Beat the “dealer”

Here’s a great story from the Computer Science Lab (CSL) at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) that a recent bout of e-mail made me remember. They had a weekly meeting known as “Dealer”. Basically,

a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it against dissection by his peers… “If someone tried to push their personality rather than their argument, they’d find that it wouldn’t work.”

But the argument had best be carefully thought out. Anyone trying to slip an unsound concept past this group was sure to be stopped short by an explosive “Bull$#&t!” from Thacker or “Nonsense!” from the beetled-browed ARPANET verteran Severo Ornstien. Then would follow a cascade of angry denunciations: “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” “That’ll never work!” “That’s the stupidiest idea I’ve ever heard!” Lampson might add a warp-speed chapter and verse deconstruction of the speaker’s sorry reasoning. If the chastened dealer was lucky (and still standing), the discussion might finally turn to how he might improve on his poor first effort….

...It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half-right, or had made a decent try. “There was nothing personal about it,” said Ornstein. “We didn’t want to be coddled or have our time wasted.”

From Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age”

Just to put it into context, Business 2.0 described PARC by saying “Think of all the brilliant tricks that have made today’s computers so useful and such a breeze to use… It seems hard to believe now, but every one of these gizmos was dreamt up by a Xerox scientist or engineer, some a decade before they came to market..”. They must have been doing something right.