Xerox PARC
I did not find an article about a wonderful Xerox PARC research center in Habrahabr. Let us fill this gap, because PARC gave the world so many wonderful things: laser printing, WYSIWYG, GUI, Ethernet and more!
')
PARC was founded by scientists George Pake and Jack Goldman in 1970 as a research division of the company
Xerox.
The center is located in Palo Alto, California, away from the main Xerox offices located on the east coast. On the one hand, such remoteness contributed to the creation of creative freedom in the center of the atmosphere, but on the other hand, it was difficult to implement its developments.
Under the leadership of Paik, a unique team of talented scientists and engineers gathered. During the 1970s and early 1980s, they presented the world with many inventions that are used today.
1971 - laser printing. In PARC, under the authority of Gary Sterweather , the first valid laser printer model was created. Unfortunately, bureaucratic delays in Xerox delayed its release until 1977, two years after the release of the model from IBM. However, the Xerox 9700 enjoyed tremendous success and brought the company's multimillion profits.
Sterweather switched his research to personal laser printers, but again ran into the short-sightedness of Xerox top management. As a result, HP released the first model of a personal printer in the 1980s. Because of these contradictions, Sterweather went to Apple in 1987, and later in 1997 he moved to Microsoft.
1972 OOP. Smalltalk language. - language Smalltalk created by Alan Kay , Dan Ingalls , Adel Goldberg and others. The concept of object-oriented programming and the concept of "all-objects" were introduced. In 1980, the first public version of the language was released. Smalltalk introduced many new ideas to programming, such as the IDE and MVC pattern, influenced Objective-C, Python, Ruby, and others.
1973 Ethernet - created by Robert Metcalf, pioneer of packet-switched networking technology and founder of 3com. You can read more in the article on Habré " Local networks are 30 years old, will they live to forty? ".
1973 PARC Alto. GUI. PARC Alto can be called one of the first personal computers. Created 3 years before the Apple I and 8 years before the IBM PC Alto had 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 512 KB, a hard disk with a 2.5 MB removable cartridge, knew how to display graphic information on a monochrome monitor, got an Ethernet network card, keyboard and three-button mouse, developed on the basis of the experiments of Douglas Engelbart . Engelbart's colleague Bill English improved the mouse: 2 mechanical wheels used to track the position were replaced with a familiar ball. For the graphical interface, PARC engineers invented such elements as menus, dialog boxes, icons. Windows in Alto could overlap each other (in Windows such an opportunity appeared in 1987). The principle of WYSIWYG and the first online game Alto Trek were also developed.
Nothing like PARC Alto existed on the market at that time. However, Xerox management, fearing high production costs, once again torpedoed PARC innovations: the bid was made on the Xerox 850, a typewriter with memory and display developed by Xerox in Dallas, and Alto did not go into commercial production, remaining small-scale development for universities and research centers. Xerox lost: the 850 brought the company some losses.
1973 SuperPaint Frame Buffer - the first computer system for creating graphics, the "father" of all modern graphic editors. She was able to create animated raster images of 640 x 480 x 8 bits. A graphic tablet was used for work, the concept of a brush was first introduced in the system. SuperPaint was used to create animations on television and in NASA. The creators of SuperPaint, Richard Shoup and Alvi Smith, later left Xerox without getting on with the management. Alvi Smith was one of the founders of the Lucasfilm and Pixar computer division.
InterPress is a page description language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in the late 70s. Like many other developments, PARC was not appreciated by the company. Therefore, Warnock and Geschke left Xerox in 1982 to establish Adobe. Based on their experience, they developed a new language - Postscript.
Also, the staff of PARC had a hand in the creation of VLSI (microcircuits with an extremely large degree of integration), the concept of a laptop, Unicode. The center created the world's first fiber-optic LAN, electronic paper and IPv6 protocol.
Despite the revolutionary ideas of PARC, the clumsy bureaucratic Xerox could not turn them into commercial products. Although the company invested money in a research center, top management was afraid to release innovative products to the market and preferred to deal mainly with copy machines. After Xerox was unable to extract profits from them, PARC employees and development companies moved to more nimble new companies - Microsoft, Apple and Adobe. So ended the "golden age" PARC.
The book "Will and Vision". read buy (described the creation of a laser printer and Alto)
PARC website
PARC Innovation Review
WIMP - How It Was
')
PARC was founded by scientists George Pake and Jack Goldman in 1970 as a research division of the company
Xerox.
The center is located in Palo Alto, California, away from the main Xerox offices located on the east coast. On the one hand, such remoteness contributed to the creation of creative freedom in the center of the atmosphere, but on the other hand, it was difficult to implement its developments.
Under the leadership of Paik, a unique team of talented scientists and engineers gathered. During the 1970s and early 1980s, they presented the world with many inventions that are used today.
1971 - laser printing. In PARC, under the authority of Gary Sterweather , the first valid laser printer model was created. Unfortunately, bureaucratic delays in Xerox delayed its release until 1977, two years after the release of the model from IBM. However, the Xerox 9700 enjoyed tremendous success and brought the company's multimillion profits.
Sterweather switched his research to personal laser printers, but again ran into the short-sightedness of Xerox top management. As a result, HP released the first model of a personal printer in the 1980s. Because of these contradictions, Sterweather went to Apple in 1987, and later in 1997 he moved to Microsoft.
1972 OOP. Smalltalk language. - language Smalltalk created by Alan Kay , Dan Ingalls , Adel Goldberg and others. The concept of object-oriented programming and the concept of "all-objects" were introduced. In 1980, the first public version of the language was released. Smalltalk introduced many new ideas to programming, such as the IDE and MVC pattern, influenced Objective-C, Python, Ruby, and others.
1973 Ethernet - created by Robert Metcalf, pioneer of packet-switched networking technology and founder of 3com. You can read more in the article on Habré " Local networks are 30 years old, will they live to forty? ".
1973 PARC Alto. GUI. PARC Alto can be called one of the first personal computers. Created 3 years before the Apple I and 8 years before the IBM PC Alto had 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 512 KB, a hard disk with a 2.5 MB removable cartridge, knew how to display graphic information on a monochrome monitor, got an Ethernet network card, keyboard and three-button mouse, developed on the basis of the experiments of Douglas Engelbart . Engelbart's colleague Bill English improved the mouse: 2 mechanical wheels used to track the position were replaced with a familiar ball. For the graphical interface, PARC engineers invented such elements as menus, dialog boxes, icons. Windows in Alto could overlap each other (in Windows such an opportunity appeared in 1987). The principle of WYSIWYG and the first online game Alto Trek were also developed.
Nothing like PARC Alto existed on the market at that time. However, Xerox management, fearing high production costs, once again torpedoed PARC innovations: the bid was made on the Xerox 850, a typewriter with memory and display developed by Xerox in Dallas, and Alto did not go into commercial production, remaining small-scale development for universities and research centers. Xerox lost: the 850 brought the company some losses.
1973 SuperPaint Frame Buffer - the first computer system for creating graphics, the "father" of all modern graphic editors. She was able to create animated raster images of 640 x 480 x 8 bits. A graphic tablet was used for work, the concept of a brush was first introduced in the system. SuperPaint was used to create animations on television and in NASA. The creators of SuperPaint, Richard Shoup and Alvi Smith, later left Xerox without getting on with the management. Alvi Smith was one of the founders of the Lucasfilm and Pixar computer division.
InterPress is a page description language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in the late 70s. Like many other developments, PARC was not appreciated by the company. Therefore, Warnock and Geschke left Xerox in 1982 to establish Adobe. Based on their experience, they developed a new language - Postscript.
Also, the staff of PARC had a hand in the creation of VLSI (microcircuits with an extremely large degree of integration), the concept of a laptop, Unicode. The center created the world's first fiber-optic LAN, electronic paper and IPv6 protocol.
Despite the revolutionary ideas of PARC, the clumsy bureaucratic Xerox could not turn them into commercial products. Although the company invested money in a research center, top management was afraid to release innovative products to the market and preferred to deal mainly with copy machines. After Xerox was unable to extract profits from them, PARC employees and development companies moved to more nimble new companies - Microsoft, Apple and Adobe. So ended the "golden age" PARC.
The book "Will and Vision". read buy (described the creation of a laser printer and Alto)
PARC website
PARC Innovation Review
WIMP - How It Was
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/83228/
All Articles