Xerox PARC is one of the research and technology laboratories of Xerox Corporation, specializing in networks and documents, smart matter, and knowledge ecologies. During the mid-1960s Xerox Corporation began to investigate ways to extend beyond its paper copier business. A few years later a plan was established for a scientific laboratory to develop advanced physics, materials science, and computer science technologies. The region around Palo Alto, California, was earmarked after nearby Stanford University showed a commitment to work with electronics and computer companies. This region is now collectively known as Silicon Valley.
Headed by Robert Taylor, former deputy director of the agency that established ARPAnet (the precursor to the Internet), Xerox organized in 1970 a team of renowned researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to specialize in computer and electronics research with the mandate of "creating the architecture of information." Some of the more important innovations that PARC scientists have developed are the first personal computer, the laser printer, Ethernet local-area network, network architecture, client/server architecture, object-oriented programming, and Internet standards and protocols.
Among the early inventions of PARC, one of the most important was the Xerox Alto. Developed in 1973, it is commonly considered the first personal computer (PC), though it was never released to the consumer market. The Alto contained a number of firsts, including the a WYSIWYG ("what-you-see-is-what-you-get") editor, mouse, graphical user interface (GUI; with windows, icons, pull-down menus, and pointers), and PC bit-mapped display. Xerox management believed it was too expensive to market to private and small-business owners; Steve Jobs, however, after visiting PARC, "borrowed" ideas like the mouse and the GUI for his new company Apple. Today's computers contain the same kinds of components that were developed by the Alto project. By the time its successor, the Xerox Star, was commercially released, other companies had introduced more affordable computers. Xerox soon exited the PC market and up-and-coming PC manufacturers assimilated their innovative features.
Another early invention of PARC was the laser printer. Gary Starkweather, who realized the importance of the laser for improving the traditional copier light source, created the technology at Xerox. Starkweather also believed that a laser-driven copier could function as a printer, transferring an image from a computer screen and posting its precise image on paper. Unfortunately Xerox management did not realize the importance in changing from their tried-and-true copiers. Luckily, one top-level Xerox researcher saw the importance in Starkweather's idea and transferred him to PARC in 1971. By 1972 Starkweather developed a working prototype, but Xerox did not introduce it until 1977. The laser printer soon became a best-selling product, and PARC's leadership in laser research (including laser diodes, multi-beam lasers, and blue lasers) became the key to early and recent Xerox's successes.
Another PARC breakthrough was the Ethernet, the global standard for connecting computers on local-area networks (LAN). Proposed by Robert Metcalfe and jointly developed with Intel and Digital in the mid-1970s, this networking standard increased the speed and reliability of data exchanges over LANs. The Ethernet created a series of sophisticated networking protocols that not only enabled distributed computing but led to a remodeling of internal computer-to-computer communications.
The development of Ethernet, Alto, and distributed computing prototypes of networking protocols led to XNS, Xerox's leading-edge network architecture. This in turn led to the Corporate Internet, a company-wide area-enterprise network that was well ahead of its time in allowing employees to easily exchange formatted documents. In fact, users of Xerox's 1981 STAR system were able to access file servers and printers around the world through simple point-and-click actions. This client/server architecture approach was an important PARC project that transferred information processing from centralized mainframes downloading to dumb terminals, to a more distributed access to intelligent computers.
PARC researcher Alan Kay created a computer programming language in 1972 called SmallTalk (complete with bitmap display, windowing system, and mouse) that was critical in creating the graphical user interface for the Alto. SmallTalk was the first true object-oriented programming language that allowed objects within programs to be individually described, addressed, and linked together with other objects without the necessity of rewriting an entire program. This PARC research revolutionized the software industry.
PARC scientists were also instrumental in designing and implementing the Internet standards and protocols that governed and defined how the Internet would operate. A partnership between PARC and several universities around the world created the "M-Bone" multicast backbone that was first implemented at PARC and has been delivering real-time video over the Internet since 1992. Currently, a PARC research team has been selected by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to lead the development of HTTP-NG (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Next Generation), the new protocol that will improve performance and add features such as security to the transfer of information back and forth between Internet browsers and servers.
Other major PARC innovations are glyphs, information visualization, collaborative tools, flat panel displays, page description languages (PDL), device independent imaging, DocuPrint, integrated Al environments, BITblt, Mesa/Cedar, expert systems, VLSIdesign methodologies, linguistic compression technology, constraint-based scheduling, and SmartService.
PARC performs research, in unison with other Xerox research groups, along three major themes: (1) Networks and Documents, which deals with digitally stored document techniques and services, and helps define the standards and protocols for the Internet; (2) Smart Matter, which uses physical and computational sciences to reduce mechanical complexity in design and manufacturing through the use of computational sensing and controls; and (3) Knowledge Ecologies, which examines how to effectively extract meaningful knowledge, sometimes unwritten knowledge, and informally shared knowledge from organizations and documents.
The PARC ended up functioning more like a federal computer laboratory or an educational research center because many of its successes ended up accessible to all companies. These lost opportunities were often directly the result of missed chances by Xerox management in identifying their own innovative research and development activities. Many of PARC's researchers ended up forming their own Silicon Valley start-up companies using the technologies that Xerox failed to act upon. Unfortunately for Xerox, the PARC was a place where brilliant ideas often ended up outside of its control.
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