Xerox PARC (1970-2001)

A Xerox PARC (1970-2001) was a research and development organization that ...

• Context:
  • It can be a predecessor to PARC (Company).
  • It can be associated to the invention of Laser Printing, Ethernet, Personal Computer, Graphical User Interface, and a Desktop Metaphor.
• Example(s):
  • Xerox PARC, 1975.
  • Xerox PARC, 1979 (when Apple engineers, executives, and Steve Jobs toured it).
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Google Research.
  • Microsoft Research.
• See: R&D, Xerox Corporation, Research and Development.

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References

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) Retrieved:2017-11-29.
  • PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated), formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California, 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 in large part responsible for such developments as laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.

    Xerox formed Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary in 2002.

2017a

• Alan Kay. (2017). “What made Xerox PARC special?."
  • QUOTE: There was a vision: “The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone in the world pervasively networked worldwide”.
  • … Quite a lot of the inventions Parc is most known for were done in the first 5 years by a rather small pool of researchers (Butler Lampson estimates about 25 people, and that seems about right). ...
  • A few principles:
    • Visions not goals
    • Fund people not projects — the scientists find the problems not the funders. So, for many reasons, you have to have the best researchers.
    • Problem Finding — not just Problem Solving
    • Milestones not deadlines
    • It’s “baseball” not “golf” — batting .350 is very good in a high aspiration high risk area. Not getting a hit is not failure but the overhead for getting hits. (As in baseball, an “error” is failing to pull off something that is technically feasible.)
    • It’s about shaping “computer stuff” to human ends per the vision. Much of the time this required the researchers to design and build pretty much everything, including much of the hardware — including a variety of mainframes — and virtually all of the software needed (including OSs and programming languages, etc.). Many of the ARPA researchers were quite fluent in both HW and SW (though usually better at one than the other). This made for a pretty homogeneous computing culture and great synergy in most projects.
    • The above goes against the commonsense idea that “computer people should not try to make their own tools (because of the infinite Turing Tarpit that results)”. The ARPA idea was a second order notion: “if you can make your own tools, HW and SW, then you must!”. The idea was that if you are going to take on big important and new problems then you just have to develop the chops to pull off all needed tools, partly because of what “new” really means, and partly because trying to do workarounds of vendor stuff that is in the wrong paradigm will kill the research thinking.
    • An important part of the research results are researchers. This extends the “baseball” idea to human development. The grad schools, especially, generally admitted people who “seemed interesting” and judgements weren’t made until a few years down the road. Many of the researchers who ultimately solved most of the many problems of personal computing and networking were created by the ARPA community.

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