In the following article, by Senior Editor James Ellis, Newsweek explores how this innovation led to personal computing. Forget semiconductors and startups—what defines Silicon Valley as an entity are ideas. Every would-be innovator and aspiring tech mogul dreams of coming up with that one idea that ushers in a digital nirvana, changing the world and maybe making the guy or gal behind it a few billion dollars in the process.
And when you put these people in the same social and geographic space together, their ideas tend to bounce back and forth until one latches onto the individual or company able to turn a thought into an empire.
One of the earliest examples, which has since become a legend in the Valley, is how an upstart Apple seized on the innovations Steve Jobs saw at Xerox PARC to create the personal computer market.
In , business-equipment behemoth Xerox founded the Palo Alto Research Company PARC and staffed it with the smartest, most creative men and women in the tech industry to come up with new ideas Xerox could eventually monetize. Jobs's company stood on the precipice of a public offering guaranteed to make him and any investors wealthy, and the tech guru's impending good fortune enticed the suits at Xerox to make him an offer he couldn't refuse: Let us buy shares in your company, and we'll give you a peek inside the greatest minds in your field.
The rest is history: Apple went on to pioneer and find huge success in the personal computer market with the Lisa and Macintosh, while Xerox continued to focus on putting out large machines geared toward large corporate offices prohibitively expensive for the small business owner. And Ford doesn't care. Imagine they're just sitting on the future of transportation, while the bulk of the company figures out how to squeeze another decade out of gasoline powered cars. Then, one day, they give a tour to Toyota and GM and happily show them their flying prototype because, why not?
Only, instead of a flying car, the device was a personal computer. The company that let the most world-changing invention since aviation get away wasn't IBM, or Intel, or Texas Instruments. Here's a hint: it's the people who probably made your photocopier at work. We think we speak for millions of office drones when we say, "Fuck these guys in the neck". If you get an Apple fanboy and a Windows loyalist in the same room they'll eventually get into a heated debate about who really invented the PC, and who was really responsible for each little innovation that came along to make it the device that most of us would rather lose a testicle than live without.
In reality, both of them stole the idea from the company you probably associate with infuriating paper jams, empty toner cartridges and photocopied dongs at the office Christmas party.
It all started with a machine they slapped together almost 40 years ago, called the Xerox Alto. What the fuck? It was the birth of what we know as the personal computer now: It had a screen, a keyboard, a mouse, and a graphical interface -- the very first time all four of these came together in the same machine. Honestly, if the thing had been capable of rendering full color boobs PC evolution could have just stopped right then. And this happened in freaking Almost a decade before the first Mac would hit store shelves.
Way sexier. Basically everything you're using to read this article, and the devices that most of your lives revolve around, can be credited to a building full of geniuses in Palo Alto, California. It was the Xerox PARC Palo Alto Research Center , which was set up four decades ago to think up ways to make computers actually useful to the average person, rather than being huge, bulky machines that ran on diesel fuel.
Here's a short but fucking startling list of things that PARC invented :. Graphical user interfaces, so you could finally look at something other than letters on your computer screen;. Computer-generated bitmap images, which eventually led to video animation, the precursor to GIFs of skateboarders crushing their nuts on handrails;.
Before this, you literally could not see what you were typing until you printed it;. Object-oriented programming, which meant that you could add features to a program without rewriting the whole thing. It was the birth of a bold new era in masturbation. See, all of this leads up to what might be the granddaddy of Xerox's inventions, the one that made Cracked and other vital services possible:.
If you know something about computer history, you probably heard that the modern Internet came from DARPAnet, a Defense Department project experimenting with the ability to transfer files across computers. They had a similar network at the Xerox offices, which probably transferred a lot more humorous cat pictures, and around there they called it "Inter network routing" or "Internet" for short.
Xerox invented it all. So why on Earth does Xerox not own the entire planet, sitting on the combined fortunes of Microsoft, Apple, IBM and god knows how many other companies, in a world where everyone owns a Xerox desktop, laptop and an xPad?
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