Interval’s mandate is solely to generate intellectual properties, not to develop products — a heresy in Silicon Valley. If an idea is good enough, the unwritten concept is that there’s an in-house VC dude in the form of Paul Allen to foot the bill. No wonder people get jealous — imagine not having to struggle for start-up money — the intellectual freedom!
Abe is against the lack of gung-ho-ishness in pure research. He says Interval is an intellectual
Laura used to be at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, but left a year ago. When she started at Apple, they had a 3-to 7-year yield time for theoretical research; a project had to pay for itself from three to seven years after its start. In the early 1990s, the yield time dropped to one year—“Not one-point-oh enough,” said Laura. “Here, it’s 5-to 10-years’ yield time. That’s good.”
We asked her what the difference was between Apple and Interval, and she said that Apple tried to change the world while Interval tries to
“Staff here are a bit older, too,” she said, “and people mostly only get in via recommendation. There’s no snatch-the-pebble-from-my-hand koan routine for prospective employees. And there’s no reporting tree. It’s post- grad school, sort of. Everybody’s supposed to be equal, too, but of course you have sub-equal and super-equal personalities. They fall into planet/moon relationships soon enough. But for the most part, we’re all start-up types, ex-academic and ex-corporate types who want to keep the one-point-oh flame alive.”
Laura cleaned up at pool. I felt goofy losing, the way you do with pool. Pool is like rollerblading: you have to pretend you’re the cooly-wooliest person on earth, while you’re quietly cringing inside.
Other techies came and went, and it felt refreshingly like a normal workday. Karla promised to fix Laura up with Anatole. Laura used to have a crush on him back at Apple.
I said that since Anatole’s friends were going to help us alpha test
When we got home, Mom and Dad were just back from a bike ride along the Foothills Expressway. They were sweating, and Misty was licking them in pursuit of sodium. After this, they watched Martha Stewart tapes and felt guilty for not orchestrating their lives more glamorously.
Bug popped by en route to a party in San Jose. We told him about our trip to Interval and he told us that the replacement paradigm for Graphic User Interface was going to emerge from there, and that PARC’s 1970s desktop metaphor work had become the “intellectual avocado-colored appliance of the computer industry.”
“My, how fickle are our allegiances,” said Karla.
“Oh come on, Bug,” I said, “can’t you be even a
“I can foam about PARC forever,” said Bug, “or I can groove on the next PARC-like think tank. I choose to groove. Where’s your mom, Dan? I brought her a rock she might like.”
Bug is spending part of his off-time developing a traffic-monitoring routine for offices that allows office workers to minimize the number of times they bump into each other in the hallway. He was inspired by that cartoon character, Dilbert, who freaks out every time he has to walk down a hall with somebody else. “I mean, what’s a person supposed to say, Kar? How often can a person regenerate fresh and witty banter each and
SATURDAY New Year’s Day, 1994
Abe left for SFO Airport and then we all went for a drive in the Carp — Karla, Ethan, Todd, Bug, and I.
We drove past the home of Thomas Watson Jr., 99 Notre Dame Avenue, San Jose, California. Watson steered IBM into the computer age — and was made prez of the company in 1952. In 1953 he developed the first commercial storage device for computers. He died on a New Year’s Eve.
On the radio we heard that Bill got married, on Lanai in Hawaii, and we all screamed so loudly that the Carp nearly went off the road. And apparently Alice Cooper was there. So to celebrate we played old Alice Cooper tapes and purchased a “Joey Heatherton” fondue kit in a secondhand store and later on boxed it up to mail to Microsoft. They’ll probably think it’s a bomb.
“I feel as though we’re in a witness relocation program,” said Todd. “You can leave Bill, but Bill will never leave
We also went to “The Garage,” the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. We were expecting a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of exhibit, with bioanimatronic Deadheads hacking an Altair inside a re-created 1976 Sunnyvale Garage.
Instead there was a mock clean room, a Silicon Graphics 3D protein simulator, and a chromosome map in the biotechnology section: Goiter: bottom of gene pair no. 8 Epilepsy: lower half of gene pair 20 Red hair color: middle of pair 4 Albinism: lower 11th pair
Karla said that a quarter of all pure white cats are deaf — that the trait of whiteness and the trait for deafness are entwined together, so that you can’t have one without a possibility of the other.
This segued into a discussion of algorithm breeding that lasted well until we arrived in Berkeley where we went to a yuppie-style party at a college friend of Karla’s. Ethan drank too much and told loud jokes, and the yuppies weren’t happy. We had to take him into the backyard and cool him off. He said, “What’s a bar bill but a surtax on reality.” We’re not sure if he has a drinking problem.
The music was Herb Alpert and Brazil 66. It could easily be your own parents’ party, circa
Anecdote: We talked with Pablo and Christine, Karla’s “we-have-a-life” friends who were having the party. I asked them, “Are you married?”
“Well,” said Pablo, “we went down to Thailand and a guy in a yellow silk robe waved his hands around our bodies and …” Pablo paused. “You know, I suppose we don’t really
“It was sort of Mick-and-Jerry,” said Christine.
Later on, Pablo was telling this deep intimate story about how he found religion in the hinterlands of Thailand, and just at the most intense, quietest moment in the storytelling, Ethan walked into the kitchen, overheard a snatch of conversation, and said, “Thailand? I love Thailand! I’m dying to build a chain of resorts all over Thailand and Bali, kind of like Club Meds but a little more nineties. I’m gonna call them ‘Club Zens,’ right? ‘Cause of the Buddhism thing. There’s all kinds of statues and monuments over there I could use to make it look authentic — like you’re in a monastery, but with booze and bikinis. Now that’s nirvana! As soon as I make my next million …”
It was a very “Ethan” moment.
Oh-at the Museum in San Jose there was a pile of this stuff called aerogel — solid, yet almost entirely air. It seemed like thoughts made solid. It was so lovely.
