Xerox PARC Celebrates 40th Anniversary

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 20, 2010 @08:13AM from the success-that's-hard-to-copy dept.

CWmike writes "For 40 years, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center has been a place of technological creativity and bold ideas, writes Todd Weiss. The inventions it has spawned, from Ethernet networking to laser printing and the graphical user interface, have led to myriad technologies that allow us to use computers in ways that we take for granted today. When it opened on July 1, 1970, PARC was set up as a division of Xerox Corp. The idea was to invest in PARC as a springboard for developing new technologies and fresh concepts that would lead to future products. 'Conducting research at PARC four decades ago was like magic,' says Dr. Robert S. Bauer, who worked at PARC from 1970 to 2001. 'In an era of political and social upheaval, we came to work every day with a passion to free technology from the grip of the military-industrial complex and bring computation to the people.' Indeed, the company's 'technology first' culture has sometimes brought it under fire. PARC has often been criticized for its past failures to capitalize on some of its greatest inventions, allowing other companies to cash in on its ideas. (Today, PARC has a team working to protect its intellectual property.) Nevertheless, its reputation as a technology innovator is impeccable."

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Its kind of funny that... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-20 08:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

...a company made successful by copying, created so much original technology.
1. Re:Its kind of funny that... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2010-09-20 08:27 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Not as funny as the things they created are only relevant because someone else copied it.
  
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Re:Why PARC's Fault? by Lennie · 2010-09-20 08:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think it is a great example of what would happen if nothing was patented.
The mouse/wimp and ethernet and so on all came from there, had they patented it like crazy, they would probably never had much succes.

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Re:Big Deal by TheRaven64 · 2010-09-20 10:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

Apple did not rip of PARC. Apple paid Xerox a load of shares for a tour of PARC. They commercialised some ideas from PARC and Xerox got money from the shares (a lot of money, in fact). Possibly Xerox could have made more money doing it themselves, but the Alto is a good indication that they didn't really understand how to sell computers.

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