Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

Completely agree! On 1/5/19, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On 1/4/19, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: >> >> In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system >> from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson, >> Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest >> innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs, >> but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes >> innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to >> marketing, >> he seems to be more impressed by the later stages. > > I would argue that Isaacson does have a point here. After Lampson > left Xerox PARC he set up a similar outfit at Digital'--the Western > Research Lab (WRL). They did a lot of interesting work in the area of > software development tools. I was working in the software tools > engineering group at the time, and we would have loved to take WRL's > work and to incorporate it in our products. But we couldn't. Why? > Because they wrote everything in Modula 3, and we were using BLISS. > It was too expensive and time-consuming to do the translation. If > they had worked in BLISS, we could have just taken their code and run > with it. From my perspective it looked as though they were > deliberately setting up barriers to prevent us from sullying their > research by actually turning it into useful products. > > In one memo to DEC's engineering staff, Gordon Bell proposed a "Xerox > PARC" award to the R&D project that advanced the state-of-the-art the > most while simultaneously advancing DEC's bottom line the least. > > Yes, PARC invented the modern windows-based GUI, but, as with so many > PARC innovations, Xerox did nothing with it. Based on how the PARC > alumni at WRL behaved at DEC,I would argue that this was the fault of > PARC as much as of Xerox management. > > > -Paul W. >