburg said, continuing:
“I went over to him and asked, ‘Bob, what’s so funny?’ And he said, ‘You know that guy who just gave the suggestion to Goldman?’
“‘Yes?’
“‘He doesn’t work here.’ Bauer said. ‘He’s from the Stanford Al lab, and he was over here talking with some people, and they said, “Gee, we’ve got to go to a staff meeting, do you want to come along?”‘
“I don’t think Goldman ever knew that guy didn’t work for Xerox,” Thornburg said.
The word went out quietly through PARC that openness had its limits, but it wasn’t yet clear where those limits were. A much more explosive incident, in terms of PARC’s reputation and its relations with the parent company, came with a 1973 article In Rolling Stone magazine that was written by Stewart Brand.
Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, a bible for the 1960s, had visited PARC, as well as several other research centers, to see what its visionaries were doing. He found Alan Kay, working on the Dynabook for “us kids”; Peter Deutsch, who wrote one of the first Lisp interpreters at age 15 and had “served on every major front in computer science” while working for ARPA; and Bob Taylor, the “chief marble collector” from ARPA, who put the group together.
Taylor, according to Brand, was directing his researchers on the premise that the benefits of large, centralized computers “‘are less than claimed.’
“And that is the general bent of research at [PARC]—soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computing power in the hands of every individual who wants it,” Brand wrote.
“When the article, ‘Fanatic life and symbolic death among the computer bums,’ was published [in Rolling Stone], it really upset Xerox,” recalled Alvy Ray Smith, now vice president and chief technical officer of Pixar Inc., San Rafael, Calif. “All these wild, hairy people out there in a research lab got written up—how embarrassing! I’ve recently learned that when you go out and try to raise giant money in the financial world, you don’t come across as a long hair. Xerox could not afford to have people think they were flakes.”
“Jack Goldman, and I forget who else, came out to PARC right after the article was published,” Thornburg recalled. “We were all on the edges of our seats thinking the lab was going to be closed down.
“It was made crystal-clear to use that this was not all right. If it happened again, the lab was going to be shut down. That was a very sobering experience. That was about the time we began having badges and all that sort of stuff—which after all is what companies do.”
When David Em, the artist, first visited PARC in 1975, such trappings of corporate security were the norm. “It was a strange environment for an artist,” he recalled. “There was a guard gate, you needed a pass, there were all sorts of access codes on the terminals.”
Even today, though, PARC is not nearly as watchful as many corporate research facilities. Many students and faculty members from Stanford are consultants at PARC, carrying ideas freely back and forth, and visitors still occasionally wander the halls by themselves. And some of the regular employees—having trouble figuring out whether to clip their badges to the collars of their T-shirts or to the belt loops of their shorts—just keep them in a handy pocket.
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