XEROX PARC

Palo Alto Research Center (Reference: org., USA, Xerox)

/zee'roks park'/ Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of ground-breaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons (WIMP) style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer and the local-area network; Smalltalk; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honour in their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialised in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else. The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suits has been well described in the reference below. ["Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9)]. [Jargon File] (1995-01-26)