PARC and the semi-myth of missed opportunities

In an otherwise good article in the New York Times about Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and its efforts to build a new search engine around its natural language processing technologies, this irritation:

In Silicon Valley and beyond, PARC has often been called the lab of missed opportunities. It has been credited with many breakthroughs, including the graphical user interface and the Ethernet networking technology, that have revolutionized the computer industry, but that were commercialized by others.

Well, its often been called things like that, but they're not entirely true. Sure, there are some famous examples of technologies that started, or were refined, at PARC that Xerox itself didn't commercialize-- the computer mouse, the GUI-- but as Michael Hiltzik points out in his great book Dealers of Lightning, this isn't the whole story. As I wrote in my review of Dealers of Lightning:

PARC in the 1970s was an incubator of many of the technologies that now define personal computing, as well as a vision of a world in which computers would be cheap, portable, widely available, and easy to use. This seemed audacious in the days of expensive mainframes and programmer priesthoods, but has now become conventional wisdom. Dealers of Lightning chronicles those inventions and their uneven commercial development. Historians have long wondered why Xerox developed the key technologies of the modern computer age, only to let others capitalize on them.

Hiltzik points out that the company hit two commercial grand slams with laser printing, which brought in enough money to pay for PARC's more arcane research, and Ethernet, which became the de facto standard platform for networking. But faced with a global economic crisis, expiration of its basic patents in xerography and the entry of IBM and Japanese companies into its market, the company in the 1970s was too busy fighting for its survival to invest the billions necessary to develop personal computers.

Further, PARC's Computer Science Laboratory director Bob Taylor and his staff, which included such titans of computing as Alan Kay, Bob Metcalfe, and Alvy Ray Smith, weren't very interested in product development. While it didn't prevent Xerox from "fumbling the future," as the book by Robert Alexander put it, Taylor demonstrated a remarkable knack for attracting good people and encouraging high-concept research. At the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s, he had supported early work in computer graphics, networking, and the ARPANET; his group at PARC fundamentally changed the direction of computer science and personal computing. For all Taylor's flaws-- Hiltzig paints a portrait of an arrogant, paternalistic, bullying fighter who alienated some as effectively as he inspired others-- he emerges as the modern equivalent of a Medici patron, stubborn but brilliantly tasteful, and possibly the most important figure in the history of modern computing.

So the claims that PARC blew it on commercialization miss a couple important points: laser printing and Ethernet were big wins; personal computing was by no means a sure thing in the 1970, especially for a company facing huge challenges in its core business; and perhaps more important, PARC wasn't really in the commercialization business.

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