Dealers of Lightning

Written by Michael A. Hiltzik

Narrated by Forrest Sawyer

Dealers of Lightning is the riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC'a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the seventies and eighties. Here for the first time is revealed in piercing detail the true story of the extraordinary group that aimed to bring about a technological dawn that would change the world'and succeeded.

Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and corporate executives who lived the story, Dealers of Lightning takes the listener on a journey from PARC's beginnings in a dusty, abandoned building at the edge of the Stanford University campus to its triumph as a hothouse of ideas that spawned not only the first personal computer, but the windows-style graphical user interface, the laser printer, much of the indispensable technology of the Internet, and a great deal more.

It shows how and why Xerox, despite its willingness to grant PARC unlimited funding and the responsibility for developing breakthroughs to keep the corporation on the cutting edge of office technology, remained forever unable to grasp (and, consequently, exploit) the innovations that PARC delivered'and details the increasing frustration of the original PARC scientists, many of whom would go on to build their fortunes upon the very ideas Xerox so rashly discarded.

More than just a fascinating historical narrative, Dealers of Lighting brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters. It is an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistory'and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.

Forrest Sawyer reads.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Dec 13, 2005
• ISBN: 9780061127458

Michael A. Hiltzik

Michael A. Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times. In 2004 he won a Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in American financial journalism. Hiltzik is the author of Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age and A Death in Kenya. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons.

Reviews for Dealers of Lightning

[lorune · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you are into computers as a professional, this is a book you can not afford to sit on the side.

The pure amount of computer Science history captured in this book is just staggering.

[joeldinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The overarching question is "Did Xerox let the PARC technologies escape?" And the answer is "Of course." Of course.Hiltzik argues--successfully, I think--that the question oversimplifies the reality, in several dimensions: Xerox did use some of the Palo Alto Research Center creations, Xerox didn't really have the ability/agility to implement others, and that clashing cultures made some gains difficult. He also explores the strengths and weaknesses of Bob Taylor's management practices at some length (an interesting thing, actually, as I'm also reading Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which also features Taylor as a key player). Finally, he points out, Xerox continued to fund those rebels it supposedly didn't listen to.Well-written & researched. Each chapter is thematic, and mixes contextual explanation with word portraits of the key players. The book is very much focused on PARC's computer and system projects, but aware of external events occurring more or less simultaneously with them and how those interacted. It acknowledges, but doesn't really explore, the non-computer activities occurring in the center. All in all, one of the better histories of early computing.

[cohenja · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Great book, but a too many characters for me to keep track of.

[carloa_31 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A story of PARC, the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center , that follows both the business and the "people" aspect of the founding and evolution of the institution.
It is written as a story of the people there but the compelling, informed and witty writing bring weave what amount to a page-turner about real life events.
It is not a business manual, nor a software or hardware textbook, yet it has aspects of all of these subject and provides a fascinating insight into the recent history of computing.

[scottcholstad · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’ve heard of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) for years now and of its importance, but this book really drove home just what a critical place PARC was for the development of the personal computer. It was an excellent, excellent book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.Back in the mid-60s, Xerox decided they wanted to compete with IBM and AT&T by developing their own research labs in the hopes of winning prestige and a possible Nobel or two, just like Bell Labs did. They set PARC up with a virtually unlimited budget and told the director he could hire whomever he wanted. Pake, the director, had heard of one Bob Taylor, formerly of ARPA, the precursor of the Internet, and hired him to head his computer lab. Taylor instilled a fierce commitment in his employees, but had a very adversarial management style and made a lot of enemies around the company. Another key hire was Alan Kay, a programmer with a dream of creating laptops and one day tablets (30 years before they ever came out) which would be so easy to program, kids could do it. Soon PARC had the best and the brightest from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Utah, etc. They came from all over, from the best computer science programs. And there were no deadlines and nothing to produce – it was like a giant think tank where you could just follow your dreams to see where they’d lead with unlimited funding. For the most part. By the late 60s, one of the programmers had produced a mouse, ancient by our current standards, but radical by theirs. Also, they were producing GUI operating systems for point and click possibilities. By the mid to late 70s, the inventers had invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, overlapping windows, a text editor (word processor), a programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. And that’s the crux of the situation. Xerox didn’t know what it had. Xerox did nothing with PARC. PARC embarrassed Xerox. The wizards at corporate were so far behind the times that change of that enormity just unnerved them too much to act, so they didn’t. In fact, they got rid of the R&D people who had created PARC, brought in new managers to run PARC, got rid of Bob Taylor (who had gotten too big for his britches), prompting a ton of resignations from his team members, and lost a lot of people who went on to form companies like 3Com, Adobe, SGI, and others. Xerox could have OWNED computing and they blew it! They literally could have been Microsoft, IBM, and Apple rolled into one and they blew it. The author tries to shield them from this criticism. He tries to say that as a copier company, they weren’t equipped to sell computers. Well, why invest in researching them, then? He tried to say you’d have to retrain 100,000 salesmen. Well, do it. Piss poor excuses, in my opinion. Xerox has no excuse for blowing things the way they did.One last thing. I really enjoyed the chapter on the visit by Steve Jobs. Of course, it’s a famous story about how Jobs visited PARC, saw what they had, ripped them off, put everything in the Mac, and made a killing. Part of which is true. However, with his first visit, he was given just a main demo given anyone who would visit. Apparently he wasn’t impressed and he had the ear of the Xerox CEO, who was investing in Apple, so PARC got a call telling them to show Apple everything. Jobs and his crew went back again and this time got more, but not everything. Somehow Jobs knew this, and before Jobs was out of the building, the Xerox CEO was on the phone to PARC telling them to show them everything. This elicited a great deal of stress and agony in some Xerox employees, who thought they were giving away the store. (They were.) So Jobs went back and apparently went nuts when he saw the GUI interface, and his engineers also appreciated the mouse and networking, etc, et al. And so the Mac was born.This book isn’t perfect. There are a ton of people to keep up with. It gets hard. Sometimes the book gets a little boring. But all in all, if you’re into computers and into the development of the personal computer, the story of how the first one was built before Steve Wozniak came along and claimed to do it is pretty awesome and the story of Xerox PARC is pretty awe inspiring. Definitely recommended.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating story but told in a superficial manner. Mentions hundreds of names you will not remember a minute later and ignores all but simplest technical issues. I'm just not that interested in people's personal stories. Came here for the technology and was bored by all the social aspects.