Xerox PARC
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship
research division of the
Xerox Corporation, based in
Palo Alto, California,
USA. It was founded in
1970, and spun out as a separate company (still wholly owned by Xerox) in
2002. It is best known for essentially creating the modern
personal computer graphical user interface (GUI) paradigm.
PARC's founding director,
George Pake, was an outstanding
physicist in the area of
nuclear magnetic resonance. Dr. Pake had been serving as
provost of
Washington University in
1969 when he was courted by
Jack Goldman, Chief Scientist at Xerox. If Jack Goldman was chiefly responsible for Xerox founding, and generously funding, a second research center, then George Pake was chiefly responsible for siting PARC in Palo Alto â€" 3,000 miles away from Xerox headquarters.
In retrospect, this turned out to be a good idea, for around 1974, PARC was able to raid the nearby
Augmentation Research Center (founded by
Douglas Engelbart) for some of its most talented personnel. It also helped that Engelbart's funding from
DARPA,
NASA, and the
U.S. Air Force was drying up around the same time.
Much of its success in the computer field was due to the inspired leadership of PARC's Computer Science Laboratory by
Bob Taylor, as associate manager (1970â€"77), and then manager (1977â€"83),
On
January 4,
2002, PARC was incorporated as a subsidiary company of Xerox, called Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated, i.e., PARC. Following the spin-off, PARC remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Xerox Corporation. As of 2004, Xerox remained the company's largest customer, but PARC had also announced a multi-year relationship with Fujitsu and an entrance into biomedical sciences in partnership with the
Scripps Research Institute of La Jolla, CA.
Xerox PARC was the incubator of many elements of modern computing. Most were included in the
Alto, which introduced and unified most aspects of now-standard personal computer usage model: the
mouse, computer generated color graphics, a
graphical user interface featuring windows and icons, the
WYSIWYG text editor,
InterPress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to
PostScript),
Ethernet, and fully formed
object-oriented programming in the
Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment. The
laser printer was developed at the same time, as an integral part of the overall environment.
Among PARC's distinguished researchers were two
Turing Award winners:
Butler W. Lampson (
1992) and
Alan Kay (
2003). The
ACM Software System Award recognized the Alto system in
1984,
Smalltalk in
1987,
InterLisp in
1992, and
Remote Procedure Call in
1994. Lampson, Kay, Bob Taylor, and
Charles P. Thacker received the
National Academy of Engineering's prestigious
Charles Stark Draper Prize in
2004 for their work on the Alto system.
Xerox has been heavily criticized (particularly by business historians) for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations. A favorite example is the GUI, initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then commercialized as the
Xerox Star by the Xerox Systems Development Department. Although very significant in terms of its influence on future system design, it is deemed a failure because it only sold approximately 25,000 units.
The first successful commercial GUI product was the
Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the
Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed on a technicality â€" Xerox had waited too long to file suit and the statute of limitations had expired. However, some dispute the degree to which the Apple interface was derived from Xerox designs[
1].
There is no denying the long-term impact of PARC's systems. It took two decades for much of their technology to be equaled or surpassed. The interfaces and technology that PARC pioneered became standards for much of the computing industry, once their merits were widely known.
It is legend that Xerox management consistently failed to see the potential of many of the PARC inventions. While there is some truth to this, it is also an over-simplification. They certainly understood the value of laser printing, and of advances coming from the non-computer-focused part of PARC. Most critics don't realize that computing research was a relatively small part of PARC; there were many researchers working in areas such as
materials science at PARC, including pioneers in
LCD and
optical disc technologies.
The work at PARC in the years since the early
1980s is often overlooked, but major work since then includes
Ubiquitous computing aka
Pervasive Computing,
Aspect-oriented programming, and
IPv6 to name but a few.
Xerox PARC was the first research group to widely adopt the mouse invented by
Douglas Engelbart's
Augmentation Research Center at the
Stanford Research Institute (now
SRI International) in
Menlo Park, California.
* Michael A. Hiltzik,
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, New York, 1999) ISBN 0887309895
* Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander,
Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (William Morrow, New York, 1988) ISBN 1583482660
* M. Mitchell Waldrop,
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking Penguin, New York, 2001) ISBN 0670899763
* Howard Rheingold,
Tools For Thought (MIT Press, 2000) ISBN 0262681153
*
PARC*
Xerox PARC innovation*
Xerox Star Historical Documents*
Xerox PARC history*
MacKiDo article
