Unsent Letter #1: To the Elephant
Some saw in you a pillar. Some a post. I saw only silence moving across wire. We touched, interpreted, named—and then stepped away, each building from the echo of our grasp. If you are still walking, perhaps you have become everything we imagined—and nothing we understood. This is the story I heard:
The Blind Men and the Elephant of the 20th Century
They arrived in twos.
Not as prophets, but as curious men summoned to glimpse something that didn’t yet have a name: a machine that blinked, responded, and shimmered with possibilities.
Steve Jobs. Robert M. Metcalfe. Two young men, called to Xerox PARC, where minds wandered among wires and photons.
Inside a quiet room, nestled in the womb of the 1970s, they were shown a prototype: a personal computer—graphical, clickable, impossible, named Alto.
But they did not see the same thing.
One saw the soul of creation. Jobs touched the interface and felt mythology— A device to unlock human intuition, to bring art to code. He saw a door, not a circuit.
The other touched the tendon of connection. Metcalfe, then a researcher at Xerox, sensed the pulse of data - the lifeblood of networks, invisible conversations between machines. He saw the web before it was woven, the early whisper of distributed possibility
Like the blind men and the elephant, each grasped a piece. A tusk of interface. A leg of protocol. An ear of potential.
Each returned to build his own truth:
Apple—a shrine to elegance and vision.
3Com—an artery for information.
But neither saw the whole elephant.
Xerox PARC did.
And they let it walk away.
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