PARC (company): Difference between revisions
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{{Infobox Company |
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| name = PARC |
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| logo = [[Image:PARC-logo-color.png|275px]] |
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| type = |
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| foundation = 1970 |
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| location_city = [[Palo Alto, California]] |
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| location_country = [[USA]] |
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| location = {{Geolinks-US-streetscale|37.403|-122.149}} |
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| industry = [[R&D]] |
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| homepage = [http://www.parc.com/ www.parc.com] |
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}} |
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[[Image:Parcentrance.jpg|thumb|right|PARC entrance.]] |
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[[Image:XeroxPARC.gif|thumb|right|Xerox PARC old logo.]] |
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'''PARC''' (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc.), formerly '''Xerox PARC''', is a [[research and development]] company in [[Palo Alto, California]] that began as a division of [[Xerox Corporation]]. |
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== Overview == |
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PARC was founded in 1970, and incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox in 2002. It is best known for inventing [[laser printing]], [[Ethernet]], the modern [[personal computer]] [[graphical user interface]] (GUI) paradigm, [[ubiquitous computing]], and advancing [[Very-large-scale integration|very-large-scale-integration]] (VLSI). |
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Today PARC collaborates with sponsors and clients to discover novel business concepts and transfer scientific findings into production. Current research areas include [[Health science|biomedical technologies]], "clean technology", [[user interface]] design, [[sensemaking]], [[ubiquitous computing]], large area electronics, and embedded and intelligent systems. |
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==History== |
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PARC's founding director, [[George Pake]], was a [[physicist]], working in the area of [[nuclear magnetic resonance]]. Dr. Pake had been serving as [[provost (education)|provost]] of [[Washington University]] in 1969 when he was approached by [[Jack Goldman]], Chief Scientist at Xerox. The result of their partnership was that Goldman was chiefly responsible for Xerox founding, and generously funding, a second research center, and George Pake was chiefly responsible for choosing PARC's location in Palo Alto — 3,000 miles away from Xerox headquarters. |
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In retrospect, this turned out to be a good idea, for around 1974, PARC was able to hire many employees of the nearby [[Augmentation Research Center]] (founded by [[Douglas Engelbart]]) as Engelbart's funding from [[DARPA]], [[NASA]], and the [[U.S. Air Force]] was drying up. |
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Much of its success in the computer field was due to the inspired leadership of PARC's Computer Science Laboratory by [[Robert Taylor (computer scientist)|Bob Taylor]], as associate manager (1970–77), and then manager (1977–83), |
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On [[January 4]], [[2002]], PARC was incorporated as a subsidiary company of Xerox, called Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated, i.e., PARC. Following the spin-off, PARC remains a wholly owned subsidiary of the Xerox Corporation. As of 2004, Xerox remained the company's largest customer, but PARC had also announced a multi-year relationship with [[Fujitsu]] and an entrance into biomedical sciences in partnership with the [[Scripps Research Institute]] of La Jolla, CA. |
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==Accomplishments== |
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PARC has been the incubator of many elements of modern computing. Most were included in the [[Xerox Alto|Alto]], which introduced and unified most aspects of now-standard personal computer usage model: the [[Computer mouse|mouse]]<ref name="fn_1">Xerox PARC was the first research group to widely adopt the mouse invented by [[Douglas Engelbart]]'s [[Augmentation Research Center]] at the [[Stanford Research Institute]] (now [[SRI International]]) in [[Menlo Park, California]].</ref>, computer generated color graphics, a [[graphical user interface]] featuring windows and icons, the [[WYSIWYG]] text editor, [[InterPress]] (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to [[PostScript]]), [[Ethernet]], and fully formed [[object-oriented programming]] in the [[Smalltalk programming language]] and integrated development environment. The [[laser printer]] was developed at the same time, as an integral part of the overall environment. |
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Among PARC's distinguished researchers were two [[Turing Award]] winners: [[Butler W. Lampson]] (1992) and [[Alan Kay]] (2003). The [[Association for Computing Machinery|ACM]] Software System Award recognized the Alto system in 1984, [[Smalltalk]] in 1987, [[InterLisp]] in 1992, and [[Remote Procedure Call]] in 1994. Lampson, Kay, Bob Taylor, and [[Charles P. Thacker]] received the [[National Academy of Engineering]]'s prestigious [[Charles Stark Draper Prize]] in 2004 for their work on the Alto system. |
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Xerox has been heavily criticized (particularly by business historians) for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations. A favorite example is the GUI, initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then commercialized as the [[Xerox Star]] by the Xerox Systems Development Department. Although very significant in terms of its influence on future system design, it is deemed a failure because it only sold approximately 25,000 units. A small group from PARC led by David Liddle and Charles Irby formed [[Metaphor Computer Systems]]. They extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office automation model and sold the company to IBM. |
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The first successful commercial GUI product was the [[Apple Computer|Apple]] [[Apple Macintosh|Macintosh]], which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the [[Apple v. Microsoft]] lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds{{Fact|date=February 2007}}. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired. However, some dispute the degree to which the Apple interface was derived from Xerox designs. Indeed, prior to Apple's visits to PARC, its Macintosh project more closely resembled the Valdocs operating system of the [[Epson]] [[QX-10]]. |
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There is no denying the long-term impact of PARC's systems. It took two decades for much of their technology to be equalled or surpassed. The interfaces and technology that PARC pioneered became standards for much of the computing industry, once their merits were widely known. |
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It is legend that Xerox management consistently failed to see the potential of many of the PARC inventions. While there is some truth to this, it is also an over-simplification. They certainly understood the value of laser printing, and of advances coming from the non-computer-focused part of PARC. Most critics don't realize that computing research was a relatively small part of PARC; there were many researchers working in areas such as [[materials science]] at PARC, including pioneers in [[Liquid crystal display|LCD]] and [[optical disc]] technologies. |
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The work at PARC in the years since the early 1980s is often overlooked, but major work since then includes [[ubiquitous computing]] aka [[pervasive computing]], [[aspect-oriented programming]], and [[IPv6]] to name but a few. |
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<!-- Timeline: |
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# July 1, 1970: formation |
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# 1971: [[Laser Printer]] |
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# 1972: [[Smalltalk]] |
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# 1973: [[Ethernet]] / [[Alto Computer]] |
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:* Ethernet patent first written. |
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# 1975: Introduction of WIMP interface |
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Engineers show off Xerox’s GUI, with menus and icons. (PARC) (TOCH) |
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# 1981: [[Xerox STAR]] Xerox 8010 STAR Information System |
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# 1990: [[LambdaMOO]] |
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# ???: [[Ubiquitous Computing]] |
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# ???: Data visualization |
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--> |
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== Influential past and present employees == |
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* [[Stuart Card]] |
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* [[Alan Kay]] |
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* [[Butler Lampson]] |
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* [[Robert Metcalfe]] |
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* [[Thomas P. Moran]] |
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* [[George G. Robertson]] |
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* [[Charles Simonyi]] |
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==References== |
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{{reflist}} |
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==Further reading== |
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* Michael A. Hiltzik, ''Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age'' (HarperCollins, New York, 1999) ISBN 0-88730-989-5 |
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* Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander, ''Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer'' (William Morrow, New York, 1988) ISBN 1-58348-266-0 |
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* M. Mitchell Waldrop, ''The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal'' (Viking Penguin, New York, 2001) ISBN 0-670-89976-3 |
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* [[Howard Rheingold]], ''[[Tools for Thought]]'' ([[MIT Press]], 2000) ISBN 0-262-68115-3 |
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==External links== |
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* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=355 Oral history interview with Paul A. Strassmann] Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis |
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* [http://www.parc.com/ PARC] |
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* [http://www.xerox.com/innovation/parc.shtml Xerox PARC innovation] |
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* [http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html Xerox Star Historical Documents] |
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* [http://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_history.html MacKiDo article] |
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[[Category:Xerox|PARC]] |
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[[Category:History of human-computer interaction]] |
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[[Category:Software companies of the United States]] |
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[[Category:Technology transfer]] |
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[[Category:Research and development organizations]] |
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[[ar:بارك]] |
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[[ko:팰러앨토 연구소]] |
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[[he:זירוקס פארק]] |
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[[zh:帕羅奧多研究中心]] |
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Revision as of 19:58, 21 October 2008
U SUCK