Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating story
Review: I read this book because it was mentioned in The New New Thing - a book about Jim Clark. What I found was a very well written story of PARC (Xerox's research centre in Palo Alto). 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad but entertaining
Review: I'm pleased to say that this is one of the worst books that I've actually enjoyed. The author, Michael Hiltzik, has an engaging and genial style and seems to be someone one would like to know. His command of technology however is dim at best and his explanations of computer technology are often absurd or hilariously confused. This is especially true with respect to software and programming, where he is really in at the deep end of the pool. One example: He apparently believed some of Xerox's promotional literature about the nature of the Xerox Star. It is described as not for secretaries and typist but rather their bosses and professionals. In actuality is was a very sophisticated publications system, clearly designed for publishing personnel. It couldn't do much else since it came with only token software for other common applications. (I had one.) Further, the Star is compared and contrasted with the IBM PC as if they competed head to head, where in reality they did not complete at all. (The Star is a multi-workstation system supporting up to five users, albeit slowly.) More serious, however is his historiographic method or lack of it. He breaks the cardinal rule by accepting the hearsay of participants in the events he's relating, so that he writes a story instead of history. But worse, he is unwise or gullible enough to accept as his two principal informants men who were notorious for their ambition, egoism, and willingness to generously apportion praise where it belonged, at their own feet. As a result, the really bright shining lights, especially if of a modest nature, get short shrift or no shrift at all. Take for example Adele Goldberg who is characterized as "Kay's learning expert" with Kay as the "creator" of Smalltalk. The author notes at least twice that she was pregnant at some point or nursing her baby at work at some other time. What an insane role to assign to a woman whose professional and scientific credentials stand with the best in the world and whose insight into the nature of programming languages was profound. There are quite a few things that should have been said about the effect that Goldberg and others had on the graphical user interface developed at Parc ("PARC" was not much used in-house). This is likely the case because the conceptual contributors were not hardware engineers, for whom the author has great reverence. After all it's the "things" they make that count, no? Steven Jobs, the ultimate connosieur of talent, never made the mistake of not knowing who the player were. When he raided Parc with his technological stormtroopers, he twisted arms to have Adele Goldberg as his tour guide over the protests of at least one of the author's main informants. (Arm twisting was Steve's second great forte.) The author says the picture is very confused since accounts vary so much, but it's all on a (well-researched) PBS video so how confusing can it be? The book seems good concerning the internal Xerox wars, though I have no personal knowledge of such except for the relationship between SDS/XDS and Xerox, which the author gets about right. All that said, I'll pass the book on to a friend who has no cause to be finicky and can enjoy the well-told (if largely incorrect) story.
Rating: 
Summary: Best of the breed
Review: I've read almost all of the so-called business books about the hi-tech phenomenon, and this one sets a new standard for comprehensiveness and readability. The amount of detail is incredible, while the flow of the writing style is easy and smooth, making it an extremely entertaining and educational read. Most books in this genre either insult the technical reader by explaining every little element, or they are so saturated with technology that they fail to convey the business lessons. This book treats both subjects equally well, as it should; this is one of the best examples of how business and technology tried to come together and failed. Xerox didn't just fumble the ball: politics and good-intentioned business acumen prevented the technologies from being allowed to flourish, and this behavior can still be seen today with many other companies who are married to one line and then fail to make the changes necessary to react to new conditions. Much of the book is also filled with amusing anecdotes, some of which are technical (PARC building a PDP clone because Xerox wouldn't pay for a real one) and others of which are personal (alligators in the bathtub has an almost urban legend quality). It is a truly enjoyable read. There are also some very minor problems, such as the author's dependancy on the subjects for information about their own technologies (I can tell that Metcalfe inserted the "inferior" adjective with regards to Token Ring), and there were also some very minor editorial problems like missing words and so forth, but these do not diminish the overall quality of the work.
Rating:
Summary: Good History Lesson and Case Study
Review: I, like another reviewer, came across this book because it was mentioned in the New New Thing. I picked up and read the book because I've long been interested in Xerox PARC, and how it came to be. I was rewarded with an interesting, and seemingly thorough story about the people, motivations, and resources that came together at PARC. 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.
Rating:
Summary: A gripping tale about historic computing research.
Review: If you read only one book about research management, researchers, or computing research this year, this is the one to read. Dealers of Lightning is the story of the seminal first 13 years of Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center, a period in which PARC developed laser printers, the ethernet, internets, networked personal computers, the client-server model, bitmap displays, icons and graphical user interfaces, the desktop metaphor and overlapping windows, and various other foundations of the computing world as we know it today. But this is not primarily a book about technology -- it is about the people who generated it: How they were brought together, how they interacted, and finally, how they dispersed. Michael Hiltzik is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he has clearly done his homework. He seems to have talked to all the major (and many of the minor) figures involved, read everything that has been written on the subject, and understood most of it. There are ample footnotes, source citations, glossary, and acknowledgements. Some of his accounts are as close to definitive as we are ever likely to see. For example, his story of the famous demos for Steve Jobs that had such an influence on the Lisa and the Macintosh (while recognizing that participants recollections conflict) has more information about them than I was able to gather while at PARC. As an "unindicted co-conspirator," neither interviewed by Hiltzik, nor mentioned by name (although I was close to the epicenter for the last half of the book's time span), I have both inside information and personal biases. I spotted a few small factual errors, and in some cases my interpretation of events is different than Hiltzik's. Nevertheless, he has done an amazingly good job of capturing the gist. This book is more complete, more accurate, and more nuanced than Smith and Alexander's Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Hiltzik is an excellent writer, and the book is a page-turner (even when you know how it ends). The plot is gripping; the cast of characters large and interesting. Parts of the book are too incredible to be published as fiction. I stayed up well past my bedtime three different nights, repeatedly promising myself I'd read "just one more chapter." My main complaint is that the book is so crowded with people and events that almost all the characters come out one-dimensional, often associated with a single recurring tag phrase. Bob Taylor at least gets a two-dimensional treatment, but it is too often through the eyes of his (numerous) enemies; the admiration and loyalty he inspired in many others is frequently remarked on, but never explained. The book is littered with insights about research and technology transfer -- both from the characters in the book and from Hiltzik. There are stimulating comments on what worked, and what did not, and why. Of course, I don't agree with all of them, but formulating convincing counter-arguments can be quite challenging and instructive. I particularly recommend the Epilogue, "Did Xerox Blow It?" Unfortunately, it really needs to be read in the context of the entire book. I first tried reading it out of order, and it didn't have the same force. Hiltzik discusses fairly even-handedly Steve Jobs's claim that "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been, you know, a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM--could have been the IBM of the nineties. Could have been the Microsoft of the nineties." After weighing the pros and cons, Hiltzik concludes that it's not clear that Xerox could have ridden the tiger to that kind of success -- even if it had avoided all its known blunders. Hiltzik also points out that laser printing alone repaid the cost of PARC many times over, and that no company can expect to exploit every worthwhile thing that comes out of a research laboratory.
Rating:
Summary: Not only a highly instructive story, but a page-turner
Review: It's rare that a book on business and technology reads like a thriller, but Dealers of Lightning does. I never would have thought that the story of PARC could be a cliffhanger, but Hiltzik (the writer) manages to portray the saga as one of an elemental battle between the forces of progress and the stultification of the corporate mentality. Even for those who know how the story turns out (I did, in general terms at least) you read on and on and on, hooked, to watch it unfold.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant look at the center of the world
Review: Just about everything to do with modern computing had its origin in this little Palo Alto lab. But the real story is about the complicated and ultimately uncontrolable process of bringing innovations to market. Though Xerox had the option to take a first crack at turning these into products, a combination of forces made it such that companies like Apple, 3Com, Microsoft and others were able to truly turn these inventions into the enormous industry it is today. Very readable and very well written.
Rating:
Summary: This is a book that can solidify your dreams.
Review: Michael A. Hiltzik takes you on an inspiring tour through the history of one of the most significant think tanks in the history of technology. Every page makes you want to follow your dreams even more.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating account of the magic that took place
Review: Michael Hiltzik has done an incredible job in describing the context of the environment and the dynamics of the personalities as they interacted in the birthplace of computing technology. All of the computer interfaces that we take for granted today were developed at PARC. Hiltzik weaves a tale of the evolution of the group of geniuses and the obstacles that they encountered in dealing with the hierarchy at Xerox headquarters. In many ways, the top management at Xerox was the forerunner of the "Dilbert Boss Syndrome"--a total lack of appreciation and knowledge of what was being developed by these research magicians. It is a story of a very unique period in the history of technology and is very similar to what took place during the Manhattan Project of the 1940's. I for one am glad that Mr. Hiltzik did not spend very much of the book in explaining the technology that was developed for that would have distracted from the account. He did describe the essence of what was being developed in a brief, very excellent and informational manner--enough to let the reader know its importance. The book represents a milestone in relating the events that have brought us to our present state in the computing industry. Kudos to Mr. Hiltzik for a fine job of writing!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent on names and places, deficient on dates.
Review: Perhaps spoiled by Owen W. Linzmayer's precise dates and timelines (Mac Bathroom Reader, Apple Confidential), I found it difficult to be certain of even the year in which certain events occurred, let alone the month. History, personalities, backgound details are excellent. Hard to believe so many people with the best minds and ideas came together in one place to create so much, only to see their many accomplishments stifled by indifferent corporate management, only to be brought to market later by others outside Xerox.
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