Every time you move a mouse, resize a window, connect to a local network, or print a document, you're using something invented at one lab between 1970 and the early 1980s. That lab is PARC — and its story is one of tech history's strangest: a research center that produced more foundational inventions than almost any institution ever, inside a company that failed to profit from most of them.
Why It Existed
By the late 1960s, Xerox's copier business had a ceiling. Chief Scientist Jack Goldman proposed a research lab physically separated from Xerox's Rochester operations, with one mandate: invent technology unrelated to what Xerox already sold. PARC opened on 1 July 1970, led by physicist George Pake, who assembled a team so dense that nearly half the world's top 100 computer scientists were connected to it by the mid-1970s.
What Came Out of It
The list is almost implausible for one decade:
