= PARC
/zee'roks park'/ Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of ground-breaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons (WIMP) style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer and the local-area network; Smalltalk; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honour in their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialised in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else. The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suits has been well described in the reference below.