Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) was established by Xerox , the photocopying giant , for their scientist to come up with new and innovative ideas for the company to compete with the rising tech ventures and in the paperless new generation.
It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E , Xerox corporation’s chief scientist and he was given complete freedom with 58 best computer scientists of the world to do anything they want.The smartest people in the world working together with complete freedom resulted in revolutionary innovations
Among all the great inventions by Xerox engineers , three were the future of computer industry.
Mouse : The idea of a pointer to the informations on the computer was developed at PARC in the year 1975 a decade before when it was launched commercially by Apple
Ethernet : They were able to connect over a 100 Xerox Alto computers wirelessly which formed the basis of internet that we use today
Graphical User Interface: Computers at that time had a very complex functioning. Xerox Alto was the first computer to use graphics to make it usable for commoners .The GUI further formed the basis of Apple’s Macintosh and Windows
But unfortunately the mangement team of Xerox were not interested in anything but photo copying technology and denied commercial introduction of the Xerox Alto.
But PARC became so famous in Silicon Valley that Steve Jobs visited them in 1979 and within a few hours asked his team of engineers to understand their user interface . The scientists at PARC frustated by the ignorance of Xerox mangement gave them a demo. In just 10 minutes Steve understood that this was the future and in couple of years launched Machintosh , a better but copied version of Xerox computers.
Bill Gates copied from Machintosh and launched Windows which became the primary hit of the company making Gates a billionaire.
Finally Steve Jobs got the credit and Bill Gates got money , but the real inventors of the computers that we use today got nothing.
DuckDesk 