by sandij on 10/3/15, 7:04 AM with 83 comments
by Animats on 10/3/15, 8:54 AM
I got to tour PARC in 1975, years before Steve Jobs did, when I took a summer course in computer architecture taught by William McKeeman. He was the architect of a generation of Burroughs CPUs, and knew everybody in CPU design. So I met Alan Kay before anybody had heard of him. He had a vision, but it wasn't quite what most people think it was. He said the big advantage they had was that they were funded heavily enough to build the single-user computers of the future now. The Alto was over $20K (some said $50K) per unit, which was insanely expensive for a single user computer. It took another decade to get the cost down. Kay's group saw as their job to get the software ready for when the hardware came down in price.
Kay was thinking that the killer app for personal computers was going to be simulations. He later had a demo graphical hospital simulation, which was a discrite-event simulator where patients came in with a complaint ("I am a victim of Bowlerthumb"), and went through Admitting, Examination, Surgery, etc. out to Discharge. Smalltalk is based on Simula, an Algol-derived simulation language, and was originally intended for discrite-event simulation. Document preparation and mail were a sideline.[1]
Kay was operating in an empty world. Almost nobody else was throwing money at what software should look like a decade or two hence, for a class of machines that didn't exist yet. That was a huge advantage. Anything good that was done there advanced the state of the art.
Kay's group was only a small part of PARC. There were other people in the large building working on copier technology and the physics behind xerography. (Unfortunately for Xerox, they didn't invent organic photoconductors, which made xerography machines much smaller and cheaper. IBM did.) Kay's group had considerable engineering resources to draw upon, machine shops and electronics shops and chemistry labs that could make things. They were able to have their own CRT tubes made for the Alto. It's a lot easier to invent when you have that kind of substantial engineering backup. That's why they were able to build a laser printer - they were in an engineering facility that could build both a CRT and a copier. Kay's group just did the software and some of the electronics.
That's hard to reproduce - all that engineering backup. It's only available within a big business that makes real stuff. Today, Samsung and Fujitsu have labs like that, but few US companies, at least in the electronics/computer sector, do. There are a few military operations with such capabilities - China Lake Naval Weapons Center is one; they can design, build, and flight-test something in-house.
So that's why it's hard to reproduce PARC - you need an empty field of research, and heavy engineering backup.
[1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf
by jacobolus on 10/3/15, 7:48 AM
> Exploring odd things isn’t likely to help SAP attract more cloud customers in the short term, says Bill Hostmann, an analyst at researcher Gartner. “What SAP really needs is more execution,” he says. “A lot of people took inspiration from PARC. Did Xerox directly benefit from that? Not really.”
Bill Hostmann has no clue. Xerox got the laser printer out of PARC, which ended up as a multibillion dollar business for them.
by mathgenius on 10/3/15, 7:45 AM
I worked for a while in one of these companies. It was really nice having Alan Kay around, and some of the other geniuses he was working with at the time.
But, there was also massive amounts of money at stake, and far too much heavy shit going down on a daily basis for any of the more weird guys (like me) to get very far. Although, i did make a ton of money for that company (me and one of the other weirdos), when it came time for the rest of the developers to join in it was like "what the fk is this ?" haha. good times.
by DonHopkins on 10/3/15, 9:30 AM
I went out to dinner at SIGGRAPH in the early 90's with some people from Xerox PARC and some people from Interval Research. When one of the Interval people quipped "We're the Xerox PARC of the 90's", one of the Xerox PARC people took issue with that and corrected them: "Actually, we consider ourselves to be the Xerox PARC of the 90's."
by tluyben2 on 10/3/15, 8:49 AM
And that at SAP of all places. I worked with SAP software and consultants and probably as many here who worked with SAP as well will probably agree; that is a far shout from this invent lab...
by pjmlp on 10/3/15, 8:33 AM
Every time I dig into their archives I come out marvelled with how programming might have felt in those Workstations. Memory safe programming languages for the whole stack (+ Assembly of course), automatic memory management, OS wide REPL, visual debuggers, code correction, modular systems...
Specially since Smalltalk and Oberon (Native and BlueBottle) allowed me to have a glimpse of it.
by rumcajz on 10/3/15, 8:45 AM
by teddyh on 10/3/15, 2:27 PM
by hyperion2010 on 10/3/15, 8:20 AM
by DonHopkins on 10/3/15, 9:39 AM
Department of Simulation Research
and:
Department of Research Simulation
by dang on 10/3/15, 6:09 PM
by praptak on 10/3/15, 8:40 AM
by david927 on 10/3/15, 8:53 AM
by manibatra on 10/3/15, 3:33 PM
by linkydinkandyou on 10/3/15, 1:45 PM
What did he do to recreate Xerox PARC's "magic" while at these places?