Xerox PARC: The Lab That Invented the Modern PC and Lost It

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On July 1, 1970, Xerox chief scientist Jack Goldman founded the Palo Alto Research Center, placing it 3,000 miles from the copier company's East Coast headquarters. Bob Taylor filled its computer science lab with engineers leaving the nearby Stanford Research Institute as government funding dried up. In under a decade that team produced bitmap graphics, the graphical user interface, the Bravo what you see is what you get editor, Smalltalk and object-oriented programming, Ethernet, and the laser printer, then fused them into one machine: the Xerox Alto.

This episode is the biography of an institution that drew the blueprint for personal computing and watched others sell it. Executives who made fortunes leasing giant copiers to purchasing departments had no way to market a desk-sized computer to individuals. The distance that freed the researchers also left them speaking a language headquarters could not hear, and the talent walked out the door to Apple and beyond.

• The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI. PARC's contribution was weaving it into the Alto's overlapping windows, networking, and printing.
• Xerox's own attempt, the 8010 Star workstation of 1981, was expensive and aimed at office administrators. It sold only about 25,000 units.
• David Liddle and Charles Irby left in 1982 to found Metaphor Computer Systems, which reached nearly $40 million in annual revenue by 1987 before IBM acquired it. Other researchers took the interface work to the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.
• The great fumble story is incomplete: Xerox understood the laser printer immediately and built a multibillion dollar business on it, alongside PARC advances in LCDs and optical discs.
• PARC later pursued ubiquitous computing with the location-aware PARCTAB, became a subsidiary in 2002, and was donated to SRI International in April 2023, returning to the institution it once recruited from.