Dealers of Lightning

De: Michael A. Hiltzik

Narrado por: Forrest Sawyer

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 seventies and eighties. 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 the 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.

More than just a fascinating historical narrative, Dealers of Lighting brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters. It is an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistory'and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.

Forrest Sawyer reads.

Ironic that book about computer innovations suffers from terrible audio quality

It’s like I’m listening underwater. Worst audio production quality. Not sure if they were going for the “1960s” sounding theme.

Interesting, could be better

If you're interested in the history of the personal computer, then listening to the history of Xerox PARC will be a pleasure. And this is the only audiobook (at least on Audible, and probably at all) on the topic. The passing mentions to PARC in the histories of Apple don't go nearly deep enough. But I feel like this is a new audiobook waiting to happen. This book isn't bad, but the characters seem a little flat, the book (and probably the recording) are old, the descriptions of the technology a little lifeless, the audio quality poor. But beggars can't be choosers.

barely hear anything

This audio should be fixed.
The content is good but not as technical as I expected.

Abridgement gives technical overview but loses much context and flavor from the full text

I read the full text alongside the abridged audiobook.

I like to do that with unabridged versions for most nonfiction books, as the repetition helps me to internalize more of the content. It was odd to do it with an abridged, but there doesn't seem to be any unabridged version of Dealers.

The abridged audio version does a fine job of giving you the shape of the history and the highlights of the major technical beats PARC became known for. But it is missing a lot of the human story. If what you are looking for is simply a history of the technology and some of the puzzles and obstacles the folks had to overcome, the audio version is fine. If you are looking for a people/character-focused narrative alongside that, and a sense of how it was to be these people in this time and place, I recommend reading the text version first or alongside it. Nearly all the flavor and personality of the folks involved is lost in the audio version. You can get a sense of this with one egregious example: compare the text's "Chapter 13: The Bobbsey Twins Build a Network" versus the audio version's Chapter 4, timestamp 23:10-36:36. The text paints a really quite over-the-top, boistrous, shouty Metcalfe whose antics were a delight to read about (but probably not someone I'd want to work with). The audio completely removes all of this character and portrays him and his quest for Ethernet as run-of-the-mill and neutral--a semi-interesting technical journey with none of the personality or relationship tensions involved. It's still well put together, interesting, etc. It's just, flavorless.

I'm grateful any audio version exists and it's a fine abridgement, but it's lossy. The audio quality is also very compressed.

Horrible production quality

Lots of good history marred by horrible production quality. The sound is as if it was done through a pillow.