Syntex was the first corporation to invent the "workplace as campus." Before California high-tech parks, the most a corporation ever did for an employee was maybe supply a house, maybe a car, maybe a doctor, and maybe a place to buy groceries. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations began supplying showers for people who jogged during lunch hour and sculptures lo soothe the working soul-proactive humanism-the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private. In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at "campuses" like Microsoft and Apple-with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability. Give us your entire life or we won't allow you to work on cool projects. In the 1990s, corporations don't even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.
Karla and I felt like the last couple on earth, walking through the empli-ness. We felt like Adam and Eve.
I told Karla that Ethan doesn't think biotech is such a hot investment because it's "too 9-to-5," and the workers follow non-techie time schedules, and their parking lots NEVER have cars in them on Sundays. Actually, to this day, Ethan is still trying to find a biotech firm with Sunday workers. He says that once he finds one, he'll be able to invest the farm, lie back, and retire. If only Ethan had something to invest!
Karla picked some iceplant flowers, the semiofficial plant of the high-tech world because it stabilizes hillsides so quickly. She said it's thornless-ness makes it "the Play-Doh" version of cactus.
We were being very freestyle. We discussed whether we should go try and crash into the research institute off the 280 where Koko the gorilla lives with her kitten. Karla said that the transdermal nicotine patch was invented just over the hill, on Page Mill Road, near the Interval Research Corporation headquarters. History! Then Karla suggested we visit Interval Research's campus and see what it's like: "If Syntex was the 1970s and Apple was the 1980s, then Interval is the 1990s."
Interval Research's headquarters were like a middle-class honeymoon hotel in Maui circa 1976, and slightly gone to seed, with Gilligan's Island-style lagoonlets between the buildings and a lobby with a vaguely medical/dental, is-this-where-I-drop-off-my-urine-sample? feel.
And (important) there were CARS in the parking lot, even on the Sunday after Christmas.
Karla said she knew this girl Laura who worked there, and so we checked, and she was there. We rapped on her window, overlooking the central courtyard's lagoon, and she looked up and came out and let us in. Laura has an IQ of 800, just like Karla. She invited us inside and we played pool at their pool table. The pool table is to the 1990s what PARC's bean bag chairs were to the 1970s.
Interval Research is so weird because nobody knows for sure what it is they really do there. They have stealth cachet. Laura does something on neural nets.
People project onto Interval's blankness either their paranoia or their hope. People always get emotional when you mention it. Interval was the think tank-slash-company Paul Allen from Microsoft started when he learned he had something terminal. His disease left after he founded it.
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 Auien 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 Watership Down. We have to remind him that since the government has pulled out of Big Science, someone has to do pure theoretical research. He grudgingly agrees.
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 affect the world. "We have a touchie-feelie reputation," she said, "probably because of Brenda Laurel's work in gender and intelligence, but believe me, it's heaven to be able to do pure math, theoretical software, or watch Ricki Lake if you need to." (I should add, Laura is a real pool shark. I pointed this out and she said, "Oh, it's only math.") Brenda Laurel is the woman responsible for research into how women interact with math. She's the Anti-Barbie.
"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 teenies 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. L'amour, I'amour. I was a little underwhelmed. I guess I was expecting them to be doing Tesla Coil experiments or building jets out of Mylar. Or 3,000-lb. onions being carried out of the parking lot with machine-gun totin' guards alongside the truck.
I said that since Anatole's friends were going to help us alpha test Oop!, maybe we could get her closer to Anatole if she wanted to help test. She agreed immediately. Talk about Tom Sawyer painting a fence white!
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 bit bitter aboat PARC
anymore?"
"I can foam about PARC forever," said Bug, "or I can groove\e 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 every time they bump into a person? Oohhh . . . nice carpeting. Oohhh . . . what en attractive Honey-well thermostat control switch next to the photocopier. Human beings weren't designed to bump into each other in hallways. I'm providing a valuable postindustrial service. Microsoft would have been heaven if my system had been operative and in place."