While the character recognition program was relatively simple to code [WHAT WAS IT CALLED?], as were the modifications to Wupiwug that allowed user modification of the recognized characters, it was the image that proved frustrating. The images scanned well [do scanners work the same way as photocopiers or fax?], but Abraham was never able to code an interface that pleased him. Every graphics program he invented was either too rudimentary, or [the opposite of rudimentary?] intricate. He experimented with raster and vector, with dividing the graphics into 2D “spatches,” into 3D “layers,” but his lack of progress led to a lack of resource availability, and in 1984, with PARC reorganized under new management, Abraham’s unit was mothballed, and he was transferred to another [BUT WHICH?].

He would joke to his son that this was the fate of the Jews—to be stymied by the image.

[[OPENING VERSION 1 BIOGRAPHY:One hundred years before PARC’s inception, Yehoshuah Kohen was born in 1870, in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine.

Bershad was a textile town, and antisemitism was a familiar thread. Upon returning from a spell at the yeshiva of Koretz, Yehoshuah married Chava Friedgant, the youngest daughter of a family of weavers, and it was weaving that supported Yehoshuah’s life of study and prayer, and the life of their son, Yosef, born 1895. In 18??, however, a pogrom was sparked [a pogrom sparked how?], and burned the Jewish textile warehouse [but only one warehouse?]. Theirs was a tragedy so common to the milieu that it can only become banal by repetition.

Regardless—wagon to Uman, trains to Lvov, Warsaw, Berlin, Hamburg—the family took a steamship to America, bundling with them a single trunk, and Yosef. Ellis Island records attest to an arrival of April 4, 1901. The year of the Edison battery and the transatlantic radio, the death of Queen Victoria and the assassination of McKinley, annus Rooseveltus. The first day of Passover 5661.

They settled on Orchard Street, on the East Side of New York City, where Yehoshuah—now “Cohen”—found a job as an iceman, initially cutting that substance from the East River, before being promoted to assistant deliverer (an innate sense for horses and geography), to chief deliverer (developing English and manners), cut manager, assistant payroll. But when his payroll chief married the daughter of the ice concern’s owner, he left. The man was a fellow immigrant, but from Uzhgorod [, Ungvar in Yiddish], who considered Yehoshuah a peasant[, which he was]. But he was also a natural businessman.

In 1909, with money he’d saved and income from Chava’s lacemaking, Yehoshuah purchased a building in Coney Island, Brooklyn—freezing cellar down below, living quarters up top—from which he’d deliver his ice to every borough, and even unto the wilds of New Jersey, where he buried Chava in 1918 (influenza).

A year later, their only son, the Americanized “Joseph”—who’d spent his late teens working nights for his father while attending Stuyvesant High School during the day, and his early 20s working days while attending City College at night—was married to Eve Leopold, a German American Jewess and fellow student at [City College? whose family, all of whom were involved with industrial refrigerator/freezer manufacturing, disapproved of the match, and attempted to snub Joseph by not taking him into the business, instead granting him a nonexclusive license to retail their products, which he did, to outstanding success, by exploiting the newly emerging home market, introducing puffs of the Russian Pale into American households by van and truck as far afield as Connecticut].

[Yehoshuah died in 1967, Joseph in 1977. Colon cancer—both?]

In 1930, Joseph and Eve had a daughter, Lily (accountant, d. 1998? how?), and, in 1933, a son, Abraham (named for Eve Leopold’s grandfather? great-uncle?, Abraham Leopold, a pioneer of gas absorption technology? or aqua ammonia?).

“Abs” was a loving, and beloved, son—in true immigrant fashion, Joseph and Eve would have done anything for him, but in true first-generation American fashion, “Abs” had required nothing, and had accomplished all he had on scholarship: Harvard (bachelor’s in electrical engineering), MIT (SM, electrical engineering), Stanford (PhD, electrical engineering). 12 years of education had cost his parents nothing.

If Abs ever disappointed his parents it wasn’t with any computer coupling, rather with a coupling more personal [more what?]. Joseph and Eve still held out hope that their son would return home after he finished his PhD, and Abs seemed to placate them throughout 1969 by interviewing for positions at IBM, Honeywell, Multics, and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman [was he offered any?]. But he had no intention of taking a job with any East Coast firm. Either because of the women out west, or the war in Vietnam.

Joseph’s pedes plani (flatfeet) had earned his deferral from WWI, and Abs had been too young for conscription into WWII, too II-S (enrolled in essential studies) for Korea, and old enough that by Vietnam he wasn’t fit for anything besides servicing mainframes[, which were the size of jungle temples, and brought napalm from the sky].

On Christmas Day 1969, Abs had accepted the only offer he’d been waiting for[, from the celebrated Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox-PARC]

On New Year’s Eve, 1970, two men wandered San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in a celebratory mood. Abs and Hal Lahasky had been rivals at Stanford, but now that both were newly minted PARCys, the time had come to be friends. Firecrackers were going off in the streets [WERE THEY?]. Love-beaded flower-children danced in the gutters with sparklers [DID THEY?]. The house [DESCRIPTION OF WOOD BOHEMIAN GINGERBREAD TRIM SF HOUSE] belonged to a cousin/friend of Lahasky’s, but the party going on inside it, spilling out onto the porch and the street, was so packed that Abs never met her/him, and lost Lahasky within a moment of arriving [REWRITE/CUT: NO LAHASKY].

Marijuana was being passed around, which Abs was used to, but then, judging by the [crazy bucknakedish people], there was also LSD. He avoided the punch and went for beer. People stood [at a distance from the hifi?] “drinking draft.” That’s what they told him the game was called. You drank the number of drinks of your draft number. Until you hit it, or died. Luckily, also unluckily, the numbers were low. Still, a guy [in a Mao suit?] had to be held standing by, or was trying for a piggyback ride from, a [pretty young] woman.

“Let me help,” Abs said.

“I got it,” she said, and slumped the guy up against a banister. “Chivalry is misogyny.”

Then she turned away just as he said, “And chauvinist on a double word score is 36 points in Scrabble.”

She paused, “Heavy.”

“And a pair of Yahtzee dice can be rolled in 36 combinations.”

“So you’re a [spaz/square]?”

“I’m 36.”

“That’s your draft number?”

“I mean I’m 36 years old.”

“Bummer.” [“far out”?]

A month before, on the first day of December, the Selective Service System—an agency of the US government responsible for staffing the armed forces—[had reached its omnipotent eagle’s talons into a dimestore fishbowl] and chosen 366 blue plastic capsules, each of which had been [impregnated] with a paper slip marked with a number corresponding to a day of 1944, which was a leap year. The first number drawn was 258, and the 258th day of that year was September 14. The last was 160, and the 160th day was June 8. Anyone born on June 8 got the highest draft number, 366, and would be among the last to be inducted, while anyone born on September 14 got the lowest, 1, and would be among the first—the other 364 days of 1944 all drew draft numbers between them.