Xerox research center where many technological innovations were developed (located in Palo Alto, California)
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc.), formerly Xerox PARC, is a
research and development company in
Palo Alto, California that began as a division of
Xerox Corporation. It was founded in
1970, and incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox in
2002. It is best known for inventing
laser printing,
Ethernet, the modern
personal computer graphical user interface (GUI) paradigm,
object-oriented programming,
ubiquitous computing, and advancing
very-large-scale-integration (VLSI). Today PARC collaborates with sponsors and clients to discover novel business concepts and transfer scientific findings into production. Current research areas include
biomedical technologies, "clean technology,"
user interface design,
sensemaking,
ubiquitous computing, large area electronics, and embedded and intelligent systems.
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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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