An Interview with John Markoff
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Koman: Well, being in Palo Alto at the times, it seems natural, right? It seems like it would have been hard to avoid it.
Markoff: It was a very different time. That's right. It was hard to avoid it. But there were people who did. One thing that I was very aware of, this is not a story of Silicon Valley. There were very definitely multiple cultures in Silicon Valley. Growing up there, I knew you could go down to the Bold Knight or the Wagon Wheel and that was the heart of the Intel culture. That was another thread that was running through Silicon Valley at the very same time. It was much more of a fraternity-engineering culture. It had very little to do with counterculture. It was pushing the semiconductor technology.
Koman: Engelbart had this vision that was really radically different from the giant data processing machine vision. He seems really far ahead of the pack but I suppose he wasn't the only one with these ideas so early on?
Markoff: No, not at all. What I found over and over again in the interviews that I did was that the people who tended to see things first were the people who understood scaling early on, who were well aware of the effects of scaling in the Gordon Moorian sense of the word, and Doug was one of the first. Alan Kay understood it early on. He understood that, even though these little toys appeared to be little toys, that you get great computing power at low cost if you look up the curve a little bit, or down the curve at a certain point, rather than looking at the current state of the art.
Koman: That seems like that was a rare quality in those days.
Markoff: It was. And people who understood it first--people like Tesler and Kay and Engelbart--were people who had an advantage and tended to get the obvious arrival of personal computing early on.
Koman: So Engelbart had this great success in 1968, the "mother of all demos," and then shortly thereafter things go south, gradually over a period of years. By the time NLS comes to fruition, he can't give it away to Xerox PARC; eventually, the team all leaves and goes to Xerox. Was this a personal failing or some other failing that tripped him up and stopped him from being involved in what came next?
Markoff: Yeah, you know, I find this with guys like Engelbart all the time. The very strengths that allow them to see things seem to undercut them in terms of being able to ... Doug did not have the personality to lead a group forward into the 1970s. He was creating these experiments that tended to just create chaos in his group. A lot was going on in the inside that was chaotic. A lot was going on in the outside that was chaotic. Free love, psychedelics, distrust of authority, all the kinds of exploratory stuff that was synonymous with coming up with these ideas also undercut his ability to hold the group together.
In the last 20 years since I've known him, he's always felt that people missed the larger message, the bootstrapping message, and they took away little bits and pieces of his message and actually made great fortunes off of them. I think that's true. There probably still is ... a lot of the stuff I wrote about today (Web 2.0) is still within the framework of Doug's original idea, and that if Doug was smart he would sort of just take credit for it and call the whole thing off. He wouldn't just wring his hands and do the things he's done over the last decade, sort of feeling sorry for himself. But that's just who Doug is. People get caught in loops.
I think the crucial juncture came when he wasn't the organizational manager that he needed to be when he had the great funding. That was a failing, but who's perfect? I mean, that was enough. The fact that he didn't become a gazillionaire and that Gates and Jobs and everybody else took away his ideas directly from Xerox, that's just history.
