PARC's location on the west coast was chosen to give researchers access to SRI, Stanford University, and other resources in the Palo Alto area. The distance provided a nearly 5,000-kilometer buffer between PARC researchers and Xerox corporate management in Rochester, N.Y., but it also made it difficult for the two sides to get on the same page. What are your thoughts on PARC's location?
Both of those statements are true. PARC's location was a very thoroughly thought out decision by George Pake, [Xerox Chief Scientist] Jack Goldman and other Xerox executives. In the first 10 years or so Xerox did an incredible job of buffering us against the recession that hit the Silicon Valley [in the early 1970s]. While Berkeley Computer Corp. and others were cutting staff, we were bringing people in. George definitely wanted it to be near one of a small set of universities, but being near one on the west coast kept PARC researchers out of the day-to-day operations that took place in the corporate offices and labs back east. We had a much longer-term horizon than was allowed for many people in the labs in Rochester, N.Y.
Still, our communication with the corporate offices was not so much limited by the distance. I think it was really limited on both our ends by our different visions for the future and about how to commercialize the things we developed.
PARC is known for developing a wide variety of technologies, including laser printing, the Ethernet, the GUI, ubiquitous computing, blue lasers, MEMS (microelectromechanical systems ), natural language processing, flexible and printed electronics, and the first PC. What do you see as PARC's greatest contribution to society?
PARC's biggest legacy was the Alto. We weren't just creating a personal computer, we were creating personal computing, even as most companies, like IBM, were moving away from this direction because there didn't seem to be a need for a personal computer. But PARC allowed people to come together and work on the systems that had to be developed around the computer, like Ethernet, the GUI, and all the software personal computers need and can enable. More important than the physical platform was allowing the interpersonal collaborations to occur that led to new tools. This is how evolution works—toolmaking is one of the things that allows humanity to evolve.
PARC has been criticized for not capitalizing on many of its inventions. For example, Apple took the mouse mainstream, and it became standard on all PCs when IBM-compatible computers switched from MS-DOS to Windows. What was Xerox's thinking in not commercializing certain technologies?
I was not directly involved in the computer developments, but [as an organization] it was hard because we wanted Xerox to bring to the world all of these advances that we found so exciting. It's like being a child; you get all antsy to get it out there, and we were frustrated that it wasn't getting out there. But also like a child, it was our own naiveté that brought out a $20,000 very capable computer that nobody really could afford to buy many of. It's easy to overlook that these costs are very hard to drive down. You need suppliers and lots of other infrastructure to help scale the price down. The frustration wasn't just Xerox's inability to realize and profit from the gold mine they were sitting on, there were many other aspects.
What's been the biggest misconception about PARC over the years?
That the primary technology impact to come out of PARC was the personal computer. It's really "personal computing" that's our legacy, the ability to support interpersonal computing and collaboration. PARC is also responsible for many other technologies—obviously laser printing as well as high-power and other types of laser diodes that are the backbone of our telecommunications network; amorphous semiconductors, which became the backplanes for LCD displays; and now printed organic electronics which can enable flexible, lightweight displays and other devices. PARC has also spawned many companies like Adobe, 3Com, Spectra Diode, just to name a few. Many of Microsoft's products like Word got their starts here as well.
What do you foresee in PARC's future?
PARC's future is much like its past—providing our customers and the world with radically new ways of interacting with each other and interacting with our physical surroundings. [Former PARC computer scientist] Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I would tweak that to say that you have to invent multiple futures because you don't know which one[s] will prevail.
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8 Comments
Add CommentExcellent historical foundation of today's ubiquitous personal electronic devices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Xerox, however, was considerably less successful (and less interested) in commercializing much of PARC's technology itself..." - understatement of the CENTURY.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf interested in PARC read "Fumbling the Future" - to learn how Xerox totally blew using and capitalizing on the research at PARC.
Just like Morton Thiokol, one senior executive made a horrible decision that had permanent negative affect on the company.
We need a computer that can talk to us and follow our orders and fix itself like the one Captain Kirk was using in star trek
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiscandide - Marketers they were not, but their developers invented the modern computer system - fortunately for us stolen by everyone else. Have you ever seen a command interface? Without PARC, that is the computer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@jtdwyer -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImagine IF Xerox had done a decent job of marketing and developing (business wise) their various inventions - Xerox could have been Apple, Microsoft and part of IBM all rolled into one.
Fortunately the ideas and inventions made it into production, delayed, stolen or however.
candide - It's fortunate for us that Xerox research groups had sufficient independence to invest a great deal of time and capital to develop new technologies without a product or business plan. If a production plan had been required they never would have succeeded. There was no market for Altos, because they could not be economically produced.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt took more than ten years of processor development for costs to fall and for IBM to develop the PC market before the PARC inventions could be produced economically.
It wasn't allways about greed and profit, although Bill Gates would certainly lead you to conclude otherwise. Before Microsoft, the consensus among developers was to make all software freely sharable.
"Before Microsoft, the consensus among developers was to make all software freely sharable."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBesides all this technology that Xerox was not able to bring to market, fortunately, it will not be 40 more years until that is a reality, thanks to Xerox PARC's ideaology of the "collaborative community".
I was involved in an effort to make PARC ideas into commercial products, a project called OIS at Xerox El Segundo. I was given an Alto and plugged into Ethernet, two things that just blew me away.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, the software stunk; it had the look, feel, and quality of something a grad student would throw together to support his thesis. The user tools, word processor, etc., had an interface that only a techno-geek could love or even understand, and they were horribly buggy. Even the underlying compiler, for a language called MESA, was full of bugs. The main reason that Xerox failed to productize their inventions was undoubtedly managerial, but the software certainly didn't help.
PARC seems to take a little more credit for things than is really due it. Biegelsen gives proper credit to Doug Englebart for the mouse, but fails to mention his word processing, document management, and collaboration system NLS. I like to think we made some small contribution at Brown Univ. with the Hypertext and WYSIWYG word processor FRESS systems in the late '60s. One final note: the laser printer was invented at Xerox Webster in New York State a year before PARC was founded.