Xerox PARC - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

PARC formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California

Palo Alto, California

Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...

, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems.

Founded in 1970 as a division of Xerox Corporation, PARC has been responsible for such well known and important developments as laser printing, Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

, the modern personal computer

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

, graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

(GUI), object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

, ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems...

, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale-integration

Very-large-scale integration

Very-large-scale integration is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device.The first semiconductor...

(VLSI) for semiconductors.

Incorporated as an independent but wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox in 2002, PARC now works with other commercial (major corporations, ventures, licensees) and government partners.

History

In 1969, Chief Scientist at Xerox Jack Goldman

Jack Goldman

Jack Goldman is an American physicist and former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation. He is especially notable for hiring physicist Dr. George Pake to create the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.-External links:**...

approached Dr. George Pake

George Pake

George Pake was a physicist and research executive primarily known for helping found Xerox PARC. Pake earned his bachelors and masters degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and his doctorate in physics at Harvard University in 1948.A rather serious case of scoliosis kept Pake out of...

, a physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

specializing in nuclear magnetic resonance

Nuclear magnetic resonance

Nuclear magnetic resonance is a physical phenomenon in which magnetic nuclei in a magnetic field absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation...

and provost

Provost (education)

A provost is the senior academic administrator at many institutions of higher education in the United States, Canada and Australia, the equivalent of a pro-vice-chancellor at some institutions in the United Kingdom and Ireland....

of Washington University, about starting a second research center for the company.

Pake selected Palo Alto, California, as the site of what was to become known as PARC. While the 3,000 mile buffer between it and Xerox headquarters in Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York

Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...

afforded scientists at the new lab great freedom to undertake their work, the distance also served as an impediment in persuading management of the promise of some of their greatest achievements.

PARC's West Coast location proved to be advantageous in the mid-1970s, when the lab was able to hire many employees of the nearby SRI

SRI International

SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...

Augmentation Research Center

Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line...

as that facility's funding from DARPA, NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

, and the U.S. Air Force began to diminish. Being situated on Stanford Research Park

Stanford Research Park

Stanford Research Park is a technology park located in Palo Alto, California on land owned by Stanford University. Built in 1951, as Stanford Industrial Park, it claims to be the world's first technology-focused office park...

land leased from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

allowed Stanford graduate students to be involved in PARC research projects, and PARC scientists to collaborate with academic seminars and projects.

Much of PARC's early success in the computer field was under the leadership of its Computer Science Laboratory manager Bob Taylor

Robert Taylor (computer scientist)

Robert William Taylor , known as Bob Taylor, is an Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies....

, who guided the lab as associate manager from 1970–77 and as manager 1977–83.

PARC today

After three decades as a division of Xerox, PARC was transformed in 2002 into an independent, wholly owned subsidiary company dedicated to developing and maturing advances in science and business concepts with the support of commercial partners and clients.

Xerox remains the company's largest customer (50%), but PARC has numerous other corporate and venture clients in different fields of use than Xerox including: VMware

VMware

VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....

, Fujitsu

Fujitsu

is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....

, Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP), Samsung

Samsung

The Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...

, NEC

NEC

, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....

, SolFocus, Powerset, and many more.

'PARC' currently conducts research into "clean technology", user interface

User interface

The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...

design, sensemaking

Sensemaking

Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to experience. While this process has been studied by other disciplines under other names for centuries, the term "sensemaking" has primarily marked three distinct but related research areas since the 1970s: Sensemaking was introduced to...

, ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing

and context-aware systems, large-area electronics, and model-based control and optimization in embedded, intelligent systems.

Accomplishments

Xerox PARC has been the inventor and incubator of many elements of modern computing in the contemporary office work place:

Laser printers
Laser printer
A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process, but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced...

,
Computer-generated bitmap
Bitmap
In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...

graphics
The Graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

, featuring windows and icons, operated with a mouse
The WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

text editor
InterPress
InterPress
InterPress is a page description language developed at Xerox PARC, based on the Forth programming language and an earlier graphics language called JaM...

, a resolution-independent graphical page-description language and the precursor to PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

as a local-area computer network
Fully formed object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

in the Smalltalk
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

and integrated development environment.

The Alto

Most of these developments were included in the Alto

Xerox Alto

The Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use , making it arguably what is now called a personal computer. It was developed at Xerox PARC in 1973...

, which added the now familiar SRI-developed mouse unifying into a single model most aspects of now-standard personal computer use. The integration of Ethernet prompted the development of the PARC Universal Packet

PARC Universal Packet

The PARC Universal Packet was one of the two earliest internetwork protocol suites; it was created by researchers at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s...

architecture, much like today's Internet.

The GUI

Xerox has been heavily criticized (particularly by business historians) for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations. A favorite example is the GUI

Gui

Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

, initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then commercialized as the Xerox Star

Xerox Star

The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based...

by the Xerox Systems Development Department. Although very significant in terms of its influence on future system design, it is deemed a failure because it only sold approximately 25,000 units. A small group from PARC led by David Liddle

David Liddle

David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, and credited with heading development of the groundbreaking Xerox Star computer system. He has served on the board of many corporations. He was chair of the board of...

and Charles Irby formed Metaphor Computer Systems

Metaphor Computer Systems

Metaphor Computer Systems was a Xerox PARC spin-off that created an advanced workstation, database gateway, a unique graphical office interface, and software applications that communicate. The Metaphor machine was one of the first commercial workstations to offer a complete hardware/software...

. They extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office-automation model and sold the company to IBM.

Adoption by Apple

The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge dismissed most of Xerox's complaints as being inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons.

Distinguished researchers

Among PARC's distinguished researchers were three Turing Award

Turing Award

The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

winners: Butler W. Lampson (1992), Alan Kay

Alan Kay

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...

(2003), and Charles P. Thacker

Charles P. Thacker

Charles P. Thacker is an American pioneer computer designer.-Biography:Thacker was born in Pasadena, California on February 26, 1943.He received his B.S...

(2009). The ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

Software System Award recognized the Alto system in 1984, Smalltalk

Smalltalk

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

in 1987, InterLisp

Interlisp

Interlisp was a programming environment built around a version of the Lisp programming language. Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts as BBN LISP, which ran on PDP-10 machines running the TENEX operating system...

in 1992, and Remote Procedure Call

Remote procedure call

In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...

in 1994. Lampson, Kay, Bob Taylor, and Charles P. Thacker received the National Academy of Engineering

National Academy of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

's prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize

Charles Stark Draper Prize

The National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Charles Stark Draper Prize, which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Engineering" - the others being the Academy's Russ...

in 2004 for their work on the Alto.

People associated with PARC

Daniel G. Bobrow
Daniel G. Bobrow
Daniel Gureasko Bobrow is a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center, and is amongst other things known for creating an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD....
David Boggs
David Boggs
David Reeves Boggs is an electrical and radio engineer from the United States who developed early prototypes of Internet protocols, file servers, gateways, network interface cards...
Anita Borg
Anita Borg
Anita Borg was an American computer scientist. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. She was born Anita Borg Naffz in Chicago, Illinois...
John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown is a researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bent towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities....
Stuart Card
Stuart Card
Stuart K. Card is an American researcher and Senior Research Fellow at Xerox PARC. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of applying human factors in human–computer interaction.- Biography :...
Robert Carr
Robert Carr (Programmer)
Robert Carr is credited as the architect of GO Corporation's PenPoint OS. He was profiled in the book Programmers at Work , where he was credited as the author of Framework....
Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, trans woman, and activist for the transgender community....
Pavel Curtis
Pavel Curtis
Pavel Curtis is an American software architect at Microsoft who is best known for having founded and managed LambdaMOO, an online community...
Steve Deering
Steve Deering
Stephen Deering is a former Technical Leader at Cisco Systems, where he worked on the development and standardization of architectural enhancements to the Internet Protocol...
L Peter Deutsch
William English
Charles Geschke
Charles Geschke
Charles Geschke, is best known as the 1982 co-founder with John Warnock of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company.-Education:...
Adele Goldberg
Adele Goldberg (computer scientist)
Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in the 1970s.Goldberg began working at PARC in 1973, and...
Bruce Horn
Bruce Horn
Bruce Lawrence Horn was a programmer with Apple Computer and the creator of the Macintosh Finder and the Macintosh Resource Manager. His signature is amongst those molded to the case of the Macintosh 128K....
Dan Ingalls
Van Jacobson
Van Jacobson
Van Jacobson is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack which is the technological foundation of today’s Internet. He is renowned for his pioneering achievements in network performance and scaling....
Ronald Kaplan
Ronald Kaplan
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information...
Alan Kay
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
Gregor Kiczales
Gregor Kiczales
Gregor Kiczales is a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in Canada. His best known work is on Aspect-oriented programming and the AspectJ extension for Java at Xerox PARC. He has also contributed to the design of the Common Lisp Object System, and is the author of...
Butler Lampson
Butler Lampson
Butler W. Lampson is a renowned computer scientist.After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1964, and his Ph.D...
Cristina Lopes
Cristina Lopes
Cristina Videira Lopes is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Irvine.Prior to being a professor, she was a Research Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. While at PARC, She was most known as a founder of the group that developed Aspect-Oriented...
Andrew K. Ludwick
Andrew K. Ludwick
Andrew K. Ludwick - Co-Founded SynOptics and was the CEO and President of SynOptics Communications and CEO and President of Bay Networks from 1985 - 1996.-References:...
Edward M. McCreight
Edward M. McCreight
Edward Meyers McCreight is an American computer scientist. He co-invented the B-tree with Rudolf Bayer while at Boeing,co-designed the Xerox Alto workstation,...
Diana Merry
Diana Merry
Diana Merry-Shapiro was a computer programmer for the Learning Research Group of Xerox PARC in the 1970s and 1980s, after having originally been hired as a secretary. As one of the original developers of the Smalltalk programming language, she wrote the first system for overlapping display windows...
Robert Metcalfe
Robert Metcalfe
Robert Melancton Metcalfe is an electrical engineer from the United States who co-invented Ethernet, founded 3Com and formulated Metcalfe's Law., he is a general partner of Polaris Venture Partners...
Jim Mitchell
James G. Mitchell
James "Jim" Mitchell Ph.D. , is a Canadian computer scientist. He has worked on programming language design and implementation , interactive programming systems, dynamic interpretation and compilation, document preparation systems, user interface design, distributed transactional file systems, and...

Thomas P. Moran
Thomas P. Moran
Thomas P. Moran is a Distinguished Engineer at the IBM Almaden Research Center near San Jose, California. He has been active in the field of human computer interaction for a long time. In 1983 the book he wrote along with Stuart Card and Allen Newell The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction...
James H. Morris
James H. Morris
James Hiram Morris is a Professor of Computer Science. He was previously Dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and Dean of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.-Biography:...
Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg is an American linguist and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Nunberg has taught at Stanford University and served as a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from the mid-1980's to 2000...
Severo Ornstein
Severo Ornstein
Severo M. Ornstein is a retired computer scientist and son of Russian-American composer Leo Ornstein. In 1955 he joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory as a programmer and designer for the SAGE air-defense system. He later joined the TX-2 group and became a member of the team that designed the LINC. He...
George Pake
George Pake
George Pake was a physicist and research executive primarily known for helping found Xerox PARC. Pake earned his bachelors and masters degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and his doctorate in physics at Harvard University in 1948.A rather serious case of scoliosis kept Pake out of...
Randy Pausch
Randy Pausch
Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch was an American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....
Prasad Ram
Prasad Ram
Prasad Bhaarat Ram, known as Pram, is a computer scientist and promoter of education.- Early life :Prasad Ram was born in Tiptur of Karnataka state in southern India. He obtained his B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1987. He then went on to...
George G. Robertson
George G. Robertson
George G. Robertson is an American information visualization expert and Senior Researcher, Visualization and Interaction Research Group, Microsoft Research. With Stuart K. Card, Jock D...
Eric Schmidt
Ronald V. Schmidt
Ronald V. Schmidt
Ronald V. Schmidt is an computer network engineer from the United States.-Life:Schmidt was born March 31, 1944, in San Francisco, California.He graduated with B.S. , M.S. , and Ph.D...
Scott Shenker
Scott Shenker
Scott Shenker is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He is also the head of the Networking Group and the Vice President of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. He received his Sc.B. in Physics from Brown University in 1978, and his PhD in Physics from...
Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-American computer software executive who, as head of Microsoft's application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship Office suite of applications. He now heads his own company, Intentional Software, with the aim of developing and marketing his...
Brian Cantwell Smith
Brian Cantwell Smith
Brian Cantwell Smith is a scholar in the fields of cognitive science, computer science, information studies, and philosophy, especially ontology. His research has focused on the foundations and philosophy of computing, both in the practice and theory of computer science, and in the use of...
Robert Spinrad
Robert Spinrad
Robert J. Spinrad was an American computer designer, who was on the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory and who created many of the key technologies used in modern personal computers while director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.-Early life and education:Spinrad was born on March 20,...
Bob Sproull
Bob Sproull
Dr Robert F. Sproull is an American computer scientist, who works for Oracle Corporation where he is director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts .- Biography :...
Gary Starkweather
Gary Starkweather
Gary K. Starkweather is an American engineer and inventor most notable for the invention of the laser printer and color management.In 1969, Starkweather invented the laser printer at Xerox's Webster research center...
Bert Sutherland
Bert Sutherland
William Robert "Bert" Sutherland , older brother of Ivan Sutherland, was the longtime manager of three prominent research labs, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories , the Systems Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC , and the Computer Science Division of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc...
Robert Taylor
Robert Taylor (computer scientist)
Robert William Taylor , known as Bob Taylor, is an Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies....
Larry Tesler
Larry Tesler
Larry Tesler is a computer scientist working in the field of human-computer interaction. Tesler has worked at Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!...
Chuck Thacker
John Warnock
John Warnock
John Edward Warnock is an American computer scientist best known as the co-founder with Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company...
Mark Weiser
Mark Weiser
Mark D. Weiser was a chief scientist at Xerox PARC in the United States. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988.-Biography:...
Frances Yao
Frances Yao
Frances Foong Yao is professor and head of the department of computer science at the City University of Hong Kong.After receiving a B.S. in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1969, Yao did her Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Michael J. Fischer at the Massachusetts Institute of...
Annie Zaenen
Annie Zaenen
Annie Else Zaenen is a linguistics consulting professor at Stanford University and a principal scientist at the Palo Alta Research Center .-Career:...

Legacy

PARC's developments in information technology have had great long-term impact. Once the merits of interfaces and technology pioneered by PARC became widely known, they evolved into standards for much of the computing industry. Many advances were not equalled or surpassed for two decades, enormous timespans in the fast-paced high-tech world.

While there is some truth that Xerox management failed to see the potential of many of PARC's inventions, it is an over-simplification to generalize. The larger reality is that computing research was a relatively small part of PARC's operation. Its materials scientists

Materials science

Materials science is an interdisciplinary field applying the properties of matter to various areas of science and engineering. This scientific field investigates the relationship between the structure of materials at atomic or molecular scales and their macroscopic properties. It incorporates...

pioneered LCD and optical disc

Optical disc

In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc is a flat, usually circular disc which encodes binary data in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces...

technologies, others invented laser printing, each of which proved great successes when introduced to the business and consumer marketplaces.

While not of the same order, the oft-overlooked work at PARC since the early 1980s includes advances in ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing

, aspect-oriented programming

Aspect-oriented programming

In computing, aspect-oriented programming is a programming paradigm which aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns...

, and IPv6

IPv6

Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...

External links

Oral history interview with Terry Allen Winograd Charles Babbage Institute
Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....

, University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

, Minneapolis
Oral history interview with Paul A. Strassmann Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Oral history interview with William Crowther Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

PARC today

Accomplishments

The Alto

The GUI

Adoption by Apple

Distinguished researchers

People associated with PARC

Legacy

See also

Further reading

External links