Paxton H. (paxtonholley) reviewed Dealers of Lightning : Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age on + 67 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
This is a fantastic non-fiction book detailing the origins of desktop computing.
Back in the '70s, Xerox established a research and development center in Palo-Alto, CA and named it Xerox-PARC. They staffed it with brainy Stanford grads and left it pretty much all alone to develop the technologies of the future. What came out of this center has defined how everyone works and uses computers to this day. This group invented the modern TCP/IP protocol that runs the Internet, the mouse, the light pen, laser printers and graphics processing. This research center also invented the graphical user interface (GUI) that Apple and Microsoft would use as a model for their operating systems in the early '80s. The ideas were so far ahead of their time Xerox, for the most part, had no idea how to market them at the time. The stodgy Xerox executives looked down their noses at everything that came out of Xerox-PARC until they made a mint off their laser printing technology.
It's fascinating to read about these computer nerd/hippies developing all the tools that have become so ubiquitous today.
Back in the '70s, Xerox established a research and development center in Palo-Alto, CA and named it Xerox-PARC. They staffed it with brainy Stanford grads and left it pretty much all alone to develop the technologies of the future. What came out of this center has defined how everyone works and uses computers to this day. This group invented the modern TCP/IP protocol that runs the Internet, the mouse, the light pen, laser printers and graphics processing. This research center also invented the graphical user interface (GUI) that Apple and Microsoft would use as a model for their operating systems in the early '80s. The ideas were so far ahead of their time Xerox, for the most part, had no idea how to market them at the time. The stodgy Xerox executives looked down their noses at everything that came out of Xerox-PARC until they made a mint off their laser printing technology.
It's fascinating to read about these computer nerd/hippies developing all the tools that have become so ubiquitous today.
