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◈ALB Atlas

Xerox PARC Alive

Xerox PARC
KindCompany
Founded1970
StatusAlive
FoundersXerox
Also known asPalo Alto Research Center

The lab that invented the Alto, Ethernet, laser printing, the GUI, and the modern workstation — everything except a way to sell any of it.

George Pake founded PARC in 1970 to give Xerox a research arm near Stanford. In its first decade it produced: the Alto (1973), Ethernet, laser printing, bitmap graphics, overlapping-window GUIs, WYSIWYG editing, Smalltalk, and the first networked personal computers.

The 1979 demo to Apple's engineers is the famous theft-that-wasn't (Xerox got pre-IPO stock). PARC incorporated as an independent subsidiary in 2002; its alumni seeded Adobe, 3Com, Apple, Microsoft Research, and half of Silicon Valley.