Xerox PARC Alive
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.