- PARC (company)
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PARC 
Industry R&D Founded 1970 Headquarters Palo Alto, California, USA Parent Xerox Website parc.com 
PARC entrance.
Xerox PARC old logo.PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated), formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California,[1][2][3] with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems.
Founded in 1970 as a division of Xerox Corporation, PARC has been responsible for such well known and important developments as laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.
Incorporated as an independent but wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox in 2002, PARC now works with other commercial (major corporations, ventures, licensees) and government partners.
Contents
History
In 1969, Chief Scientist at Xerox Jack Goldman approached Dr. George Pake, a physicist specializing in nuclear magnetic resonance and provost of Washington University, about starting a second research center for the company.
Pake selected Palo Alto, California, as the site of what was to become known as PARC. While the 3,000 mile buffer between it and Xerox headquarters in Rochester, New York afforded scientists at the new lab great freedom to undertake their work, the distance also served as an impediment in persuading management of the promise of some of their greatest achievements.
PARC's West Coast location proved to be advantageous in the mid-1970s, when the lab was able to hire many employees of the nearby SRI Augmentation Research Center as that facility's funding from DARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force began to diminish. Being situated on Stanford Research Park land leased from Stanford University [4] allowed Stanford graduate students to be involved in PARC research projects, and PARC scientists to collaborate with academic seminars and projects.
Much of PARC's early success in the computer field was under the leadership of its Computer Science Laboratory manager Bob Taylor, who guided the lab as associate manager from 1970–77 and as manager 1977–83.
PARC today
After three decades as a division of Xerox, PARC was transformed in 2002 into an independent, wholly owned subsidiary company dedicated to developing and maturing advances in science and business concepts with the support of commercial partners and clients.
Xerox remains the company's largest customer (50%), but PARC has numerous other corporate and venture clients in different fields of use than Xerox including: VMware, Fujitsu, Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP), Samsung, NEC, SolFocus, Powerset, and many more.
PARC currently conducts research into "clean technology", user interface design, sensemaking, ubiquitous computing and context-aware systems, large-area electronics, and model-based control and optimization in embedded, intelligent systems.
Accomplishments
Xerox PARC has been the inventor and incubator of many elements of modern computing in the contemporary office work place:
- Laser printers,
- Computer-generated bitmap graphics
- The Graphical user interface, featuring windows and icons, operated with a mouse
- The WYSIWYG text editor
- InterPress, a resolution-independent graphical page-description language and the precursor to PostScript
- Ethernet as a local-area computer network
- Fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment.
The Alto
Xerox AltoMost of these developments were included in the Alto, which added the now familiar SRI-developed mouse[5] unifying into a single model most aspects of now-standard personal computer use. The integration of Ethernet prompted the development of the PARC Universal Packet architecture, much like today's Internet.
The GUI
Xerox has been heavily criticized (particularly by business historians) for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit 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 Department. Although very significant in terms of its influence on future system design, it is deemed a failure because it only sold approximately 25,000 units. A small group from PARC led by David Liddle and Charles Irby formed Metaphor Computer Systems. They extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office-automation model and sold the company to IBM.
Adoption by Apple
The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product.[6] Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge dismissed most of Xerox's complaints as being inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons, [7]
Distinguished researchers
Among PARC's distinguished researchers were three Turing Award winners: Butler W. Lampson (1992), Alan Kay (2003), and Charles P. Thacker (2009). 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, Bob 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.
People associated with PARC
- Daniel G. Bobrow
- David Boggs
- Anita Borg
- John Seely Brown
- Stuart Card
- Robert Carr
- Lynn Conway
- Pavel Curtis
- Steve Deering
- L Peter Deutsch
- William English
- Charles Geschke
- Adele Goldberg
- Bruce Horn
- Dan Ingalls
- Van Jacobson
- Ronald Kaplan
- Alan Kay
- Gregor Kiczales
- Butler Lampson
- Cristina Lopes
- Andrew K. Ludwick
- Edward M. McCreight
- Diana Merry
- Robert Metcalfe
- Jim Mitchell
- Thomas P. Moran
- James H. Morris
- Geoffrey Nunberg
- Severo Ornstein
- George Pake
- Randy Pausch
- Prasad Ram
- George G. Robertson
- Eric Schmidt
- Ronald V. Schmidt
- Scott Shenker
- Charles Simonyi
- Brian Cantwell Smith
- Robert Spinrad
- Bob Sproull
- Gary Starkweather
- Bert Sutherland
- Robert Taylor
- Larry Tesler
- Chuck Thacker
- John Warnock
- Mark Weiser
- Frances Yao
- Annie Zaenen
Legacy
PARC's developments in information technology have had great long-term impact. Once the merits of interfaces and technology pioneered by PARC became widely known, they evolved into standards for much of the computing industry. Many advances were not equalled or surpassed for two decades, enormous timespans in the fast-paced high-tech world.
While there is some truth that Xerox management failed to see the potential of many of PARC's inventions, it is an over-simplification to generalize. The larger reality is that computing research was a relatively small part of PARC's operation. Its materials scientists pioneered LCD and optical disc technologies, others invented laser printing, each of which proved great successes when introduced to the business and consumer marketplaces.[8]
While not of the same order, the oft-overlooked work at PARC since the early 1980s includes advances in ubiquitous computing, aspect-oriented programming, and IPv6.
See also
- Xerox Daybreak (a.k.a. Xerox Windows 6085)
References
- ^ "Contact." PARC. Retrieved on November 11, 2010. "PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA"
- ^ "driving & public transportation directions." PARC. Retrieved on November 11, 2010.
- ^ "map." PARC. Retrieved on November 11, 2010.
- ^ Map of Stanford Research Park on Stanford University Real Estate web site
- ^ Xerox PARC was the first research group to widely adopt the mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park, California,
- ^ Gladwell, Malcolm (2011-05-11). "Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell. Retrieved 2011-10-09.
- ^ Pollack, Andrew (1990-03-24). "Most of Xerox's Suit Against Apple Barred". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE3D91E38F937A15750C0A966958260. Retrieved 2008-12-01.
- ^ "Milestones, PARC, a Xerox company". http://www.parc.com/about/milestones.html.
Further reading
- Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, New York, 1999) ISBN 0-88730-989-5
- Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1988) ISBN 1-58348-266-0
- M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking Penguin, New York, 2001) ISBN 0-670-89976-3
- Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (MIT Press, 2000) ISBN 0-262-68115-3
External links
Coordinates: 37°24′11″N 122°08′56″W / 37.403°N 122.149°W
- Oral history interview with Terry Allen Winograd Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
- Oral history interview with Paul A. Strassmann Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
- Oral history interview with William Crowther Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Categories:- Xerox
- History of human–computer interaction
- Software companies of the United States
- Technology transfer
- Research and development organizations
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