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alankay | 6 years ago
His move from Rochester to Xerox Parc in its earliest days was his "last chance" according to Xerox management. There he found kindred spirits who welcomed him and would up quickly loving him for his fearless approach to invention, no matter how difficult.
He was a great guy to work with and be with (one of the raft of things I did in the early days of Parc was to experiment with the design and making of high quality display fonts using an allout video system* that could reach the limits of video). We realized that it could barely do the much larger characters needed for the first laser printing system and rigged a coax from "the old character generator room" down the hall to Gary's lab to provide test pages for Gary's early experiments.
The story below about the use of Edmund Scientific "hobby" reflecting telescopes is more or less the way it happened -- except that the front part that says he was "annoyed" is not. That was not Gary's style; he just moved forward, and what happened is very similar in spirit to the computer researchers at Parc building their own simulated mainframe (MAXC) also in the first year because Xerox wouldn't allow us to buy a PDP-10 which was made by a competing company.
I also object to him being called "a badass" (I realize it is suppose to be a compliment, but it quite misses what really top talents are like in its attempt to suggest some kind of pop-culture teenage aggressiveness. Gary was an artist who simply transcended difficulties put in his way.)
He now joins another great engineer's engineer at Parc -- Chuck Thacker -- in our memories of truly great people who could do truly great things.
--------- * designed by Butler Lampson, Bill English and Roger Bates, and mostly built by Roger, with an excellent interactive font design program made by Ben Laws.
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