catflap.org Online Dictionary Query

  XEROX PARC
       
          /zee'roks park'/ Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research
          Center.
       
          For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the
          mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
          ground-breaking hardware and software innovations.  The modern
          mice, windows, and icons ({WIMP) style of software interface
          was invented there.  So was the laser printer and the
          local-area network; Smalltalk; 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
          honour in their own company, so much so that it became a
          standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialised in
          developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
       
          The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's
          top-level suits has been well described in the reference
          below.
       
          ["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)].
       
          [{Jargon File]
       
          (1995-01-26)
       
       

  XEROX PARC /zee'roks park'/ n. 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
     suits 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).