Xerox Parc

From: nerdware_at_ctgonline.org <(nerdware_at_ctgonline.org)>
Date: Thu Nov 7 20:07:54 2002

On 6 Nov 2002, at 0:06, Eric Smith wrote:

> Jobs cut a deal with them where they were allowed to invest some money
> in Apple in exchange for showing Apple what they were doing and allowing
> Apple to use some of the concepts. Also, Apple was a Smalltalk licensee.
> AFAICT, Xerox didn't have any grounds to "sue Jobs ass off". Though
> many years later, they tried to do it, and the Judge threw the case out.
>

Also, IIRC, the Mac team was working with only a visual knowledge
of the Alto's GUI.... Jef Raskin (I think) developed ways to render
the hidden parts of windows that even blew away the PARC people,
since they'd been trying to figure it out for years. Raskin simply
didn't know that it couldn't be done, so he just did it.

And yes, in exchange for Apple's deal with Xerox, Apple was
allowed to tour PARC, at which point the lightbulb came on over
Jobs' head and he realized that this was the future of personal
computing.

PARC was really the birthplace of most of what we take for granted
in personal computing today. There was a lot of early theories and
experimentation, but the Alto system really made it all come
together. Bob Metcalfe's team invented ethernet, and left to form
3com. John Warnock's and Chuck Geschke's team developed
Postscript, and they left to form Adobe. The mouse was actually
invented by Doug Englebart years earlier at SRI, but adopted and
developed further by PARC. WYSIWYG word processing was
developed there as well, and the developer was hired away by
Microsoft to develop Word (oddly enough, he had to dumb it down
to work on the command-line-only MS-DOS....)

PARC also developed such things as object-oriented programming,
browseable and resizeable windows, and the laser printer, which
was really the only thing they profited from out of all those
inventions. Xerox was basically a company run by copier guys, and
while they started PARC and told the members to invent really cool
stuff, they didn't have a clue what to do with it when it was done.
So, the guys who invented it got frustrated and left to form their
own companies. The Alto II, the commercial version of the in-house
Alto network, was way too expensive to be commercially viable.

The first computer "worm" was also invented at PARC, simply as
an experiment by two of PARC's scientists to see what it could do,
whether that's a good thing or not.

Also keep in mind that the majority of the Alto/Star system was
developed by the end of 1973.....and also, they had developed a
color laser copier during that time as well. When I was in high
school, a older guy in my town found out that I was into electronics
and computers, so he invited me over to give me a bunch of books
and parts that he no longer needed. He also told me that his son
worked for Xerox, and pulled out an envelope containing several
color copies to show me what he'd been working on. At the time I
thought it was cool, but it wasn't until recently that I realized just
how amazing that actually was.... and that was back in 1977 or so.

All in all, PARC is a classic example of what happens when a
group of brilliant scientists has to answer to a larger group of suits
and bean counters.



Paul Braun
Cygnus Productions
nerdware_at_laidbak.com
Received on Thu Nov 07 2002 - 20:07:54 GMT