Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was founded in Palo Alto, California by Xerox (then a copier company) in 1970. PARC is widely regarded as one of the most successful corporate research labs in history, pioneering many of the major developments that made computing shift from an exclusively corporate enterprise to the personal, ubiquitous machines we know today. While Xerox made the lab possible with initiative and funding, the company's vision of developing "the office of the future" was never realized, as they failed to successfully monetize and market the innovations made at PARC. Regardless, scientists and engineers at park were responsible for developing well known and recognizable elements of modern computing such as as laser printing, Ethernet, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and concept of the desktop, object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing.
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1. Xerox, the Copier Company
a. Grew explosively in the 1960s due to a monopoly on the copier industry
b. With billions in new capital and rising competition on the horizon, CEO Peter McColough was looking to broaden the company's influence
i. Saw potential in the obscure field of computing, where few others did
ii. Already having a strong presence in offices across the nation, wanted Xerox to own "the office of the future"
2.Founding of PARC
a. In 1969, Chief Scientist at Xerox Jack Goldman approached George Pake about starting a second research center for the company.
b. Pake selected Palo Alto, California as the location for the research center
i. Far enough away from Xerox's headquarters in Rochester that they could work freely
ii. In the heart of the blooming silicon valley, making it easy to recruit staff
c. Goldman also recruited Robert Taylor to help manage the facility and help recruit scientists to join the research center
i. Taylor's connections from working at ARPA enabled him to find the best minds in computing
ii. Taylor would go on to be instrumental in the operation of PARC, maintaining the spirit and atmosphere that enabled the lab to flourish
3. Research at PARC
a. Began with McColough's $920 million acquisition of the failing computer company Scientific Data Systems
b. Culminated in the development of the Alto, the first true personal computer, many features of which would be recognizable today
Technologies developed at PARC:
- Laser printers,
- Computer-generated bitmap graphics
- The Graphical user interface, featuring windows and icons, operated with a mouse
- The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor
- Ethernet as a local-area computer network
- Fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment.
- Model–view–controller software architecture
4. Collapse
a. Unfortunately for Xerox, the Alto was not successfully monetized or marketed and only saw use in Xerox's own offices and by the US government
b. Multiple changes in leadership and Xerox's corporate structure led to a bureaucratic mess
i. Many Xerox managers saw Xerox as just a copier company and were focused on that business model, seeing no use for funding further computing research
ii. Other executives were becoming increasingly dissatisfied by (what they saw as) financial risks being taken by the PARC scientists
c. As a result, most of the talented scientists that made PARC so successful left
i. Most of the technologies developed there were eventually seen being used by other companies
ii. Steve Jobs, who made a deal to invest in PARC in exchange for a look at the technology developed there, recruited many of these scientists so they could fully develop their ideas
iii, This technology saw the greatest exposure to the public with the debut of the immensely popular Apple Macintosh computer
Sources:
The Dream Machine, M. Waldrop
Fumbling the Future, Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29
http://www.scaruffi.com/svhistory/sv/chap84.html