palo alto research centre
(foldoc) | XEROX PARC
Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto Research Centre
PARC
/zee'roks park'/ Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research
Center.
For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the
mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
ground-breaking hardware and software innovations. The modern
mice, windows, and icons (WIMP) style of software interface
was invented there. So was the laser printer and the
local-area network; Smalltalk; and PARC's series of D
machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the
1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without
honour in their own company, so much so that it became a
standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialised in
developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's
top-level suits has been well described in the reference
below.
["Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the
First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert
C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN
0-688-09511-9)].
[Jargon File]
(1995-01-26)
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