Xerox PARC Research Articles

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things by John Tinnell (review)

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things by John Tinnell (review)

The Work and Vision of Ubiquitous Computing at Xerox PARC

The Work and Vision of Ubiquitous Computing at Xerox PARC

50 & 25 Years Ago

Keynote Speech COMPCON 73: Computing Networks: A Powerful National Force; Ruth M. Davis (p. 14) “Computer networks are essential for all those real time geographically dispersed control activities vital to our individual and national well-being. … Computer networks are the only practical means available for the sharing of expensive information resources, computing resources, and information handling equipment.” (p. 15) “Minicomputers are becoming personal computing resources and minicomputers linked to computer networks provide each of us our own individual information center. … Centralized management, in a real-time sense, of geographically dispersed organizations is impossible without computer networks.” (p. 16) “The importance of information, in our post-industrial society today, is not equally recognized. Therefore, the importance of computer networks as conveyers of information, is also inadequately recognized.” [Editor’s note: Interesting enough that 50 years ago, the need for computer networks that transmit all kinds of data was argued about. The centralized thinking about computers predominated at that time. A story by Allen Kay about the Xerox Parc Alto personal computer (1973), which was not utilized at all by Xerox, illustrates that. A year later, he met a high-level Xerox executive and, to his surprise, realized that Xerox Parc was unable to illustrate to Xerox management the usefulness of a device that fit on a desk and did not need an air-conditioned computing center.]

Interview of Lynn Conway

A major feature in computing history is the evolving ability to “write on silicon” and thereby create novel computational structures in increasingly fast, compact and power-efficient hardware. In 1978, Xerox PARC researcher and MIT professor Lynn Conway, together with Caltech's Carver Mead, developed a simple and powerful method of designing and fabricating very large-scale integration (VLSI) integrated circuits. Their method, often referred to as “Mead-Conway,” began a revolution in IC design that continues to this day.

What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

In the summer of 1985, Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry turned off U.S. 101 in San Rafael, Calif., looking for one of the San Francisco BayArea's many nondescript office parks. In the passenger seat was fellow editor Paul Wallich, navigating with scribbled directions, occasionally distracted by the scent of eucalyptus. The two were tracking down former employees of Xerox Parc in an effort to write an unauthorized profile of its heyday.

Role of Management Control Systems During Early Years of PARC

A management control systems perspective is applied to the history behind Xerox PARC’s founding and innovative development of technological products. The inability of Xerox to commercialize their many innovations at PARC is traced back to the inception of the ROI financial control metric at DuPont. While the story of PARC in the 1970’s has been well-studied from a strategic-management perspective, we believe an accounting management control perspective, framed within management theories, sheds new light and gives richer context to the decision-making processes at Xerox PARC during the late 1960’s through the 1970’s.

The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs

This article is a summary of a three-hour discussion at Stanford University in September 2019 among the authors. It has been written with combined experiences at and with organizations such as Zilog, Altera, Xilinx, Achronix, Intel, IBM, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, University of Wisconsin, the Technion, Fairchild, Bell Labs, Bigstream, Google, DIGITAL (DEC), SUN, Nokia, SRI, Hitachi, Silicom, Maxeler Technologies, VMware, Xerox PARC, Cisco, and many others. These organizations are not responsible for the content, but may have inspired the authors in some ways, to arrive at the colorful ride through FPGA space described above.

When you cut, copy, or paste today, thank Larry Tesler: Remembering the computer scientist who revolutionized the user interface - [Spectral Lines

Larry Tesler, who died this past February at age 74, is the most famous computer scientist most people have never heard of—and one of the nicest guys I've worked with in my years as a tech journalist. first met him when writing about the amazing things happening at Xerox Parc, when he told me that his groundbreaking work in user-interface design started with his determination to prove that the computer mouse was a bad idea. ¶ I really didn't believe in it, he said. I thought cursor keys were much better. We literally took people off the streets who had never seen a computer. In 3 or 4 minutes they were happily editing away using cursor keys. At that point was going to show them the mouse and prove that they could select text faster than with the cursor keys. Then was going to show that they didn't like it. ¶ It backfired. would have them spend an hour working with the cursor keys. Then would teach them about the mouse. They would say, ‘That's interesting, but don't think need it.’ Then they would play with it a bit, and after 2 minutes they never touched the cursor keys again. ¶ A researcher to the core, Tesler accepted the results of the experiment—but then set out to make the mouse, then a three-button device accompanied by a five-button keypad, better. He simplified the user interface—bringing us the click-and-drag movement to select text and graphics, along with cut, copy, and paste—and paved the way for the one-button mouse that so many of us use today.

Negative Emissions Technologies: The Tradeoffs of Air-Capture Economics

Matthew Eisaman is an assistant professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at Stony Brook University. From 2008 to 2011, Eisaman was an applied physicist at Xerox PARC. He received an AB in physics from Princeton in 2000 and a PhD in physics from Harvard in 2006, and he was an NRC postdoc at NIST from 2006 to 2008. He holds 17 patents and has coauthored 29 papers with over 3,700 citations. Eisaman invented indirect ocean capture in 2010–2011 while at PARC. From 2014 to 2016, Eisaman led Project Foghorn at X (formerly Google X), which used IOC to make carbon-neutral fuel from seawater.

Desktop Publishing, Part 3

The articles in this special section focus on the emergence and growth of desktop publishing. This is the third special issue that is devoted to the history of desktop publishing. The first issue appeared in the fall of 2018, and was about the developments in the 1960s and 1970s of computer-driven printing and the technologies that led to the commercial growth of the desktop publishing industry. The second issue, in the fall of 2019, continued the story by describing how those technologies, developed in the 1970s particularly at Xerox PARC, became the foundation for the growth of major desktop-publishing software companies, with articles by founders of Adobe, Aldus, Quark, Frame Technology, and Ventura. The prediction that computers would end the era of print publication goes as far back as Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex. The first two Annals special issues on desktop publishing have documented what happened instead, as computing became central to publishing. They were primarily about the technology and the companies that created the digital publishing industry and made it so popular. We continue that documentation in this issue, and also have two articles on the history of font design, which is central to all publishing, both traditional “hot-metal” and digital.

Desktop Publishing, Part 2

The articles in this special section examine the history of desktop publishing. This is the second in a series of articles on this topic. The first issue appeared in the Fall of 2018 (Vol. 40, Issue 3). The first series focused on the developments in the 1960s and 1970s for computer-driven printing and for the technologies that led, in the 1980s and 1990s, to the commercial growth of the desktop publishing industry. This second desktop publishing issue continues the story by describing how the technologies developed in the 1970s, both for the printing industry and at Xerox PARC, became the foundation for the growth of a number of desktoppublishing software companies, including Adobe, Aldus, Quark, Frame Technology and Ventura, as well as Apple’s seminal entry in the industry with the Macintosh, LaserWriter, PostScript (from Adobe), and Page Maker (from Aldus).

How Modeless Editing Came To Be

Several word processing and desktop publishing innovations grew out of 1970s research by Larry Tesler and his collaborators at Stanford and Xerox PARC. One prototype was PUB, a markup language for print publishing. Another was Gypsy, a text editor with a cut/copy/paste command suite that became the de facto standard in desktop publishing and most other applications.

The motivations of ubiquitous computing: revisiting the ideas behind and beyond the prototypes

Ask anyone in the field, "What is ubiquitous computing?" and you'll get a different answer from each person. The one definition of ubicomp that nearly everyone points to (as an almost obligatory citation) is Mark Weiser's 1991 Scientific American article: "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." While this vision was clearly inspiring, many readers miss the point that ubicomp was not simply a dream of putting computers everywhere. Weiser was deeply concerned about what it would be like to live in a world of ubiquitous computing. Those human issues were compressed to a single paragraph of his Scientific American article, citing Herbert Simon, Michael Polanyi, James Gibson, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger. By unpacking this dense paragraph, tracing connections between ideas through his library archives, and interviewing many of Weiser's professional and personal influencers from the early days of ubicomp (late 1980s at Xerox PARC), we get a sense for the philosophical history behind ubiquitous computing. This broader understanding of the influencers and ideas can serve as a source for inspiration for exploration and innovation that refocuses upon the first-person human experience of ubicomp systems: (1) leveraging human experience below the level of focused, conscious attention, (2) bringing back embodiment, and (3) simultaneously supporting and getting out of the way of human interpersonal interactions and relationships.

Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush

Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush

Structural ambidexterity and competency traps: Insights from Xerox PARC

We investigate the organizational dysfunctions that can interfere with the implementation of structural ambidexterity as a dynamic capability. We find that these dysfunctions give rise to competency traps characterized by interlinked cognitive, organizational and behavioral dimensions, that can severely compromise structural ambidexterity. Further, from the perspective of network ambidexterity, we also find that the inventions of the explorative unit can be treated as external to the focal organization, mirroring the dynamics of portfolio resources found in the context of strategic alliances. Our findings extend understanding of organizational ambidexterity as a dynamic capability, in particular how competency traps can severely compromise ambidexterity; and how network-like effects can adversely shape intra-firm dynamics.

Structural ambidexterity and competency traps: Insights from Xerox PARC

We investigate the organizational dysfunctions that can interfere with the implementation of structural ambidexterity as a dynamic capability. We find that these dysfunctions give rise to competenc...

THE CONTEXT-SENSITIVE SYSTEM PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

What do we need? What he wants and how to help him? Which settings will be more useful right now? In the modern world gadgets are still waiting for our tips, but it could answer these questions yourself. In 1994, bill Shilit from the lab, Xerox Parc published a paper called computer applications. In the work of Shilit described programs that change their behavior automatically based on changes in the external environment. After two decades of ideas Silica do not seem fantastic. The context-sensitive today are already working On applications from Microsoft, Apple and Google.

Introduction to this Special Issue on HCI and Games

Games have been part of human–computer interaction (HCI) research since the first CHI conference in 1982. At that gathering, Tom Malone, then at Xerox PARC, presented insights from the study of computer games to motivate a set of design principles for “enjoyable” user interfaces (Malone, 1982). Over the ensuing years, games-related HCI research has steadily grown as a subarea of CHI (e.g. Keeker, Pagulayan, Sykes, & Lazzaro, 2004; Pausch, Gold, Skelly, & Thiel, 1994), with more rapid acceleration in the last 10 years. A recent metareview (Carter, Downs, Nansen, Harrop, & Gibbs, 2014) analyzed game- and play-related content at CHI between 2003 and 2013, finding that the overall percentage of the CHI proceedings related to play and games rose from 2.5% to a peak of 9.5% in 2012. In the last few years, venues for game-related HCI work have expanded as well. From 2011 to 2013, two of this special issue’s editors (Bernhaupt & Isbister, 2013) formed a Games and Entertainment Special Community devoted to game-related HCI research at CHI, leading to the permanent addition to CHI venues of a Student Game Design Competition. And in 2014, a new ACM-sponsored conference was created as a specialized peer-reviewed venue for the intersection of HCI and Games—CHI-Play. Game-related research is clearly a valued, integral, and growing segment of HCI research.

Delete: A Design History of Computer Vapourware

Paul Atkinson’s book Delete: A Design History of Computer Vapourware, a glossy, illustrated compendium of computing projects (all hardware) that never came to fruition, is best read during times of leisure, one case study at a time, rather than straight through from start to finish. The book consists of short chapters on twenty-eight computing devices, most of them, at some point or another, conceptualized inside an organization (IBM, Xerox PARC, etc.). Each chapter has details on how the device was designed and supposed to work, and the story of its development, and in many cases, eventual abandonment. Chapters are mostly descriptive rather than analytical, and some of the stories tend to get repetitive, but they are often gorgeously illustrated (perhaps too gorgeously, because the photographs, which often seem to be marketing materials, sometimes obscure the nitty-gritty of technical work, though this is easily explained by the fact that they are sourced from the portfolios of industrial designers, who were Atkinson’s primary informants). Readers will find it exciting to linger for a while in a different time and place, when computing meant something very different from what it does today.

Clamorous computing [Technically Speaking

Technology should become more self-effacing. In 1988, Xerox parc computer scientist (and later CTO) Mark Weiser put forward the idea of?and coined the term?ubiquitous computing. Sometimes shortened to ubicomp, it refers to the seamless integration of computing resources into most of the objects that people use to perform the activities of daily life. Today we?re more likely to call it pervasive computing or everyware. We're not quite there, despite newfangled appliances such as smart TVs and smart refrigerators, but modern computing does have a pervasive feel to it. That feel comes mostly from the gadgets like smartphones and tablets (and soon, wearables like Google Glass) that we routinely carry around with us. Thanks to cellular connections and Wi-Fi networks, we have near-constant access to computing power and online data, giving us what might be called near-ubiquitous computing. It's not quite the ambient intelligence envisioned by ubicomp fans, but it's a step or three in that direction.