PARC Turns 40
On September 20, 2010, Gavin Clarke of The Register wrote a piece on PARC celebrating it’s 40th anniversary:
A bunker-like building perched on a sun-drenched hillside in California’s Silicon Valley, PARC was formed by Xerox to create the office of the future, and it assembled some of the greatest minds of that time in a single location. In just four years, those minds managed to conceive and create the modern PC – and the modern network.
PARC researchers devised the world’s first WYSIWYG editor, the GUI, bitmapped display object-oriented programming methodology, and, yes, the first commercial mouse, all of which were quickly rolled into the Alto workstation – a recognizable modern PC. PARC’s boffins also gave us Ethernet and laser printers. But PARC is also famous because the products and profits associated with these breakthroughs arrived through other companies. Steve Jobs and Apple are credited with introducing the first commercial GUI workstations: the Lisa and the Mac. Bill Gates and Microsoft gave us Windows on x86 PCs. 3Com successfully exploited Ethernet. And profits from laser printers flowed to Cannon, Lexmark, and Hewlett-Packard.
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