Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

Dealers of Lightning is an inside chronicle of Xerox PARC’s first decade and a half—how a cash-rich copier giant assembled an unmatched cast of engineers and scientists, gave them unusual freedom, and accidentally helped ignite the personal computing revolution. The book tracks the lab’s core breakthroughs: the Alto personal computer, the Ethernet local network, WYSIWYG word processing, laser printing, and the software systems that made graphical computing feel natural.

It’s also a story of friction: research culture versus corporate incentives, the politics of budgets and product strategy, and how hard it is for large organizations to commercialize disruptive technologies while defending existing cash cows. Built from extensive interviews and detailed timelines, the narrative shows both the myth and the nuance behind the famous question: did Xerox “blow it,” or was the outcome nearly inevitable?

• Listeners who want the real origin story behind the GUI, Ethernet, laser printing, and modern office computing
• Product leaders and founders studying why great R&D doesn’t automatically translate into market wins
• Anyone fascinated by Silicon Valley’s pre-Apple, pre-Microsoft “time machine” era

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He has covered finance, politics, foreign affairs, and technology, and draws heavily on interviews and archival sources to reconstruct PARC’s formative years.