The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the
early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice,
windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So
was the laser printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series
of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the
1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in
their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to
describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant
ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level
{suit}s has been well anatomized in Fumbling The Future: How XEROX
Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K.
Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN
0-688-09511-9).
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {PARC}{PostScript}]