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Comment by GnarfGnarf | Hacker News Reader

I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. The general Xerox organization was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at PARC. It's ironic that every new hire was given a copy of "The Billions Nobody Wanted" (by John H. Dessauer), a bio of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography.

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I did some contract work for them in 80s and asked why they were letting Microsoft and Apple blow up the universe..the response (from senior, or should I say Sr. ) management was that they were waiting to see which one won and would then “sue the winner”. Somehow they wound up suing Apple and famously lost on statutory grounds. (For the under-40 crowd: Before Apple ripped off Xerox and Microsoft ripped off Apple for the Graphical User Interface, they both were ripping off CP/M that, in turn, was a ripoff of RSX-11, which followed norms established by IBM, some 30 years earlier! The passage of time has shown those companies couldn’t research their way out of a plastic bag —2022 and we get the same UX with all kinds of smoke and mirrors to explain how cool Taiwan’s new 5nm fabrication is.)

One perspective Alan Kay had was that no company could really capitalize on so many different things that came out of PARC. Xerox picked laser printing and capitalized it to the point of being forced by the government to release patents.

How to Invent the Future (2 parts), Alan Kay talking at Stanford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

I read that book. It opens with statistics on the number of photocopies made each year in the USA.

Interesting now that Xerox seems to be dropping the ball on making decent reliable copiers.

The question has to be asked - was the last time you copied a paper document (as opposed to printing one out - and maybe not even that :) )? Even the fed-ex kinkos (as major user of such machines) are closing down because people don't promote things with paper anymore. PARC has for years been trying hard to get Xerox to the right place with this - there are many things Xerox should do based on PARC work, like hybrid/functional object printing (which actually uses the mechanical service industry type infrastucture they have setup already). And Xerox is moving in the direction of services around servicing (CareAR, etc). Now the former head of PARC (Steve Hoover) is CTO of Xerox, there is a possibility they might actually do something.

What is even funnier is that half of the major companies founded right after that all basically went to PARC and said 'Great Idea were gone do that'.

Sun, Apple, Microsoft and many others were inspired by it.

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