Free Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik

syndrome more virulent than Goldman had suspected. The university, it was true, was famous for the snobbery of its faculty, but he was still shocked at its unfriendliness to enterprises located outside the grimy stone campus walls. Faced with the prospect of being shut off from the very resources for which he sought an academic setting in the first place, Goldman decided to look elsewhere.
    Several other possibilities were culled early. These included Webster, where Goldman feared his new lab would come under the intellectual domination of the copier bureaucracy still entrenched in Rochester. Also rejected were Princeton; Stony Brook on Long Island, where the State University of New York was building a new campus; and several other East Coast sites that were either too far from an established Xerox facil­ity or lacked the cachet Goldman craved for his would-be Bell Labs.
    Pake directed Goldman's attention westward. Teaching at Stanford in the early 1960s had given him a glimpse of the phenomenon that would shortly make the Santa Clara peninsula famous as "Silicon Val­ley." A few weeks after signing on, he proposed that Goldman charter the company plane for a California excursion. Ardent corporate way­farer that he was, Goldman agreed with alacrity. Soon he and Pake were working their way south from Berkeley to San Diego, stopping at every major university campus in search of the ideal spot.
    But at Berkeley there was no available real estate to support a corpo­rate research facility. At Santa Barbara, where a new state university cam­pus was sprouting on the dazzling coastline, there was real estate but no major airport. "Oxnard . .. dismal," Pake recalled. "Pasadena . .. Smog was terrible. Xerox had a division called Electro-Optical Systems there with a fairly big site but it was not something that could interact with Cal-tech—too industrial. So we didn't see anything very encouraging."
    That suited his purposes fine. For the whirlwind tour on which he led Goldman was mostly window dressing. Pake's primary objective was Stanford and its vibrant home town, Palo Alto. Goldman had initially ruled out the site for lack of any nearby Xerox facility, but Pake goaded him to reconsider. He knew from experience that the university was anx­ious to develop strong relationships with the industrial enterprises springing up like anthills all over the valley. Then there was the salubri­ous physical and cultural climate—not a trivial consideration if one hoped to attract gifted researchers to an embryonic lab.
    As for Goldman's objection that Palo Alto was too far from any Xerox property, Pake countered with a neat equivocation: Let proximity mean being close enough to reach a Xerox facility in time for lunch. SDS was in Los Angeles, an hour's flight from the Bay Area. Anyone could leave Palo Alto in the morning, lunch at SDS, and get home in time for dinner. And was not the original rationale for the lab to be SDS's research support?
    "That's a very interesting thought," Goldman said, bowing to the inevitable. In early March, Pake invested his first two staff members, a pair of administrative officials from the Webster research division named Richard E. Jones and M. Frank Squires, with the task of flying to Palo Alto and finding a building suitable to rent.
    "Nobody at Webster wanted the job," Rick Jones chuckled, remem­bering how he became PARC's first official employee. "I was the admin­istrative manager at research and development in Webster. Everyone else had kids in school in Rochester and I only had a nine-month-old son. I had married a Rochester girl in 1966, but when I said, 'How about leav­ing Rochester and moving to California?' she said, 'Sure.' Squires was similarly unencumbered by a growing family, having only recently mus­tered out of the service, so Jones tapped him as personnel manager.
    On their first reconnaissance trip they found that cutbacks in govern­ment and military research spending had left plenty