Xerox
PARC 1970
In
1970 the Xerox Corporation, having dominated the photocopier
market, created a research and development division
- the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Their remit
was to develop the “architecture of information”. The
centre achieved an enormous number of “firsts” in computing.
The first Graphical User Interface (GUI), the first
commercial mouse, bit-mapped displays, the Ethernet,
client/server architecture, object- oriented programming,
laser printing and developed and contributed to many
of the Internet protocols.
Alan
Kay was a researcher at PARC, who dreamed up the idea
of a device that looked like a book, but when touched
allowed different information to appear on the screen.
While developing the world’s first WYSIWYG word processor,
the team at PARC came up with the desktop computer metaphor
that we still use today. Data would be held in files,
which in turn would be held in directories (like filing
cabinets). These ideas were implemented in the Xerox
Alto, the world’s first workstation.
|
