Abstract
Fumbling the Future: How Xerox In vented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander appeared almost a decade ago and has been republished with a 1999 copyright. In addition, 1999 saw the publi cation of a new book on the same subject, Michael Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. In this column, I review and compare these books, and also describe the role of the management scientists at Palo Alto Re search Center (PARC), a topic neither book mentions. In both books, the authors Smith and Alexander and Hiltzik describe how Xerox set up a new research laboratory in Palo Alto, away from its copier business in Rochester, to do research on the architec ture of information. Both books contain
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