Xerox PARC
More info
- Founded
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, California
- Type
- Research laboratory
Invented the personal computer as we know it — and became the textbook case of a company that failed to understand what its own research was worth.
Xerox opened the laboratory in Palo Alto in 1970 and recruited widely. Over a decade it produced: the Alto in 1973 with a graphical interface and mouse, Ethernet, the laser printer, Smalltalk, WYSIWYG editing and early versions of what became PostScript. The Alto was one computer per person at a time when that was an absurd proposition.
Xerox commercialised almost none of it. Steve Jobs was given a demonstration of the Alto in 1979 in exchange for letting Xerox buy Apple shares, and those ideas became the Lisa and later the Macintosh. The laser printer did become a substantial business for Xerox — the company made money on the one thing close to its core business.