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PARC gave the world Graphical User Interfaces, object oriented programming, ethernet, laser printers, precursors to PostScript, and a few other major breakthroughs.

It wasn't necessarily a "secret lab", but its distance from XEROX management on the east coast made it effectively an under the radar operation (to their detriment, of course)

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Most of these only really took off once PARC shared them with other people and companies.

Yeah not really. If you look at Sketchpad and the Mother Of All Demos you see the foundations and inventions of modern user interfaces, and C++ style objects were invented first in Simula.

So PARC was mostly just the industrialization of already known ideas and computer interactions.

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