Xerox Alto and Parc Labs

Truly, Before its Time...

A venerable copy machine company was noticing the stellar rate of growth in the sector known today as "Information Technology". And the use of this new technology in the office posed a serious risk to that company's dominance as a leader, if people didn't buy paper anymore, they wouldn't buy copy machines. to mitigate this threat the company decided to create a laboratory to investigate the opportunity of making their own information or office technology as a safeguard. Xerox called their lab, Parc. Xerox didn't bother to adopt much of the technology that Parc came up with, 40 years ago predated the computer industry, they were more or less happy to give away all their creations. while the copy machine company didn't profit from their designs, you however, did. the little lab invented; email, Ethernet, object oriented programming, laser pointing, graphical user interface, the first computer to use a mouse, and the ability for a computer to display bitmapped graphics. this is, more or less everything that a computer is today, the source code for modern technocracy, all created by a paper company but never successfully commercialized.

Xerox, had they gone to market with their creations would have been an unbeatable giant in the industry. their first computer, the Alto was created in 1973, 11 years earlier than the Macintosh...

Alto.

Imagine ipads and tablets and the Internet as being eleven years older than they are today. a heap of iphone 6's being in your junk drawer, a relic long forgotten.  One might ask, why the heck didnt they?

They tried, mostly, just not very hard... the Alto was priced at $50,000 for your first machine and $16,000 for subsequent ones (the alto was designed to work in a server-client configuration). they might as well have just said "eleventy zillion dollars". if you adjust the 1973 dollars for inflation, the computers would have been worth way way more than the people operating them, you might not buy a Macbook either if if was more than a German car. Xerox also made a machine for their customers, Businesses, not the public at large. Xerox felt that business would fuel the demand for this sort of machine and people would have no desire to purchase their own gigantic computer. lastly, in one ill fated move Xerox decided to showcase the Alto to a small startup company after years of not selling them. Steven Jobs and his coworkers were impressed by how well the graphical user interface worked...and the rest, is history.

Parc labs was on the precipice of what is now a critical understanding of people’s relationship with information technology; in order to interact with technology, technology needs to be relateable in human terms. “C:/” usually fails to “prompt” the imagination. Usually technology is a long, gradual, linear development over time. Trying to understand who “invented” the computer is limited to by the phrase; “ but just a few years before this happened, someone else had developed something very similar...”. History shows however, that there are a few remarkable explosions of brilliance. and Parc Labs was one of the brightest.