Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age [Kindle Edition]

The story is really set in the 1970s and 1980s when Xerox set up PARC really to support a newly acquired computer company SDS. What happened instead was that PARC itself outshone the acquired company and for a corporation that built up its name in the photocopier business, it caused many problems.

Hiltzik is a master at capturing the mood and feel. He brings a multitude of characters to life in bite sized chapers. (The book has almost 450 pages but the chapters are about 8-12 pages long making it easy to pick up and immerse yourself in a piece of history.)

What I found astounding was the level of technology reached in PARC. This is well documented in this book. You have Douglas Englebart who used research and ideas raised in the 1940s as a blueprint for interactive hardware and software aimed at manipulating text and video images (he was the "inventor" of the mouse). You have explanations of the floating point function (which caused Intel so many problemns with its Pentium chip). You have descriptions of culture shaping events such as Bob Taylor's "Beat the Dealer" where his people would spend an hour or so explaining their research and then were let loose to the erudite audience "like a rank steak to a pack of hungry wolves." You even have the origins of Ethernet and TCP/IP documented here.

This is a very detailed book but unlike say "competing on Internet Time" it is much more like a story with real characters and real-life issues. It reads as well as a Southwick book but with much more to say.

It is amazing what PARC produced using a bunch of the best people around, and it is the characterisation of these very talented people which made me enjoy the book so much. Hiltizk masterfully adds an epilogue that goes some way to trash the view that Xerox must have been just plain stupid to let all this technology go. A very thoughtful and broadminded ending to a superb book.

I enjoyed the detail presented in the background material about the people and circumstances that came together to found PARC. There's a lot of good stuff about so many of the seminal minds and ideas that made much of the computing environment that we use today possible. I believe that most of the major breakthrough inventions that came out of PARC are written about, including the background, people, and stories surrounding them. If you are interested in the history of computing and invention, this is wonderful, fascinating stuff.

I expected more material about how and why Xerox missed so many opportunities to capitalize on the inventions created in this extroadinary place. To be fair, however, the story may be as simple as presented. The author also debunks the myth that Xerox didn't reap any reward from inventions that came out of PARC. But woven throughout the text and stories in this book is a case study about innovation within large companies, and how it is actively killed.

Again, I very much enjoyed this book. The stories that I knew little about before reading it are now much more clear. I found the stories fairly presented and free of jargon.