Xerox Parc

Xerox PARC in the 1970s was unusual in that a major corporation, concerned very much with its bottom line, funded a group of researchers to design the future. The research organization brought in Ph.D.s from some of the top universities, many of whom were funded by the federal government's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the organization that laid out what today is known as the Internet.

Xerox brought these researchers together here far away from the company's Rochester, N.Y., headquarters. This was intentional, said Charles Geschke, co-chairman and president of Adobe Systems Inc., and a researcher at PARC from 1972 to 1982.

"When George Pake [who initially headed PARC] started the lab, he realized that if he simply put a building next to the research lab in Webster [N.Y.], it would very likely [be] sort of sucked into the kind of research that Xerox had been doing historically," said Geschke. "[The PARC environment was] let's just go out and figure what the next great things to do are, and figure out, based on that, how they can relate to business opportunities for Xerox."

The most visible result of all that brainpower in the 1970s was the Xerox Alto, a computer that looked a lot like today's PC. It had a mouse, a WYSIWYG screen, bit-mapped graphics and an Ethernet port that allowed it to be connected to other Altos and to a laser printer.

When John Seely Brown, chief scientist and a corporate vice president of Xerox and current director of PARC, first saw the Alto, he said he was blown away. "I was always impressed with the forward-thinkingness of the whole place. So I jumped at the chance to move westward and come. It was basically virgin territory, and with virgin territories, you have exceptional freedom to kind of invent the future," he said.

While Xerox was successful in commercializing the laser printer and the mouse, it did not have the same success with the Alto. Although it actually built more than 100,000 Star computers, the commercial follow-up to the Alto, it was unable to take advantage of it. A big problem was the difference in culture between the researchers in PARC and the copier people at headquarters, said Brown. "In the 1970s, there was an us vs. them culture. There was us, the geniuses inside PARC, and them, the tonerheads back in Rochester. Both sides of the fence looked at the other side of the fence with deep, deep suspicion," he said.

For Gary Starkweather, architect at Microsoft Corp. but then the developer of the laser printer at PARC, this difference became clear at a 1971 prototype laser printer demonstration staged for Xerox executives. Raymond Hay, an executive vice president, saw the machine plugged into an outlet marked R01, but read it as ROI, or return on investment, said Starkweather.

The turning point for most researchers was a huge technology demonstration they prepared for Xerox management in 1977, said Starkweather. It included color printing, black-and-white printing, networking and the Alto. "It was a general thud," he said. "Very disappointing."

There was a practical reason why Xerox did not take advantage of PARC at the time, said Stuart Card, a Xerox research fellow and currently manager of PARC's User Interface Research Group and part of the team that commercialized the mouse. "Xerox was challenged by the Japanese in the printer business, and so it defended its core business. It was the right decision at the time. The development of the laser printer more than paid for PARC," he said.

PARC in the 1970s was like a star that burned too brightly before going supernova, said Charles Simonyi, who invented WYSIWYG graphics at PARC and is now chief architect at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash. "Look at the capacity of the people there. It was so bright we had to wear shades. But it had to explode," he said.

Even if Xerox did not fully capitalize on its early investments in PARC, its contribution to the computer industry is immeasurable. Some of the researchers from the early days returned to academia as professors. Some became entrepreneurs, like Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet who went on to found 3Com Corp., or Geschke and John Warnock, who founded Adobe. Others, like Simonyi and Starkweather, contributed to the rise of companies like Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft.

Then there are those like Brown and Card who stayed with PARC, an organization that today is researching such bleeding-edge products as blue lasers; multibeam lasers; micro-electro-mechanical systems, which can rebuild and reprogram themselves in response to obstacles in their paths; and the Hyperbolic Tree software, which can map up to 7,000 nodes of a Web site or organizational chart on a single screen. But despite its legendary past, PARC today has a more well-defined purpose, said Ross Bringans, manager of its Electronic Materials Laboratory. Half of its funds now come from business divisions. "So we have to have projects for the business divisions. But the corporate half is a recognition that there are projects about things that could mean business in the future."