Xerox PARC

Xerox PARC was the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (most usually referred to by the acronymmed short form). During its peak period of productivity in the 1970s, building on earlier thinking and work by people such as J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland and Douglas Engelbart, it created essentially the modern computing environment. Among their most consequential and famous creations were:

• the ground-breaking Xerox Alto personal workstation, from which essentially all modern personal computers, including especially their graphical user interfaces, are descended;

• the Ethernet local area network, which through its descendant, DIX Ethernet, was similarly influential on the now-ubiquitous WiFi networking technology;

• the PARC Universal Packet (PUP) internetworking protocol suite; it had a significant influence on the later TCP/IP of the Internet;

• the unification of the above into the network-centric information-handling system, with servers and workstations (the Alto).

Hints of those existed before, but PARC's unified implementation of them all (and in a way that made them cheap enough to deploy them widely) was a huge jump forward.

Although 'personal computers' had a thin but long (if now poorly remembered) history at that point (including the LINC, and ARC's 'workstation' - which did not mean then what it does now), the Alto showed what could be done when you added a bit-mapped display to which the CPU had direct access, and deployed a group of them in a network/server environment; having so much computing power available, on an individual basis, that the user could 'light their cigar with computes' radically changed everything. (Of course, the invention of the microprocessor turbo-charged that.)

Other notable creations of PARC in that period included:

• the laser printer
• inclusion of graphics in computer-produced documents, eventually leading to PostScript
• structured programming and object-oriented programming languages
• the idea for the laptop (in the form of Alan Kay's Dynabook)
• structured VLSI design, including CAD tools for it
• semiconductor lasers, used in (among many other places) optical disks
• the touch tablet

The Maxc computers (clones of the PDP-10, which ran TENEX), were also produced there. PARC also wrote and experimented with the first worms ever produced.

Further reading

• Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, HarperBusiness, New York, 1999
• Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer, William Morrow, New York, 1988

External links

• Xerox PARC Interim File System (IFS) archive
  • Xerox PARC file system archive - curated overview
  • A Backup of Historical Proportions - making the Xerox PARC file system archive accessible
• Xerox PARC's Engineers on How They Invented The Future - excellent IEEE article (with a few irritating minor errors: "information-processing techniques office" should be Information Processing Techniques Office - its formal name; "the 1,103 dynamic memory chips used in the MAXC design" - that's the Intel 1103)
• 50 Years Later, We‘re Still Living In The Xerox Alto‘s World - another IEEE article, which also covers the creation of PARC
• Xerox Donates Legendary PARC Research Center