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Dealers of Lightning Audiobook Summary

Dealers of Lightning is the riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC’a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the seventies and eighties. Here for the first time is revealed in piercing detail the true story of the extraordinary group that aimed to bring about a technological dawn that would change the world’and succeeded.

Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and corporate executives who lived the story, Dealers of Lightning takes the listener on a journey from PARC’s beginnings in a dusty, abandoned building at the edge of the Stanford University campus to its triumph as a hothouse of ideas that spawned not only the first personal computer, but the windows-style graphical user interface, the laser printer, much of the indispensable technology of the Internet, and a great deal more.

It shows how and why Xerox, despite its willingness to grant PARC unlimited funding and the responsibility for developing breakthroughs to keep the corporation on the cutting edge of office technology, remained forever unable to grasp (and, consequently, exploit) the innovations that PARC delivered’and details the increasing frustration of the original PARC scientists, many of whom would go on to build their fortunes upon the very ideas Xerox so rashly discarded.

More than just a fascinating historical narrative, Dealers of Lighting brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters. It is an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistory’and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.

Forrest Sawyer reads.

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Dealers of Lightning Audiobook Narrator

Forrest Sawyer is the narrator of Dealers of Lightning audiobook that was written by Michael A. Hiltzik

Michael A. Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times. In 2004 he won a Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in American financial journalism. Hiltzik is the author of Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age and A Death in Kenya. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons.

About the Author(s) of Dealers of Lightning

Michael A. Hiltzik is the author of Dealers of Lightning

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Dealers of Lightning Full Details

Narrator Forrest Sawyer
Length 5 hours 47 minutes
Author Michael A. Hiltzik
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date December 13, 2005
ISBN 9780061127458

Subjects

The publisher of the Dealers of Lightning is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Business & Economics, Corporate & Business History

Additional info

The publisher of the Dealers of Lightning is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780061127458.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Nathan Davis

June 24, 2011

Riveting read. Not as technical as I'd like - though I have yet to read any computer book that is. Mostly it's straight up porn for anyone who loves working with computers. PARC was one hell of a lab back in the day. The most interesting part about this is seeing what really happened with Xerox and the first GUI PCs. It's not that they let the opportunity slip through their fingers, they were never the right company to produce an OS in the first place.Still, it worked out well for virtually all of the engineers involved. They went on to bigger and better things, or started companies of their own (3com, Adobe) to make the computer technology they wanted.

Josh

October 08, 2018

I'm sceptical of the genius narrative. In my mind, there are always a few people with irrational self-confidence - and of course a couple happen to succeed. Cue mythmaking, fawning biographies and countless would-be clones...Relatedly, I can feel some sympathy for the executives at Xerox. The standard narrative is that their Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) developed all of the big ideas of modern desktop computing (mouse, ethernet connection, desktop GUI, laser printing) under their noses, but the myopic suits failed to develop and fund it. This unremarkable, reportage-like book acknowledges that there is another side to that story - one in which hindsight is easy but managing a failing company is hard, in which brilliant but cantankerous geniuses aren't always best off given all the control and resources they want - without trying to say which story is true, or divine greater lessons.Steve Jobs (whose own tech-world canonisation came after this book was written) said that Xerox could have been the IBM or Microsoft of the '90s. Instead, others came in (including, famously and literally, Jobs himself) and took the ideas forward. Hiltzik notes that there is nothing like Xerox PARC at the time of writing - even Microsoft's research is much more product-focused. Would Google/Alphabet change his mind?

Elen

July 22, 2015

rating for entertainment alone -- i don't rly agree with a lot of the overarching points made here but god i love reading about old computers.

Nick

May 03, 2019

church

Aarsh

October 09, 2020

"Computing is pop culture. […] Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is allabout identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation,the past or the future — it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of mostpeople who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]…"- Alan KayWe stand on the shoulders of giants. I swear to never forget this. Writing code for me now, will be a spiritual experience. I atleast hope so.From the silicon transistors that can amplify and switch electronic signals, to the IC's embedding billions of those transistors to the micro-processors built on top of these transistors, to the operating system talking to those micro processors which in turn is given instructions by compilers which take the pithy "code" we "programmers" write and convert it to a form those operating systems can understand, it's all human magic. One hundred years of blood, toil, tears and sweat has gone into ensuring all this works correctly on a a small machine that stands atop my desk right now. To get an idea of how far we've come, here's a photo of a computer in the 1950's. It's simply been 70 years since then, just one human generation.https://www.quora.com/What-did-comput...This is a machine that helps me derive meaning in life and pay my dad's medical bills. We owe a debt to those greats, who followed their curiosity to the extremes, those "geeks" who combined night and day and winter and summer into one beautiful symphony of flow state that will far surpass the satisfaction that you and I will ever get to experience in life.The gorgeous visual displays we take for granted, the trackpad and the mouse that make it easy for the "man" to interact with the "machine", the Ethernet cables, radio waves and software protocols that make it easy for me to send those "I love you's" to people I care about in seconds across the globe, a globe with unforgiving entropy. The "programming languages" that help a million middle class households in my country pay their bills and educate their children, all of this and more was either made possible or improved upon by a bunch of renegades at XEROX PARC. This is a story of their battles, their politics, the uphill engineering struggles they faced, their inner demons but above all, the story of the triumph of what unyielding human curiosity, chutzpah and soul gutting hard work can accomplish.Read this if you ever feel nihilistic about the world, work or your life in general.

Scott

March 03, 2015

I’ve heard of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) for years now and of its importance, but this book really drove home just what a critical place PARC was for the development of the personal computer. It was an excellent, excellent book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.Back in the mid-60s, Xerox decided they wanted to compete with IBM and AT&T by developing their own research labs in the hopes of winning prestige and a possible Nobel or two, just like Bell Labs did. They set PARC up with a virtually unlimited budget and told the director he could hire whomever he wanted. Pake, the director, had heard of one Bob Taylor, formerly of ARPA, the precursor of the Internet, and hired him to head his computer lab. Taylor instilled a fierce commitment in his employees, but had a very adversarial management style and made a lot of enemies around the company. Another key hire was Alan Kay, a programmer with a dream of creating laptops and one day tablets (30 years before they ever came out) which would be so easy to program, kids could do it. Soon PARC had the best and the brightest from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Utah, etc. They came from all over, from the best computer science programs. And there were no deadlines and nothing to produce – it was like a giant think tank where you could just follow your dreams to see where they’d lead with unlimited funding. For the most part. By the late 60s, one of the programmers had produced a mouse, ancient by our current standards, but radical by theirs. Also, they were producing GUI operating systems for point and click possibilities. By the mid to late 70s, the inventers had invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, overlapping windows, a text editor (word processor), a programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. And that’s the crux of the situation. Xerox didn’t know what it had. Xerox did nothing with PARC. PARC embarrassed Xerox. The wizards at corporate were so far behind the times that change of that enormity just unnerved them too much to act, so they didn’t. In fact, they got rid of the R&D people who had created PARC, brought in new managers to run PARC, got rid of Bob Taylor (who had gotten too big for his britches), prompting a ton of resignations from his team members, and lost a lot of people who went on to form companies like 3Com, Adobe, SGI, and others. Xerox could have OWNED computing and they blew it! They literally could have been Microsoft, IBM, and Apple rolled into one and they blew it. The author tries to shield them from this criticism. He tries to say that as a copier company, they weren’t equipped to sell computers. Well, why invest in researching them, then? He tried to say you’d have to retrain 100,000 salesmen. Well, do it. Piss poor excuses, in my opinion. Xerox has no excuse for blowing things the way they did.One last thing. I really enjoyed the chapter on the visit by Steve Jobs. Of course, it’s a famous story about how Jobs visited PARC, saw what they had, ripped them off, put everything in the Mac, and made a killing. Part of which is true. However, with his first visit, he was given just a main demo given anyone who would visit. Apparently he wasn’t impressed and he had the ear of the Xerox CEO, who was investing in Apple, so PARC got a call telling them to show Apple everything. Jobs and his crew went back again and this time got more, but not everything. Somehow Jobs knew this, and before Jobs was out of the building, the Xerox CEO was on the phone to PARC telling them to show them everything. This elicited a great deal of stress and agony in some Xerox employees, who thought they were giving away the store. (They were.) So Jobs went back and apparently went nuts when he saw the GUI interface, and his engineers also appreciated the mouse and networking, etc, et al. And so the Mac was born.This book isn’t perfect. There are a ton of people to keep up with. It gets hard. Sometimes the book gets a little boring. But all in all, if you’re into computers and into the development of the personal computer, the story of how the first one was built before Steve Wozniak came along and claimed to do it is pretty awesome and the story of Xerox PARC is pretty awe inspiring. Definitely recommended.

Tim

August 06, 2018

A perfect companion to the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", this book provides a more nuanced explanation for why so many of the technologies pioneered at PARC ended up being exploited by other, more nimble, technology companies. I am coming away with a greater appreciation for the difficulty of turning truly groundbreaking research into marketable consumer products. Highly recommend.

George

January 15, 2022

No matter your background or career, this is a good book. However, if you are interested in where all of the devices and applications you enjoy came from, this book is amazing! My time in technology started pretty much when this book was published, which is already over 20 years ago. As a child I had an i386, learned DOS, GWBasic, and have been interested in hardware and programming since. My career has followed those interests and this book fills in the history of how it all started. Ethernet, OOP, Smalltalk, Personal PC, Personal Devices, Graphic Design, Digital Video Editing, and more were all envisioned, invented, and shared from Xerox Parc. If you read The Idea Factory, this is where some of the visionaries from Bell Labs ended up and continued to invent the future. The end of the arc in this book describes my childhood and it was great to have a whole narrative around where all of this came from. The story ends with Apple and Steve Jobs, Microsoft, and the whole industry being influenced by the work done in the fragile, innovative bubble around Xerox Parc at a perfect time in history.If any of this sounds interesting, read the book! You will not be bored or disappointed!

Julian

August 24, 2020

After reading Dealers of Lightning, I can conclude that the broad strokes of what you've heard about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) are true: that they were responsible for some of the most innovative achievements in computing, inventing the graphical user interface, the mouse, laser printing, desktop publishing and word processing, Ethernet, and many more -- yet that Xerox not only had no idea how to commercialize many of these achievements successfully, they let folks like Steve Jobs from the nascent Apple Computer cannibalize (willingly!) these game-changing inventions. To be sure, there are nuances and details to the story that add some color to Xerox's motivations, financial condition during PARC's halcyon years, and ultimate inability to own the computing industry, but Hiltzik's fundamental thesis is the following: large corporations (Xerox at the time of PARC was some 150,000 employees) are simply unable to behave in a nimble way when faced with discontinuous innovation, set as they are in their existing revenue streams and "big numbers". Hiltzik essentially argues that this is and will always be the downfall of huge companies. Even the counterexamples he uses to try and argue against his own thesis (General Electric and Hewlett-Packard) have, in the intervening 20 years since he wrote Dealers, run into significant headwinds and are a shell of their former selves, thus lending even more credence to his argument.The object lesson I take from PARC is this: beware of any company that aims to start an "innovation lab", either implicitly or explicitly, because not only will that send the signal that innovation only belongs to that business unit (thus not making the company innovative overall), the lab will always be in a tug-of-war with the bean-counters who didn't understand innovation in the first place! And God forbid that the lab actually come up with good ideas, because the initial revenue numbers and cash-flow projections will be several orders of magnitude lower than the firm's current products in market -- another [patently ludicrous] reason they will try to kill emerging products in their womb. That Xerox ever managed to bring anything to market at all beyond the photocopier is a miracle.

Joe

March 03, 2014

A fascinating account of the invention of the personal computer at a Xerox research facility in the 1970s. Hiltzik's book explains how over the course of ten years some of the world's foremost computer scientists invented almost every feature that we have come to associate with personal computing--overlapping windows, "what you see is what you get" word processing, the desktop, high speed printing, connection to an Ethernet, point and click technology, the ubiquity of the mouse, and the use of icons as opposed to coding. What's most fascinating is how Hiltzik details the creative process that led to these inventions, specifically how so many of them built off each other and the spirit of competition within the lab that resulted in great leaps forward. While the author is occasionally too worshipful of his subjects, it's not hard to see why with the cast of characters he has to work with. Heavily featured in the book are Bob Taylor (the man who ran the department of the Pentagon that literally invented the Internet), and Alan Kay (a research scientist whose dissertation anticipated by more than 30 years the hand held computer technology that Apple would bring to fruition with its Ipad), two of the most important individuals in the history of personal computing. While it may sound as though this book is written exclusively for those with an interest in or knowledge of computers, that is not the case. Much of the book explores the tensions between Xerox's corporate headquarters and PARC management in addition to the rivalries between and among the departments at PARC. What's more, I have an incredibly rudimentary understanding of technology and almost every aspect of this book made sense to me (with the exception of object oriented programming--I'm still not sure what that is or why it's important and I've done further reading on it). This is a good book for anyone interested in notions of creativity and invention.

David Jackson

July 04, 2021

Xerox PARC is legendary among geeks, of which I am proud to be one. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have read this book. Like many legends, there is a little embellishment in most of the recounts of the tale. I haven't seen the movie "Jobs", but I have seen " Pirates Of Silicon Valley "....the story of how Xerox fumbled away their chance to usher in and dominate the fledgling personal computer industry. The truth, as is almost always the case, is a bit more complicated. For a time, PARC was Computer Geek Camelot. The laser printer, local.networking, and most famously, the whole package of what we today think of when someone says Personal Computer, all sprang from this one lab. But beyond the science and engineering, which were formidable, lies a story of cultures, conflicts, egos, and the realities of Big Business. Tech isn't born in a vacuum. If you Build It, they may not come....not at this point in time, anyway. It's a great story. Geeks change the world, more so than athletes or vapid celebrities. These people gave us this life altering technology. Read this book...get to know their names.

Richard

October 16, 2017

This book is not for everyone because it contains a lot of office politics. But it does document the role PARC played in the 1970's in laying the foundation for much of what we now take for granted in computer technology. I worked at Xerox during the 70's, spent many hours at PARC on business and was personally involved in some of the products that used PARC inventions. I also witnessed the corporate level office politics that caused PARC so much trouble. I knew many of the corporate players and the author got it right. I even learned how my personal actions had consequences I never knew about. So I enjoyed the book very much. It is hard for me to know how others would like this book because I was too close to the events he described. If you think you know a lot about how we got from 1969 to the birth of personal computing to where we are today, you are probably wrong and you might be astounded to.learn how it all came about.

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