XEROX PARC
XEROX PARC: /zee'roks park'/ n. The famed Palo Alto Research
Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the
mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking
hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and
icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the
laser printer and the local-area network; 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 honor in their
own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe
PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant ideas for
everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level
suits has been well anatomized in "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).
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