Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (Hardcover)

As a technical participant in the Xerox Star commercialization effort, I worked with many of the PARC researchers described here. Hiltzik tells a very balanced and nuanced story that certainly captures the concepts, dynamics, and conflicts of that time. One can quibble with whether the participants' recollections are always fair, but Hiltzik's story about these exciting times is basically accurate with respect to the personalities and events that I knew, and he fills in a wealth of background and details that I didn't know.

This book corrects a lot of misinformation about PARC research and Xerox commercialization efforts. It is a good read for anybody interested in the history of technology. It should be required reading for everybody in research management--for many examples of what to do and what not to do. This history should also be read by anyone who believes another big leap in software technology can be achieved while research funding is cut back, universities are drained of their talent, and almost everyone competitively focuses on six month commercialization goals.

One example: He apparently believed some of Xerox's promotional literature about the nature of the Xerox Star. It is described as not for secretaries and typist but rather their bosses and professionals. In actuality is was a very sophisticated publications system, clearly designed for publishing personnel. It couldn't do much else since it came with only token software for other common applications. (I had one.)

Further, the Star is compared and contrasted with the IBM PC as if they competed head to head, where in reality they did not complete at all. (The Star is a multi-workstation system supporting up to five users, albeit slowly.)

More serious, however is his historiographic method or lack of it. He breaks the cardinal rule by accepting the hearsay of participants in the events he's relating, so that he writes a story instead of history. But worse, he is unwise or gullible enough to accept as his two principal informants men who were notorious for their ambition, egoism, and willingness to generously apportion praise where it belonged, at their own feet.

As a result, the really bright shining lights, especially if of a modest nature, get short shrift or no shrift at all. Take for example Adele Goldberg who is characterized as "Kay's learning expert" with Kay as the "creator" of Smalltalk. The author notes at least twice that she was pregnant at some point or nursing her baby at work at some other time. What an insane role to assign to a woman whose professional and scientific credentials stand with the best in the world and whose insight into the nature of programming languages was profound.

There are quite a few things that should have been said about the effect that Goldberg and others had on the graphical user interface developed at Parc ("PARC" was not much used in-house). This is likely the case because the conceptual contributors were not hardware engineers, for whom the author has great reverence. After all it's the "things" they make that count, no?

Steven Jobs, the ultimate connosieur of talent, never made the mistake of not knowing who the player were. When he raided Parc with his technological stormtroopers, he twisted arms to have Adele Goldberg as his tour guide over the protests of at least one of the author's main informants. (Arm twisting was Steve's second great forte.) The author says the picture is very confused since accounts vary so much, but it's all on a (well-researched) PBS video so how confusing can it be?

The book seems good concerning the internal Xerox wars, though I have no personal knowledge of such except for the relationship between SDS/XDS and Xerox, which the author gets about right. All that said, I'll pass the book on to a friend who has no cause to be finicky and can enjoy the well-told (if largely incorrect) story.