Xerox PARC
About
PARC — originally the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, founded in 1970 — is the research laboratory where a substantial proportion of modern personal computing was invented in a single decade. It became an independent subsidiary of Xerox in 2002 and was acquired by SRI International in 2023.
Its founding director of the Computer Science Laboratory, Bob Taylor, had previously funded Engelbart's work at ARPA, and PARC absorbed many of Engelbart's researchers after funding for the Augmentation Research Center was withdrawn.
What Was Built There
- The Alto (1973). The first computer designed around a bitmapped display, a mouse, and a graphical user interface — a machine for one person, with a screen oriented like a page.
- The graphical user interface. Overlapping windows, icons, menus, the desktop metaphor, and WYSIWYG editing, developed in Smalltalk and in the Bravo and Gypsy editors. Larry Tesler and Tim Mott's work on Gypsy produced modeless editing and the cut, copy and paste convention.
- Ethernet (1973), by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs.
- The laser printer, invented by Gary Starkweather in 1969 and developed at PARC — the one PARC invention Xerox commercialised extremely successfully, and which by some accounts paid for everything else many times over.
- Smalltalk and object-oriented programming, by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and others; and Kay's Dynabook concept (1972), a portable networked computer for children that described the tablet three decades early.
- Ubiquitous computing. Mark Weiser's programme, from the late 1980s, arguing that computing should recede into the environment across three scales — tabs, pads and boards — and that "the most profound technologies are those that disappear." With John Seely Brown he wrote the founding statement of calm technology.
- Computer-supported cooperative work and workplace ethnography. Lucy Suchman's group brought anthropologists into a computing laboratory and produced Plans and Situated Actions (1987), the book that redirected HCI toward situated practice.
"Fumbling the Future"
PARC is as famous for what Xerox failed to do with the work as for the work itself. The standing account — the title comes from Smith and Alexander's 1988 book — is that a copier company on the East Coast could not recognise or absorb what its West Coast laboratory had built. Apple's 1979 visits, and the subsequent Lisa and Macintosh, are the usual illustration.
The story is true in outline and misleading in detail: Xerox did commercialise the laser printer and Ethernet, the Star workstation shipped in 1981 and was a commercial failure for reasons including price rather than obscurity, and the transfer to Apple was negotiated rather than stolen. What the case does demonstrate is that invention and commercialisation are separate capabilities, and that an organisation optimised for one is generally not optimised for the other.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Almost every interface convention in daily use was decided at PARC by a small number of people in a short period, for stated reasons, and could have been decided otherwise — see Designing Interactions, which interviews many of them. PARC is also where two of this site's central commitments originate: calm technology, and the practice of putting anthropologists in the room where technology is designed.
