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History
Accomplishments PARC has been the incubator of many elements of modern computing. Most were included in the Alto, which introduced and unified most aspects of now-standard personal computer usage model: the mouse, computer generated color graphics, a graphical user interface featuring windows and icons, the WYSIWYG text editor, InterPress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), Ethernet, and fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment. The laser printer was developed at the same time, as an integral part of the overall environment. Among PARC's distinguished researchers were two Turing Award winners: Butler W. Lampson (1992) and Alan Kay (2003). The ACM Software System Award recognized the Alto system in 1984, Smalltalk in 1987, InterLisp in 1992, and Remote Procedure Call in 1994. Lampson, Kay, Bob Taylor, and Charles P. Thacker received the National Academy of Engineering's prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2004 for their work on the Alto system. 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, initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then commercialized as the Xerox Star 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 and Charles Irby formed Metaphor Computer Systems. They extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office automation model and sold the company to IBM. The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was given Apple stock 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 on a technicality — Xerox had waited too long to file suit and the statute of limitations had expired. However, some dispute the degree to which the Apple interface was derived from Xerox designs*. Indeed, prior to Apple's visits to PARC, its Macintosh project more closely resembled the Valdocs operating system of the Epson QX-10. There is no denying the long-term impact of PARC's systems. It took two decades for much of their technology to be equalled or surpassed. The interfaces and technology that PARC pioneered became standards for much of the computing industry, once their merits were widely known. It is legend that Xerox management consistently failed to see the potential of many of the PARC inventions. While there is some truth to this, it is also an over-simplification. They certainly understood the value of laser printing, and of advances coming from the non-computer-focused part of PARC. Most critics don't realize that computing research was a relatively small part of PARC; there were many researchers working in areas such as materials science at PARC, including pioneers in LCD and optical disc technologies. The work at PARC in the years since the early 1980s is often overlooked, but major work since then includes ubiquitous computing aka pervasive computing, aspect-oriented programming, and IPv6 to name but a few. Notes Further reading | ||||||||||||
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