Xerox PARC
XEROX PARC
For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into themid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume ofground-breaking hardware and software innovations. The modernmice, windows, and icons (WIMP) style of software interfacewas invented there. So was the laser printer and thelocal-area network; Smalltalk; and PARC's series of Dmachines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were withouthonour in their own company, so much so that it became astandard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialised indeveloping brilliant ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX'stop-level suits has been well described in the referencebelow.
["Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, theFirst Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and RobertC. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN0-688-09511-9)].