5 Jan
2019
5 Jan
'19
8:15 p.m.
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.
All that being said, I don't think this argument applies in any way to
Bell Labs and Unix. Unix was "applied usefully" long before Stallman
and Torvalds came along. Not crediting its inventors is inexcusable.
-Paul W.