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XEROX PARC’S ENGINEERS ON HOW THEY INVENTED THE FUTURE—AND HOW XEROX LOST IT
An interesting piece of computing history which may be familiar to many here ... Here is the inside story of personal computing at the legendary research lab
In late 1969, C. Peter McColough, chairman of Xerox Corp., told the New York Society of Security Analysts that Xerox was determined to develop “the architecture of information” to solve the problems that had been created by the “knowledge explosion.” Legend has it that McColough then turned to Jack E. Goldman, senior vice president of research and development, and said, “All right, go start a lab that will find out what I just meant.“
This article was first published as “Inside the PARC: the ‘information architects’.” It appeared in the October 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version [ieee.org] is available on IEEE Xplore. The diagrams and photographs appeared in the original print version.
Goldman tells it differently. In 1969 Xerox had just bought Scientific Data Systems (SDS), a mainframe computer manufacturer. “When Xerox bought SDS,” he recalled, “I walked promptly into the office of Peter McColough and said, ‘Look, now that we’re in this digital computer business, we better damned well have a research laboratory!’ “
In any case, the result was the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, one of the most unusual corporate research organizations of our time. PARC is one of three research centers within Xerox; the other two are in Webster, N.Y., and Toronto, Ont., Canada. It employs approximately 350 researchers, managers, and support staff (by comparison, Bell Laboratories before the AT&T breakup employed roughly 25,000). PARC, now in its fifteenth year, originated or nurtured technologies that led to these developments, among others:
The Macintosh computer, with its mouse and overlapping windows.
Colorful weather maps on TV news programs.
Laser printers.
Structured VLSI design, now taught in more than 100 universities.
Networks that link personal computers in offices.
Semiconductor lasers that read and write optical disks.
Structured programming languages like Modula-2 and Ada.
IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org]
