Comment by AdmiralAsshat
2 months ago
Good book on the subject that I recently finished reading:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA
Does a pretty good job at running through PARC's founding and some of the many reasons why none of its amazing technology took off (Spoilers: it wasn't always Xerox interfering!).
> none of its amazing technology took off
The laser printer sure did. In his address to "startup school" at Stanford (marked private now in Youtube for some reason) Alan Kay pointed out that with the laser printer alone, money spent funding PARC earned something like a 250x return on investment for Xerox. (of course he had opinions about how they could have earned a lot more)
The linked book is Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik, and I can second the recommendation.