Palo Alto Research Centre ==>
XEROX 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)
Nearby terms:
Xerox Data Systems Model 940 « XEROX Network
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