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Dealers of Lightning

Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

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Dealers of Lightning

By: Michael Hiltzik
Narrated by: Forrest Sawyer
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About this listen

 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 '70s and '80s. 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 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.

(P) and ©1999 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., All Rights Reserved, Harper Audio, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers Computer Science History Marketing Science & Technology
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Critic reviews

"...for any student of business or technology, Dealers of Lightning offers a gem of a story that has never before been so well told." (The New York Times Book Review)

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Fascinating story

I already knew some details of the xerox/parc story, however this had a depth that I hadn’t expected. It really gave a better insight into the different forces that shaped the events and the summary at the end also puts things into a better context which I found very insightful.

As someone who has used (and still uses) the language Smalltalk - it’s still interesting and relevant that this remaining element of history hasn’t been leveraged nearly as much as it should be. It’s influenced much of course - but the “biggerism“ described in the narrative is so relevant in how we solve problems today - and the “small” of Smalltalk has an elegance that should be embraced so much more.

I knock one star off as the audio quality isn’t the greatest at times - but it’s acceptable, and once immersed in the story you forget about it.

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