In 1969, the chief scientist at Xerox, Jack Goldman, decided to found a west-coast research center in Palo Alto, right down the road from Engelbart’s SRI. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center or PARC was far enough from headquarters in Rochester, New York, that scientists could feel a little freer to experiment.
Featuring Tom Merritt.
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Episode transcript:
In 1962, Robert Taylor’s future seemed galactic. The Dallas, Texas native was working for NASA on a new project called Apollo that aimed to land a man no the Moon. It had been a long road to this post. Starting at SMU, a tour with the Navy in Korea, back to finish his degree, slowly, at UT-Austin thanks to the GI bill. And eventually getting a Masters in psychology in 1959.
What were you supposed to do with experimental psychology in 1959? He toyed with getting a PhD, the route most of his friends and advisors had said looked obvious, but he wasn’t interested in the course he would have to take. He was integrated in psyhoacoastics. The applied physics of psychology.
He taught math and coached basketball for a year in Howey academy in Florida, but then the twins came it was time for him to find a better paying job. So he bounced around as an engineer designing aircraft, including the MGM-31 Pershing for Martin Marietta.
And in 1962, he submitted a research proposal for a flight control simulation display to NASA and they asked him to join the Office of Advanced Research and Technology.
Among the many people he met in his work there was Doug Engelbart, who was developing a suite of computer interface improvements at the Stanford Research Institute, including what would become the Mouse. Taylor made sure some NASA funds went Engelbart’s way.
In 1965, Bob Taylor took another step up becoming a deputy director and shortly thereafter, director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA. The Advanced Research Project Agency run by the US Department of Defense.
He kept helping out Engelbart and encouraged him to show off his progress at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968. That demo would later be known as the Mother of All Demos. It showed the Mouse, the word processor, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing and collaborative editing, years if not decades before they would become commonplace.
If you’ve listened to our episode about the Mother of All Demos, you know what happened next.
Nothing.
People talked about how impressed they were. And that was it.
At least that was mostly it. The next year, 1969, the chief scientist at Xerox, Jack Goldman, decided to found a west-coast research center in Palo Alto, right down the road from Engelbart’s SRI. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center or PARC was far enough from headquarters in Rochester, New York, that scientists could feel a little freer to experiment.
It opened on July 1, 1970, and began bringing in scientists who felt like maybe they had hit a brick wall elsewhere, to give them funding and freedom to develop new ideas. Among those early hires were many of the folks who helped Engelbart on his Mother of All Demos.
And one was a former ARPA director who had left to teach at the University of Utah, but found he wasn’t fitting in. Robert Taylor came to Palo Alto to head up the Computer Science lab there.
That lab would help develop laser printing, ethernet, Graphical User Interfaces, e-paper and even help popularize Engelbart’s mouse.
Let’s help you Know a Little More about Xerox PARC.
George Pake could not serve during World War II because he had Scoliosis. Instead he attended Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and got his doctorate in Physics at Harvard in 1948. He took his research in nuclear magnetic resonance to Washington University in St. Louis where he taught Physics for four years before being named the head of the Physics department at age 28. By age 38, in 1962 he was Provost.
He could have lived out his career comfortably at Washington and been very happy. After all he had a shape in nuclear resonance imaging named after him, the Pake Doublet.
But Carnegie Tech physics faculty member Jack Goldman was chief scientist at Xerox.
His boss, the chairman of Xerox, Peter McColough, told the New York Society of Security Analysts in 1969 that Xerox was going to develop “the architecture of information” to solve the problems that had been created by the “knowledge explosion.”
As some tell it, McColough turned to his chief scientist after the talk and said, “All right, go start a lab that will find out what I just meant.”
Goldman says it was his idea, brought on by Xerox buying Scientific Data Systems. If you were going to have digital computer business you needed a computer research lab.
And who better than his friend George Pake. Goldman talked Pake into heading out to Palo Alto, California and starting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
It was a good choice. Pake started an all-star team. Granted he drew from the folks departing the Stanford Research Institute as its funding began to decline. There was also a pipeline of fresh young minds coming right out of Stanford Itself.
The whole thing is a demonstration of good delegation. Mycologh trusted Goldman who trusted Pake who entrusted our old friend Robert Taylor to make all this happen.
Except nobody knew what it was they were supposed to make happen. McColough and Goldman said the mission of the lab was to develop the “architecture of information.”
That meant whatever anyone working in the lab wanted it to mean at the time. 1971 hire James G. Mitchell who came over from Berkeley Computer Corp called it “Tom Sawyering.” “Someone would decide that a certain thing was really important to do. They would start working on it, give some structure to it, and then try to convince other people to come whitewash this fence with them.”
An example of that spirit came when the first 20 people decided they needed to have a computer. DEC’s PDP-10 was the mainframe of choice. But Xerox had just bought SDS which made the Sigma 7 and didn’t love the idea of the press finding out that Xerox’s own research lab used the competition’s hardware. But building an OS for Sigma 7 was estimated to take about three years.
So the PARC team built their own machine from scratch. The MAXC (Multiple Access Xerox Computer) was so well made and cared for that it held the record for availability on the early ARPANet.
It was built using 1,103 dynamic RAM from a small company called Intel. A lot of those chips were duds so the PARC team eventually built a tester so they could find out whether they were a dud faster. Intel eventually used that tester on its production lines.
That spirit led to researchers building a lot of things.
Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs and Chuck Thacker took some work from Hawaii’s Alohanet and created the ethernet cabling system to make it easier to plug data feeds into systems.
Gary Starkweather invented laser printers and color management.
Bob Sproull made an early head-mounted display.
Charles Simonyi developed text editors that later led to Microsoft office.
Richard Shoup invented 8-bit Frame Buffer and developed Superpaint with David DiFrancesco who would go on to found Pixar.
Alan Kay developed object oriented programming and Graphical User Interfaces.
Charles Geschke developed page description languages and went on to cofound Adobe.
Lynn Conway developed VLSI design.
And of course Bill English came over from SRI with the computer mouse he developed with Engelbart.
Adele Goldberg co-designed the smalltalk programming language with L Peter Deutsch and once in 1979 refused to demonstrate it to Steve Jobs until her superiors made her.
This is only a small part of the huge team that made up PARC in the 1970s, and Bob Taylor was their ringleader. Famous for conducting meetings in bean bag chairs. His meetings were called “Dealer” as in beat the dealer, where open debate was carried out led by team members over ideas. The purpose of dealer was to figure out how to make things work and make progress.
All of that talent and all of that willingness to do-it-yourself made a lot of the bedrock of our modern computers happen, but the pinnacle of Xerox PARC is also sometimes seen as its greatest missed opportunity.
Butler Lampson wasn’t one of the folks from SRI, but he was one of the folks inspired by Doug Engelbart’s NLS demo in 1968. Lampson combined some ideas from the NLS with the University of Illinois’ PLATO system an conceived of a desktop computer with a graphical interface.
In September 1972, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker went to Alan Kay, of object oriented programming fame, and asked him if he would like them to build him a computer. He said he’d like that a lot and gave them part of his budget.
Apparently, A Xerox exec had told Thacker it took 18 months to develop major hardware systems. Thacker bet him he could do it in three months. He couldn’t. It took four months and 9 days.
That computer was the prototype of the Xerox Alto. A desktop machine with a keyboard mouse and graphical user interface.
With a few refinements thanks to the Xerox El Segundo team down in LA, they were Able to build 30 of them Everybody wanted one. Supposedly researchers would help assemble them in the Alto lab to speed up the chance they’d get one.
There’s lots more to that story including how Xerox was reluctant to get into the personal computer business. Even when Xerox decided to get behind personal computers with the Xerox 820, it didn’t use the graphical user interface or the mouse. The closest thing to it was the Xerox Star which Xerox marketed as an integrated “personal office system” sold as a package of 2-3 machines with file server and print server. The package cost around $50,000 or more. A Vic-20 at the time was $300.
In 1983, Bob Taylor left Xerox PARC, in part because he was frustrated that Xerox wasn’t using what his team developed. He quit and was hired by Xerox’s mainframe competitor DEC, where he worked until he retired in 1996.
PARC continued churning out good work with a prototype handheld meant for ubiquitous computing called PARCTAB. PARC employees were instrumental in developing IPV6, to expand the internet’s addressing system.
In 2002, Xerox spun PARC out into a wholly-owned subsidiary dedicated to advances in science and business. And in April 2023, Xerox donated the lab and its assets to.. SRI International. Yep the name for the Stanford Research Institute. The one where Doug Engelbart developed the mother of all demos, and where so many ideas and people had come from when Xerox PARC began.
On January 18, 2024, SRI turned PARC into its Future Concepts Division.
A bit of a homecoming.
And now I hope you Know a little more about Xerox PARC.