Xerox Gives Legendary PARC Lab To SRI International (barrons.com) 32
In a strange twist to the long history of the Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox has announced the donation of the lab's Silicon Valley headquarters and related assets to SRI International, another well-established tech research center. From a report: Opened in 1970, PARC was a pioneering developer of technologies like the graphic user interface, laser printing and Ethernet networking. PARC has recently been doing work in areas like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, clean tech and 3-D printing.
PARC is a fascinating subject... (Score:5, Interesting)
Xerox managed to define so much about how modern technology works, yet was not a commercial vendor of much of it.
I can only assume they at least reaped some patent revenue.
It's interesting that Ethernet originated as a way to share a printer
Re:PARC is a fascinating subject... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Xerox managed to define so much about how modern technology works, yet was not a commercial vendor of much of it."
Lions led by donkeys. The engineers could see the potential but the management couldn't see beyond photocopiers.
Re:PARC is a fascinating subject... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EMxqQ9SXon8J:https://www.computerworld.com/article/2588783/the-xerox-tragedy.html&client=ubuntu-sn&hl=en&gl=nl&strip=1&vwsrc=0
Re:PARC is a fascinating subject... (Score:5, Informative)
Xerox management crippled itself from participating in the information races altogether by taking much of its cash and investing it in "safer" business lines such as insurance."
The eventual fate of all tech giants. Eventually some MBAs come by, opt for safe and boring, and the company joins an intensely competitive market of boring products and services because so many lesser companies thought the same.
See also: IBM becoming an overpriced Tata. HP. Radio Shack.
I watched this happen... (Score:3)
I worked for Xerox AI Systems from 1986-88. We sold D-machines running Interlisp-D (and ultimately Common Lisp). Granted, we didn't sell enough of them, but it wasn't completely our fault, or the fault of AI Winter.
Small example - there were two standard configurations for our machines, with 40 and 80 MB disk drives (1986, remember). Our customers wanted more storage, and we demonstrated that the hardware would work with a newish 190 MB drive.
To sell a machine like that, we would have had to get that dri
Re:PARC is a fascinating subject... (Score:5, Informative)
"Xerox managed to define so much about how modern technology works, yet was not a commercial vendor of much of it."
Lions led by donkeys. The engineers could see the potential but the management couldn't see beyond photocopiers.
Except that they actually did commercialize much of the research that went on there [wikipedia.org]:
While there is some truth that Xerox management failed to see the potential of many of PARC's inventions, this was mostly a problem with its computing research, a relatively small part of PARC's operations. A number of GUI engineers left to join Apple Computer. Technologies pioneered by its materials scientists such as liquid-crystal display (LCD), optical disc innovations, and laser printing were actively and successfully introduced by Xerox to the business and consumer markets.
Keep in mind that lots of companies were playing with GUI technology at the time, and most of them failed to capitalize on it. Xerox wasn't alone in this. Xerox DID market the Alto heavily, and sold 25K units. But the reason why they weren't more successful wasn't because they didn't care about the product, or didn't have enough vision; Xerox couldn't make it cheap enough for average consumers. They were a biz-oriented company whose bread and butter was big customers with big Cap-Ex budgets. The kind of hardware that early Apples and DOS boxes ran on affordably was considered greasy kid stuff and not business-caliber at the time. Steve Jobs didn't exactly "steal" what they saw at Xerox PARC, either. Jobs argued to Xerox leadership that if they shared the tech, Apple could make it affordable for personal users, and as compensation, and Xerox got the right to purchase Apple stock at a very cheap pre-IPO price, which they did. (So that puts paid to the whole "Apple swooped in and stole the GUI". Xerox management was onboard from the very beginning [livingcomputers.org]).
Perhaps the biggest mistake Xerox made wasn't further developing the Alto, but fumbling the Apple investment:
Whatever happened to Xerox’s $1.05 million dollar investment in Apple in 1979? Had Xerox held onto this stake of the company, approximately 5-8% of the total outstanding equity in Apple at that time, their investment could be worth tens of billions of dollars today. Famously however, Xerox did not even retain their stake until Apple’s 1980 IPO. Instead, they almost immediately turned around and sold their shares for approximately $1.2 million, netting a return on their investment of around $200,000. Apple and their competitors, inspired by PARC’s inventions, would go on to generate trillions of dollars of revenue over the coming decades selling desktop personal computers with bitmapped displays and mouse-driven GUIs just like the Xerox Alto.
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They did get royalties from at least some of their inventions, including GUI's, but it wasn't enough to keep the lab going, at least not at the same pace.
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It's fascinating how much tech came out of there: BitBLT, Ethernet, laser printers, windowed operating systems, SuperPaint, early precursors of DOOM...
SRI & PARC invented modern computing and then. (Score:2)
And who is currently researching future computing and demoing their brilliant ideas ?
Windows, IMHO, has regressed with its oversimplified UI - what the fuck is an isn't clickable now ?!
Linux UIs are similarly dumbed down.
What happened to Sun's Project Looking Glass ? Where is the future of Human-Computer interfaces ?
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What happened ?
And who is currently researching future computing and demoing their brilliant ideas ?
Linux UIs are similarly dumbed down.
Look at the history of Gnome's Spatial browser and wonder no more.
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And Ubuntu now call their file manager "Files" FFS.
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SRI is still in the game. Though it's been a while i'm sure providing the first real digital assistant (Siri) counts as pushing the boundaries of modern computing.
Re:SRI & PARC invented modern computing and th (Score:4, Informative)
Looking glass pretty much was fully implemented by compiz if you selected enough options. Some of it manifested in OSX and Windows and Linux GUIs, though some of it was made "tamer" when the general reaction was that some of the things may have been really slick looking, but in practice a bit annoying to actually use. Now compositing (a key step toward Looking Glass) is universal, but the application is more subtle.
Frankly, 2D wise the fundamentals were nailed. We've evolved specifics and augmented it, but by and large we got it right the first time. Carving up and maybe overlapping/maybe tiling, largely living on a 2D plane so long as we are living with a 2D display.
Some things may be interesting in a VR/AR context to explore, but the 2D paradigm as it stands maps pretty well to how people comfortably can interact with an inherently 2d medium.
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That is like saying because HTML5 works, there is no need for innovation in Web UIs.
In reality, Looking Glass, compiz, etc are not actually usable. No-one has taken the technical ideas and possibilities they provide and transformed them into a fully-functional, every-day-usable Human-Computer interface that is actually more pleasant to use and makes people more productive than the current
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I'm not saying that compiz/looking glass were 'job done' and now we have awesome interfaces as a result, I'm saying that they were *mostly* dead-ends, finding new possibilities without utility. It's not that they haven't invested enough to map those fancy concepts to usable productivity, it's that the concepts were fundamentally incompatible with a productive goal.
The subset that was useful (what we call compositing desktop) has made it's way into the mainstream window management, but it's more subtle. Mos
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And the lack of progress is not limited to windows management. There are many more areas of the interface that could benefit from innovation - file managers, settings management, docu
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Linux UIs are similarly dumbed down.
Xfce4 says "Yo, hold my beer."
Alan Kay on what happened after Xerox (Score:2)
https://www.quora.com/Are-Smal... [quora.com]
From Alan Kay, on the question "Are Smalltalk and Pharo out-dated?":
====
Sure. What's disappointing is that Smalltalk is still quite comparable to most programming languages in use today (and not always negatively).
This means that the computing establishment has done a terrible job in coming up with something qualitatively better over more than 40 years.
Added: October 27, 2020.
In a conscious analogy to Lisp, Smalltalk is made from just a few ideas with as much of the language
Ideas for transcending Smalltalk (Score:2)
Alan Kay has talked about improving Smalltalk and also suggested to "burn the disk packs" now and then to start fresh. Like he said, Dan Ingalls would rewrite the Smalltalk class library every few years. Here are some ideas off the top of my head for transcending Smalltalk (as a system and culture) to something better based largely on embracing other innovations that happened elsewhere. I acknowledge that some flavors of Smalltalk as well as other languages inspired by Smalltalk explore some of these alread
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A few more ideas (inspired in part by playing with Cuis Smalltalk):
* Favoring scrolling over clicking. Modern interfaces assume a scroll wheel which makes scrolling relatively easier than clicking a lot. Smalltalk UIs should consider this more in their design. But right now, Smalltalk UIs require a lot of clicking all the time to use. I used to prefer the click-ish interface of a Smalltalk code browser because it -- with ENVY in VisualWorks -- could show the history of each method and because navigating lon
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Some thoughts to amplify on a previous point about a tool-oriented paradigm for interacting with other systems (as it otherwise references linked discussion and ideas).
A key part of the Smalltalk paradigm is that you are working with one sea of objects which contains your development tools as well as whatever else you are working on. This certainly made sense early on in Smalltalk's development history with limited computational resources and a need to rapidly innovate development tools themselves along wit
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Poking around the Pharo project (which I had not looked at lately) I see TelePharo which sounds like it supports one VM+Image inspecting another:
https://github.com/pharo-ide/T... [github.com]
"Complete toolset for remote development of Pharo images."
Not having tried it, it sounds from the description not quite as lightweight and fluid an interaction as I had in mind? (In contrast with previous PataPata versions in Python/Jython circa 2007 that had multiple worlds in the same VM.) But a huge step in the direction of being
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It's ChatGPT. Not WIMP.
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No one. Remember Xerox PARC was the output of basically a monopoly (in xerography). Xerox had way too much money making xerographic products and supplies and all that, so they spent a bunch of it on pure research like PARC. Same with Kodak, and same with AT&T (Bell Labs). They all spent a lot of money on pure research purely because they had a lot of money.
But the stuff the invented were hamstrung - Xerox and Kodak were making so much money in their traditional fields no one wanted to upset the apple ca
PARC's campus (Score:4, Interesting)
PARC's campus is a beautiful spot in the hills overlooking the Valley. I guess Xerox will get a big tax writeoff from this.
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PARC's campus is a beautiful spot in the hills overlooking the Valley. I guess Xerox will get a big tax writeoff from this.
Probably, but I suspect that the bigger motivation is cutting the costs of running the place. I don't think the timing is a coincidence when you see the whole tech industry closing offices and laying off staff. SRI is a non-profit, so there's the tax angle, the cutting costs angle, and the "do something good for the public" angle. This is probably an elegant way of killing several birds with one stone.
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That's also correct. The first thing to be jettisoned in hard times is research. Next after is development. I believe Xerox had already previously partly disassociated themselves from PARC, but I don't recall the details.
Xerox Fumbled the Future (Score:2)
by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL27421797W/Fumbling_the_Future?edition=key%3A/books/OL7726306M
LSD (Score:3)
Between SRI, PARC, and Apple, there was so much LSD floating around that the future was inevitable.
SRI's remote viewing work is the most wild of all of it. Many scientists attempted to debunk the work. Totally fascinating that they couldn't, even if some day a materialist explanation is discovered.