Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 167

on the PDP-8 and sold as a word processing machine; the DEC Professional, a more powerful machine than
the IBM PC but based on the PDP-11 architecture and a proprietary bus; and the DEC Rainbow, an “almost
IBM PC compatible” platform. DEC engineers prided themselves on their expertise in computer architecture
and “refused to be part of the pack and compete with others by supplying competitive but fully compatible
machines.” 38
Nevertheless, it is too simplistic to attribute DEC's demise solely to its failure in the PC market.
Although it is true that DEC had made several bad management decisions, in the 1990s, with the rise of the
Internet and the web (see Chapters 10 and 11 ), the company was still well placed to become a market leader
for Internet products. DEC had extensive expertise in networking and servers, and also had pioneered one of
the first successful web search engines with their AltaVista offering. In the end, Gordon Bell, Vice President
of Engineering at DEC during the 1970s, believes that “Failure was simply ignorance and incompetence on
the part of DEC's top 3-5 leaders and, to some degree, its ineffective board of directors that in removing
Olsen made an even worse mistake in appointing [his replacement] Palmer.” 39
The time machine: The Alto
In 1972, Chuck Thacker ( B.8.15 ), Butler Lampson ( B.8.16 ), and Alan Kay ( B.8.17 ) at Xerox PARC con-
ceived of building a revolutionary new type of computer. Instead of batch processing or time sharing on a
mainframe or minicomputer, the “Alto” was intended to be a genuine personal computer small enough to
fit under a desk ( Fig. 8.24 ). To computer designers and businesses at the time, computers were expensive
devices. Just to provide the computer memory for a single-user machine would cost many thousands of dol-
lars. “But to Thacker and his colleagues such objections missed the point,” Hiltzik says, and explains:
B.8.15. Charles (Chuck) Thacker (left) and Butler Lampson at Xerox PARC. Thacker is a Turing
Award recipient and designer of Xerox PARC's Alto computer - the first truly personal computer.
He had learned from his experience at the unsuccessful Berkeley Computer Corporation that in
designing computing systems, “less is often better than more.” Thacker's word for describing
engineering projects that had got out of hand was “biggerism”- as in “This project has been
biggered.” Thacker also had an influence in introducing the WYSIWYG capability in the Bravo
word processor. When his wife Karen was typing a paper for a class, he suggested she try using an
early version of the Bravo word processor. She commented that she needed to see what she got in
print on the screen. Thacker passed this comment to his colleagues at PARC and Bravo was soon
able to do this.
B.8.16. Butler Lampson was the software architect of Xerox PARC's famous Alto personal computing sys-
tem. At PARC, he also made major contributions to the first WYSIWYG word processor, Ethernet for local
area networking, operating systems, and laser printers. Lampson received the ACM Turing Award in 1992
and the remarkable citation read: “For contributions to the development of distributed, personal com-
puting environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating
systems, programming systems, displays, security, and document publishing.” F4 His wife, Lois Lampson,
was the first person to produce her PhD thesis on a laser printer. When she submitted her thesis, the
administrator insisted on knowing which was the original - to be deposited in the library - and which was
the copy! This photo was taken at the Rome NATO software engineering conference in 1969.