JargonFile/entries/XEROX PARC.txt

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2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
XEROX PARC
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
/zeeroks park/ , n. The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a
decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing
volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice,
windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was
the laser printer and the local-area network; 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 honor in their own company,
so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that
specialized in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else. The stunning
shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suit s has been well
anatomized in 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).