Xerox PARC

Palo Alto Research Center

Before fondation

Xerox Parc is the most famous research group of Xerox Corporation. Jack Goldenman, Xerox's Chief Scientist, presented, in May 1969, to Xerox his idea to create an “Advanced Scientific & Systems Laboratory” to improve new hig-technology hardware, especially in solid-state physics, end and software. Peter McCullough, Xerox's CEO, approved and gave the go-ahead to Goldenman. He recruited some managers; the most important was Robert "Bob" Taylor, author of "The computer as Communication Device". In 1969 he was working in the "Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA)". An other really important manager was George Pake, a physicist , and, later, he became first PARC director. He convinced Goldenman to choose Palo Alto as headquarter of PARC, near Stanford University. One last key member was Alan Kay, graduate in Mathematics and Molecular Biology and mastered in University of Utah College of Engineering. His aim was to make computer more easy to use even for a child.

First year: 1970

Finally on first July of 1970 Xerox PARC was founded in Silicon valley, 3.000 miles away from Xerox offices. The goal was improve new hig-techlogy hardware and software. Pake decided to locate PARC in Palo ALto because in california lots of new informatics companies were born and so it was the right place to start PARC. Tylor needed researchers, therefore he hired the engineers of the failing Berkeley Computer Company, the most important were Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and Peter Deutsch. After employed engineers from Doug Englebart’s lab at SRI’s Augmentation Research Center like Bill English, a hardware engineer.

MAXC

Parc's team wanted a DEC PDP-10, which was the best microcomputer for research, but Xerox didn't buy one because they own SDS that produced inferior computers. So PARC after, had put aside the parts, built a PDP-10 clone; they called it MAXC. It was very useful invention and it penhanced team works. An the begin of 1971 Gary Starkweather, a Xerox's researcer in Rochester, joined PARC. He was the father of laser print, in fact in 1978 PARC produced Xerox 9700 an high-speed laser printer.

1972: Smalltalk

In the summer of 1972 Kay and his team invented Smalltalk, the first object-oriented programming language. Thank to that write a new program become easy and it will affect all future programming languages. If you want to learn more about Smalltalk visit this link¹. From 1972 lots of new brilliant inventions were made. PARC was one of those companies that were able to predict future and did it in present.

1973: Xerox Alto

It was the first "personal computer". A keyboard , a mouse and a monitor were really similar to nowadays and together they seems a modern PC, but some reviewer underlines that we can't really define Alto as the first personal computer because it cost 16.000 $. So it wasn't affordable for families and normal working people. By the way it wasn't a commercial product, in fact only few thousand were made. It had the first WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor and bitmapped display an the first graphical user interface (GUI). It had also removable storage and networking.If you want to read the original Alto's manual click on this link².

PARC in the same year invented Ethernet for connect in a network workstations, printers and servers.

SuperPaint was a graphics program for create computer images. Alvy Ray Smith record the first video image. SuperPaint lead the way for computer animations

1977: Xerox 9700

Gary Starkweather's idea became true. Thanks to laser technology Xerox 9700 was able to print with high-speed and precision.

1981: Xerox Star

It was a direct evolution from Xerox. We want to focus on GUI, it was awesome, really breath-taking. Look at the images, it's striking think that it was 1981! I think, probably you will agree, that this interface, elegant and refined, is still ahead from today's GUI. The idea was to reproduce a desktop on computer, so with icons. This concept was taken and improved by Steve Jobs on Macintosh 128k. You can a interesting video from youtube about start's GUI.

1988: PARCTAB

Parc developed the idea that a new interaction between computer and humans. They created PARCTAB. It was actually a personal digital assistant (PDA). In other words a palm-sized mobile created to work in office. Whit a special pen we can write on PARCTAB and take notes. It was a ubiquitous computing experiment. PARC was able to predict the future.