Worked some with and met at PARC early on. As a group that wanted to create the architecture of information, always wondered what happened to them. They did own the computing infrastructure. Were they really scalped by Gates and Jobs? What do they do now? Here a good telling of history.
XEROX PARC’S ENGINEERS ON HOW THEY INVENTED THE FUTURE—AND HOW XEROX LOST IT in IEEE Spectrum
The inside story of personal computing at the legendary research lab
TEKLA S. PERRYPAUL WALLICH04 JUN 2022N LATE 1969, C. Peter McColough, chairman of Xerox Corp., told the New York Society of Security Analysts that Xerox was determined to develop “the architecture of information” to solve the problems that had been created by the “knowledge explosion.” Legend has it that McColough then turned to Jack E. Goldman, senior vice president of research and development, and said, “All right, go start a lab that will find out what I just meant.”
This article was first published as “Inside the PARC: the ‘information architects’.” It appeared in the October 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The diagrams and photographs appeared in the original print version.
Goldman tells it differently. In 1969 Xerox had just bought Scientific Data Systems (SDS), a mainframe computer manufacturer. “When Xerox bought SDS,” he recalled, “I walked promptly into the office of Peter McColough and said, ‘Look, now that we’re in this digital computer business, we better damned well have a research laboratory!’ ”
In any case, the result was the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, one of the most unusual corporate research organizations of our time. PARC is one of three research centers within Xerox; the other two are in Webster, N.Y., and Toronto, Ont., Canada. It employs approximately 350 researchers, managers, and support staff (by comparison, Bell Laboratories before the AT&T breakup employed roughly 25,000). PARC, now in its 15th year, originated or nurtured technologies that led to these developments, among others:
The Macintosh computer, with its mouse and overlapping windows.
Colorful weather maps on TV news programs.
Laser printers.
Structured VLSI design, now taught in more than 100 universities.
Networks that link personal computers in offices.
Semiconductor lasers that read and write optical disks.
Structured programming languages like Modula-2 and Ada.
In the mid-1970s, close to half of the top 100 computer scientists in the world were working at PARC, and the laboratory boasted similar strength in other fields, including solid-state physics and optics.
Some researchers say PARC was a product of the 1960s and that decade’s philosophy of power to the people, of improving the quality of life. When the center opened in 1970, it was unlike other major industrial research laboratories; its work wasn’t tied, even loosely, to its corporate parent’s current product lines. And unlike university research laboratories, PARC had one unifying vision: it would develop “the architecture of information.” ..... '
