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PARC's founding director, George Pake, was an outstanding physicist in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance. Dr. Pake had been serving as provost of Washington University in 1969 when he was courted by Jack Goldman , Chief Scientist at Xerox. If Jack Goldman was chiefly responsible for Xerox founding, and generously funding, a second research center, then George Pake was chiefly responsible for siting PARC in Palo Alto -- 3,000 miles away from Xerox headquarters. In retrospect, this turned out to be a good idea, for around 1974, PARC was able to raid the nearby lab of Douglas Engelbart for some of his most talented personnel. It also helped that Engelbart's funding from ARPA and NASA was drying up around the same time.
Xerox PARC was the incubator of many elements of modern computing, including many aspects of the Graphical user interfaceA graphical user interface (or GUI pronounced "gooey") is a method of interacting with a computer through a metaphor of direct manipulation of graphical images and widgets in addition to text. GUIs and PUIs The precursor to GUIs was invented by researcher (GUI), the mouseA mouse is a handheld pointing device for computers, involving a small object fitted with one or more buttons and shaped to sit naturally under the hand. The underside of the mouse houses a device that detects the mouse's motion relative to the flat surfa **, the WYSIWYGWYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzy-wig") is an acronym for W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G et, and is used in computing to refer to the technology that makes sure the image seen on the screen corresponds to what is printed out on paper. Today this is expected fo text editor, the laser printerA laser printer is a common type of computer printer that produces good quality printing, and is able to produce graphics. The process is very similar to the type of dry process photocopier first produced by Xerox. Indeed, the first laser printer was crea, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScriptPostScript (PS is a page description language used primarily in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. History The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 when John Warnock was working at Evans and Sutherland, a famous computer graph), and EthernetEthernet is a packet-based computer networking technology for local area networks (LANs). It defines wiring and signaling for the physical layer, and packet formats and protocols for the media access control (MAC)/ data link layer of the OSI model. Ethern.
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, Robert W. 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 criticized for failing to commercialize 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 Division. It is deemed a failure because it only sold approximately 25,000 units. The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which built on the earlier Apple Lisa -- developed after a famous visit by Steve Jobs to PARC. The Lisa was also a flop commercially.
But there is no denying the impact of PARC's systems. It has taken two decades for much of their technology to be 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; and 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, and Aspect-oriented programming to name but two.
On January 4, 2002, PARC was incorporated as an independent company.
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