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.
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.