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摘要

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center's (PARC) reputation stems from its development or demonstration of some of the key technologies of modern IT: the mouse-driven graphical user interface for computers; 'what you see is what you get' document editing; the laser printer; Ethernet networking technology; the concepts of ubiquitous computing and much more. But while Xerox PARC was first to apply many of these technologies, it was others, such as Apple in the Macintosh computer and Microsoft with its Windows operating system, that exploited them. Two books about Xerox PARC neatly illustrate the opposing views about the effectiveness of the research centre. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael Hiltzik, describes an intellectual hothouse which, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, made great strides in developing some of the fundamental technologies of modern IT. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, makes its position clear in its title. What seems to rankle with many is that, while Xerox's commercialisation of the laser printer probably paid for the entire costs of Xerox PARC many times over, nonetheless Xerox still left enormous technological value to be exploited by others.