I never get tired of reading the amazing achievements from Xerox PARC, even if it's something I already know. The book mentioned in the post is super-interesting and goes in lots of details and the dynamics between the different teams and people behind the legendary research division, but as Alan Kay (if I'm correct) itself mentioned is quite disorganized in regards to the sequence of events. Nevertheless you don't get bored a single bit. Highly recommended.
Once you've read all the facts, you can go beyond them and plunge yourself into that world, not knowing how it's going to turn out! Like we didn't at the time:
I had the cooperation of almost everyone who's still alive. The Jobs visit isn't in there "live" since I wasn't there. The truth is, most of us didn't even hear about it until months later.
As for Ethernet, the lightning incident really happened pretty much as I described. Ron Crane's widow loved it and said she hadn't thought so much about him since he passed. You can see him in one of the earlier Ethernet videos (he passed in 2003, IIRC).
I second this! The first time I heard about the book was somewhere here on Hacker News and I gave it a chance and it was really good (specially because I too am excited about reading everything about what was done in the Xerox PARC).
A close family member worked there and was a part of all the magic. I love picking his brain and getting the inside story about things that happened there. Very fascinating to hear his take on why it all worked so well.
He influenced me to be into computers as a kid and eventually go into tech.
> Xerox failed to turn most of the technologies that it developed at PARC into successful commercial products
PARC didn't try -- and it did make a boatload of licensing fees.
PARC from the start followed a policy of licensing intellectual property instead of trying to build it out because that set the expectations of researchers: your ideas will get out, but you'll only get glory and a paycheck and the chance to be a part of a fantastic team. That was essential to the culture and team dynamics.
I was on a PARC team that went through the commercialization process when PARC just started licensing IP en masse (e.g., to help large IP holders in their patent battles). PARC researchers are very smart and can envision the future as well as anyone, and if it's possible they can hold something back and then capitalize on it for themselves, they will do so, which completely screws and politicizes the team dynamic of open discussion and development.
If you think about the pace of new findings in new territories, slowing down to capture and carry value will be a serious drag, and PARC wouldn't be what it was. I think PARC was right to only monetize patentable ideas (in a parallel stream of lawyers), ignoring opportunities that stem from speed or execution because that's where business uncertainty lies.
Indeed, I suspect that in the rapidly-evolved AI space, the companies that can gather the best teams to do the best work in this semi-open fashion will end up with the most (and most valuable) intellectual property. (And if their lawyers are better than PARC's at licensing by recognizing new forms of residual opportunities in AI, it will be beyond profitable.) The captured groups at openai/microsoft, Google, Apple, et al will get tangled in the culture, forces, and technologies driving their patrons.
How much of PARC's magic was their own trailblazing, and how much was it low hanging fruit they were positioned to pluck? I think of all the illustrious physicist of the first half of the 20th century discovering one thing after another, while today's batch have seemingly little to offer in comparison. And that is because the fruit of the current paradigm have been plucked and we need a breakthrough to reveal new ground, and breakthroughs become more spaced out as we explain more and more.
I think another part of it is the difference in research funding philosophy at Xerox PARC in the 1970s compared to the funding philosophy of most companies and government agencies in the past 20-30 years. Xerox PARC researchers had the rare opportunity to pursue their research interests and not have to worry much about funding, not only for their salaries, but also for the equipment that they needed. In the early years of Xerox PARC researchers didn’t have to constantly justify their work to company executives. It’s amazing what researchers can do with a vision, cash, and little external pressure.
Today such a research environment exists only in our dreams, short of winning a MacArthur Fellowship. Most researchers today work in environments where their direction is heavily influenced by the people funding them. In order for researchers to pursue their own research vision and be paid for it, they must persuade a company or a funding agency that the pursuit of this vision will benefit the funders. Researchers also must justify their research activities and constantly produce deliverables such as patents, publications, and prototypes in order for their performance to be assessed by their funders.
While this more directed form of research has also definitely led to many innovations, the trouble is that only the research that fits the visions of those funding the work gets funded and thus proceeds. However, what about research ideas that don’t meet the interests of companies or government funding agencies? This is one of the reasons why we need to promote curiosity-driven research; society could be missing out on future revolutions in science and technology if our imaginations are limited to what we can imagine today instead of letting exploration take its course.
> Today such a research environment exists only in our dreams, short of winning a MacArthur Fellowship. Most researchers today work in environments where their direction is heavily influenced by the people funding them. In order for researchers to pursue their own research vision and be paid for it, they must persuade a company or a funding agency that the pursuit of this vision will benefit the funders.
The Thiel fellowship program which is similar produced many billionaires from somewhat new technology, maybe not quite fundamental research. However some of them achieved it through ponzi schemes with world changing amounts of carbon burned for cryptomining waste heat.
Sure. A lot of mathematics is out there; e.g., Shinichi Mochizuki's work on the abc conjecture is so far out other mathematicians can't evaluate it.
Think of fields or problems only a handful of people are working on. Usually because it is viewed as fruitless. Then somebody cracks it and sometimes a use is found for it. The rest is labeled "useless research".
Money. What Xerox PARC was allowed to do was to develop technology that was not yet cost-effective.
I got a tour of PARC in 1975, when I took Bill McKeenan's summer computer architecture course at UC Santa Cruz. McKeenan had designed several Burroughs machines. He knew everybody in computer architecture, and we had really good field trips. Visited an an Intel wafer fab. (2 inch wafers! 1K bit memory! Soon, 4K!) Visited Amdahl, met Gene Amdahl, saw their enormous prototype mainframe, which was to be shrunk for production by making custom ICs for each board. Visited PARC, met Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, and saw some of the first Alto machines. They were making tall CRTs in house and it wasn't going well yet, but they had some machines going. The first Ethernet was described as "an ALOHAnet with a captive ether." Kay described Smalltalk as treating everything as an active object, acting like a little computer, and working by message passing. (I was kind of appalled at that, because I thought he meant true threaded programming with real message passing. I was already doing that on UNIVAC mainframes, which had user-space threads, called "activities". My job at the time was getting the OS for a multiprocessor mainframe installation to stop crashing. So I was thinking concurrency hell and huge overheads as you sent 1 to a number to add 1 to it for each arithmetic operation. But no, that's not how OOP really works, even in Smalltalk. That's just a way to talk about it, which I did not get at the time.)
PARC was also an R&D center for Xerox copiers, so they had considerable mechanical and electronic fabrication capability in house. That was a huge advantage when they needed to build something.
We were told that Xerox had funded them heavily to push the technology regardless of cost, with the assumption that hardware technology would catch up. It was a good bet for the industry, but the payoff was further in the future than Xerox could really afford.
Xerox lost their moat when their patents on xerography expired, and their margins dropped.
There was a period of time where Parc hosted a display of David Huffman's paper folding[1]. It was great to see in person and a reminder of discussions I had with him about it during office hours at UCSC prior to his passing.
