PARC (company)

The research center Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( Xerox PARC ) was founded in 1970 at the suggestion of Xerox chief scientist Jack Goldman in Palo Alto, California.

Xerox lost at the time the patent protection for xerography ( photocopying ), and afraid of losing market share to Japanese manufacturers. To counteract this, PARC should develop new technologies for Xerox, so that the company can continue to maintain its dominant position in the field of office technology. During the 1970s there several groundbreaking technologies such as Ethernet network technology and the concept of the graphical user interface ( GUI) were developed with mouse operation that have become standards in information technology. Xerox, however, was up to the laser printer even cause none of them successful. Instead, as the Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe founded 3Com successfully his own company, and Steve Jobs introduced the case of a visit to the PARC snapped GUI concept from Apple to success.

History

At the time of founding George Pake was appointed Executive Director of PARC. Is spoken in the context of computer science through PARC, then usually is the Computer Science Laboratory meant, but which only formed a part of PARC. This laboratory was originally officially under the direction of Jerome I. Elkind, but was secretly led by Robert W. Taylor, who has previously been involved already in the DARPA Internet project.

At PARC many achievements of modern computer technology go back: Here is the first laser printer was developed VLSI enables the light of new design methods, invented Ethernet, designed its own series of Lisp machines developed with Super Paint the first computerized graphical image editing, programmed with Spacewar one of the first computer games, the Smalltalk programming language designed as a role model for many modern object-oriented programming languages, the concept of laptops developed ( Alan Kay's Dynabook ), the first graphical user interface developed and first used in the Xerox Alto computer, the WYSIWYG model ( What you see is what you get ) set up as a basic principle for the GUI and implemented and developed the forerunner of PostScript.

With the exception of the laser printer, which was successfully marketed by Xerox in the form of the laser copier, Xerox has not managed to bring these inventions to market successfully. The Xerox management was so fixated on Photocopier that it did not recognize the potential of the developed developments. The Xerox Star was attempted unsuccessfully to bring a graphical word processor on the market.

The success of other companies remained reserved for an Apple and Microsoft brought the operating systems with graphical user interface on the market, on the other hand a large number of graduates from PARC itself, which own companies founded to commercialize their inventions. The most prominent examples are likely to be Robert Metcalfe, 3Com founded to commercialize Ethernet can, and John Warnock, who left PARC to found Adobe and thus his invention Inter Press henceforth to market under the name PostScript.

In fact, competitors were admitted even into the development departments. These included, among others, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that there could watch the Xerox Alto and inserting the obtained there knowledge for its own products. Years later complained Jobs that Microsoft had the concept of GUI stolen from Apple, what Bill Gates said, "No, Steve, I think it's more like we both have this rich neighbor called Xerox, and you broke in to steal the TV set, found I'd been there first, and said:, No fair, I wanted to steal the TV set ' " ( " No, Steve, I think it was more that we both had a rich neighbor named Xerox and. you broke to steal the TV, but had to realize that I was there before you, and you said, 'That's not fair, I wanted to steal the TV ' ").

PARC is also an incubator for startups like SolFocus ( concentrator ) or cooperates with Powerset, a search engine, the relationships in the natural language understood nowadays.

Well-known former employees

Mark Weiser, who coined the term ubiquitous computing was a senior scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Other well-known researcher at Xerox PARC were Lynn Conway ( VLSI), Adele Goldberg ( Smalltalk), Neil J. Gunther ( PARCbench ), Daniel P. Huttenlocher ( JBIG2 ), Butler Lampson ( Alto, laser printer, Ethernet, Bravo, Mesa ), Calvin Quate, Eric Schmidt, Charles Simonyi ( Bravo) and Charles P. Thacker ( Alto, Ethernet, laser printers). In the framework of student programs attended, inter alia, Andreas von Bechtolsheim, John Haugeland, Dana Scott and Niklaus Wirth Xerox PARC.