Tech

After graduating from Stanford in 1980 with a degree in General Engineering with a focus on Product Design, I joined the budding personal computer industry and spent 30 years on the payroll of some very cool companies. 

First was Convergent Technologies, where my Stanford Design mentor Matt Sanders hired me straight from school and put me in charge of designing components and "caseworks" for one of the first desktop computers to include hard disk storage, graphics, multitasking, and a local area network. Far more advanced than what Apple and Microsoft were doing at the time, Convergent workstations sold very well through the companies competing with IBM. The computer guts were hidden behind what we called a "lectern", with a clip for holding up paper.

Our next generation (named NGen) was housed in modules that stacked side-by-side, fitting into the office like books on a shelf.

It was at Convergent that I developed notions of how we ought to be interacting with computers - holding them in our hands, which we accomplished with the spreadsheet appliance we called "WorkSlate" - but also interacting with them directly by touching and writing on the display. I developed a mantra: "Make electronic information as handy as paper."

To move in that direction, I next led development of a desktop touchscreen terminal for AT&T (one of Convergent's largest OEM customers). 

In 1988 I learned of an opportunity to finally create handheld touchscreen computers, with John Ellenby who had created one of the first laptops at his first startup GRiD. Our handheld "Agilis System" was very innovative, and very ahead of its time - but after building the first 100 or so units, the company lost funding. 

I rejoined some of my Convergent colleagues who had moved to Silicon Graphics, which is where I got into leading systems development that included software. I signed on as engineering project manager for Carol Peters' project Hollywood, which was in its final phase and needed an identity. On of my favorite memories is not technical at all: when the designers needed to choose a case color, I had a bunch of units painted and brought them to an all-hands meeting. Everybody loved the purple one. I had always liked the word Indigo, a portmanteau of 3 cool words - in and dig and go - so I suggested Indigo could be the identity of the new purple computer. SF designer Michael Cronan loved this and pitched that the whole product line should be named similarly, which is how we got Crimson and Onyx and project Sapphire. By the time Sapphire was ready to go to market, the color spectrum thing had run its course and my Marketing counterpart Scott Bonham came up with a great identity for our baby Indigo - Indy.

Still obsessed with making computers as handy as paper, I began pitching my own product ideas to execs - getting high-res color displays flat, then adding touch and pen sensors to them, then tucking the computer guts behind them to make them something we could use while holding. There was something of an epiphany here. Having assumed my value was in great execution of agreed upon product ideas, I learned that execs placed much higher value on bringing new product ideas along with the passion to execute on those. So I branched out, first leading development of the world's first flat panel desktop monitors "Indy Presenter" and the world's first widescreen monitor "1600SW".

As the Web emerged in 1995, pages with embedded links became ubiquitous - the perfect content for a new kind of computer - a webpad -  the first of which we started prototyping as "Netbook" with a capacitive pen digitizer. We experimented with capturing touch using the same digitizer. Eventually SGI decided Netbook was something that should happen, but not inside SGI. So we began talking with other system manufacturers and venture capitalists who we thought might fund my dreams.

In 94-95 I had gotten to know Steve Jobs personally - taking him hiking in the sierras, getting him to play a harmonica, jumping off a 40ft cliff into Angora Lake Butch Cassidy-style, watching movies together, and talking for hours about music. When he showed me an early draft of Toy Story, I proposed that SGI could tune 400 of our widescreen monitors to work as "cinema displays" for Pixar employees to use in movie development. I also considered Steve the ideal partner for bringing a tablet to market, because Apple was the one hardware manufacturer who gets it right. So I invited him down to the building now known as the GooglePlex to see our prototype. He drove me down 101 approaching 100mph on a Saturday, signed our NDA directly on the display of the Netbook prototype (after drawing a big X across the entire page!), said "This digital ink is great but Apple will never do a tablet", and left.  

I traveled up and down Sand Hill Rd pitching VCs, and quickly accepted that nobody would fund a new hardware company. My bandmate Roger McNamee got me an appointment with Michael Dell, the highest volume manufacturer of computer systems at the time. I flew to Austin with the prototype, and in his office he asked "Have you shown this to Microsoft? For it to go anywhere it'll have to run Office."

So, with Forrest Baskett, the CTO of Silicon Graphics, I took the prototype to Seattle to meet with the company that seemed most likely to succeed (though in my and Steve Jobs' estimation least likely to get it right!). Nathan Myhrvold loved it. Jeff Raikes loved it. Bill Gates called me at home. So I took my tablet dreams to Redmond.

Microsoft first wanted me to work on bringing book reading into the electronic world. Having gotten so into displays and how they worked, I theorized that if we rendered to subpixels we could get much sharper fonts. I teamed with an enchanting Scotsman named Bill Hill to lead a team developing ClearType font rendering technology, which Microsoft was able to quickly productize making displayed text look much better than it ever had. 

In pursuit of immersive reading, we developed a mostly invisible interface for interacting with books, in which menus and options only appeared as appropriate for the part of the page you touched. We developed hardware that was lovely to hold in the hand. We conceived a rights management system that didn't prevent making copies, instead watermarking each copy so you knew who owned it. Not wanting to make hardware ourselves (hardware margins are pitifully low compared to licensing software), we pitched it to Amazon. We teamed with startups Softbook and Rocketbook to create an XML format for ebooks (the Open eBook Publication Structure).

In 1999, Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker and I began prototyping tablets as the evolution of the PC. Not just for books, but great for experiencing other forms of media - with rights management, it would be an answer to Napster for people to legally obtain music. I told Steve Jobs I thought consumers would be happy to pay "a buck a song". Roger and I pitched it to Bono - if we could get U2s music on it others would follow. In his suite at SF's Meridian hotel, Bono exclaimed "you guys are bringing back the album cover!" and posed for this photo

In 2000, I demonstrated our tablet prototype as part of Bill Gates' Keynote at the Comdex trade show in Vegas.

In 2001 Apple released the iPod for use with Macs. Steve asked me for feedback and I said "add a USB connection and make iTunes available on the PC and you'll grow by an order of magnitude". Of course he scoffed at first...  

In 2002, we released a version of Windows with rudimentary tablet features, Windows XP Tablet Edition. 

In Jan 2005, at Steve's daughter's birthday party at Winter Lodge, I showed him the 'direct hinge" I had prototyped for some of our PC partners. Steve told me Apple had done some tablet prototyping he wanted to show me, they weren’t going to use it and he knew I would love it. When we talked again a couple weeks later I asked him “what was it you wanted to show me?” He said “We decided we’re going to use it after all.”

In 2007 Steve announced the iPhone, and I turned 50. Knowing both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates very well but never having seen the two of them together, I invited both to have dinner with just me and my family. Both accepted. This is the dinner where Steve told his biographer Walter Isaacson that a Microsoft engineer had "annoyed" him into starting the iPad development.

In 2008, we shipped Win8 at Microsoft, which made the rudimentary tablet features part of Windows, available on any PC with hardware for pen and/or touch. Microsoft's partners were not making good tablets, and Microsoft eventually had to start designing Surface hardware, but by this time I considered my work done and I stepped away for pursuits best done while young - rock climbing, surfing, running marathons, and music music music.

There's much more to the story which I'll share with you someday...