[HN Gopher] Xerox PARC Special
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Xerox PARC Special
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-07-26 05:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thechipletter.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thechipletter.substack.com)
| liendolucas wrote:
| I never get tired of reading the amazing achievements from Xerox
| PARC, even if it's something I already know. The book mentioned
| in the post is super-interesting and goes in lots of details and
| the dynamics between the different teams and people behind the
| legendary research division, but as Alan Kay (if I'm correct)
| itself mentioned is quite disorganized in regards to the sequence
| of events. Nevertheless you don't get bored a single bit. Highly
| recommended.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Shameless self-promotion time here.
|
| Once you've read all the facts, you can go beyond them and
| plunge yourself into that world, not knowing how it's going to
| turn out! Like we didn't at the time:
|
| https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future
|
| I had the cooperation of almost everyone who's still alive. The
| Jobs visit isn't in there "live" since I wasn't there. The
| truth is, most of us didn't even hear about it until months
| later.
|
| As for Ethernet, the lightning incident really happened pretty
| much as I described. Ron Crane's widow loved it and said she
| hadn't thought so much about him since he passed. You can see
| him in one of the earlier Ethernet videos (he passed in 2003,
| IIRC).
| jackofalltrades wrote:
| I second this! The first time I heard about the book was
| somewhere here on Hacker News and I gave it a chance and it was
| really good (specially because I too am excited about reading
| everything about what was done in the Xerox PARC).
| kilroy123 wrote:
| A close family member worked there and was a part of all the
| magic. I love picking his brain and getting the inside story
| about things that happened there. Very fascinating to hear his
| take on why it all worked so well.
|
| He influenced me to be into computers as a kid and eventually
| go into tech.
| jmspring wrote:
| There was a period of time where Parc hosted a display of David
| Huffman's paper folding[1]. It was great to see in person and a
| reminder of discussions I had with him about it during office
| hours at UCSC prior to his passing.
|
| [1] https://www.cise.ufl.edu/~manuel/huffman/index.html
| esafak wrote:
| How much of PARC's magic was their own trailblazing, and how much
| was it low hanging fruit they were positioned to pluck? I think
| of all the illustrious physicist of the first half of the 20th
| century discovering one thing after another, while today's batch
| have seemingly little to offer in comparison. And that is because
| the fruit of the current paradigm have been plucked and we need a
| breakthrough to reveal new ground, and breakthroughs become more
| spaced out as we explain more and more.
| shdh wrote:
| Right time, right place.
|
| Same could be said for SaaS products before the 2020's.
| Animats wrote:
| > Right time, right place.
|
| Money. What Xerox PARC was allowed to do was to develop
| technology that was not yet cost-effective.
|
| I got a tour of PARC in 1975, when I took Bill McKeenan's
| summer computer architecture course at UC Santa Cruz.
| McKeenan had designed several Burroughs machines. He knew
| everybody in computer architecture, and we had _really_ good
| field trips. Visited an an Intel wafer fab. (2 inch wafers!
| 1K bit memory! Soon, 4K!) Visited Amdahl, met Gene Amdahl,
| saw their enormous prototype mainframe, which was to be
| shrunk for production by making custom ICs for each board.
| Visited PARC, met Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, and saw some
| of the first Alto machines. They were making tall CRTs in
| house and it wasn 't going well yet, but they had some
| machines going. The first Ethernet was described as "an
| ALOHAnet with a captive ether." Kay described Smalltalk as
| treating everything as an active object, acting like a little
| computer, and working by message passing. (I was kind of
| appalled at that, because I thought he meant true threaded
| programming with real message passing. I was already doing
| that on UNIVAC mainframes, which had user-space threads,
| called "activities". My job at the time was getting the OS
| for a multiprocessor mainframe installation to stop crashing.
| So I was thinking concurrency hell and huge overheads as you
| sent 1 to a number to add 1 to it for each arithmetic
| operation. But no, that's not how OOP really works, even in
| Smalltalk. That's just a way to talk about it, which I did
| not get at the time.)
|
| PARC was also an R&D center for Xerox copiers, so they had
| considerable mechanical and electronic fabrication capability
| in house. That was a huge advantage when they needed to build
| something.
|
| We were told that Xerox had funded them heavily to push the
| technology regardless of cost, with the assumption that
| hardware technology would catch up. It was a good bet for the
| industry, but the payoff was further in the future than Xerox
| could really afford. Xerox lost their moat when their patents
| on xerography expired, and their margins dropped.
| shdh wrote:
| Definitely money.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Nearly all inventions were "the right time" and _something_ was
| in the air. Do you have a counter example?
| esafak wrote:
| Sure. A lot of mathematics is out there; e.g., Shinichi
| Mochizuki's work on the abc conjecture is so far out other
| mathematicians can't evaluate it.
|
| Think of fields or problems only a handful of people are
| working on. Usually because it is viewed as fruitless. Then
| somebody cracks it and sometimes a use is found for it. The
| rest is labeled "useless research".
| AlbertCory wrote:
| So that's one example.
|
| The test would be: not only was there no precedent or
| suggestion for it, but it turned out to be epochal.
| linguae wrote:
| I think another part of it is the difference in research
| funding philosophy at Xerox PARC in the 1970s compared to the
| funding philosophy of most companies and government agencies in
| the past 20-30 years. Xerox PARC researchers had the rare
| opportunity to pursue their research interests and not have to
| worry much about funding, not only for their salaries, but also
| for the equipment that they needed. In the early years of Xerox
| PARC researchers didn't have to constantly justify their work
| to company executives. It's amazing what researchers can do
| with a vision, cash, and little external pressure.
|
| Today such a research environment exists only in our dreams,
| short of winning a MacArthur Fellowship. Most researchers today
| work in environments where their direction is heavily
| influenced by the people funding them. In order for researchers
| to pursue their own research vision and be paid for it, they
| must persuade a company or a funding agency that the pursuit of
| this vision will benefit the funders. Researchers also must
| justify their research activities and constantly produce
| deliverables such as patents, publications, and prototypes in
| order for their performance to be assessed by their funders.
|
| While this more directed form of research has also definitely
| led to many innovations, the trouble is that only the research
| that fits the visions of those funding the work gets funded and
| thus proceeds. However, what about research ideas that don't
| meet the interests of companies or government funding agencies?
| This is one of the reasons why we need to promote curiosity-
| driven research; society could be missing out on future
| revolutions in science and technology if our imaginations are
| limited to what we can imagine today instead of letting
| exploration take its course.
| cma wrote:
| > Today such a research environment exists only in our
| dreams, short of winning a MacArthur Fellowship. Most
| researchers today work in environments where their direction
| is heavily influenced by the people funding them. In order
| for researchers to pursue their own research vision and be
| paid for it, they must persuade a company or a funding agency
| that the pursuit of this vision will benefit the funders.
|
| The Thiel fellowship program which is similar produced many
| billionaires from somewhat new technology, maybe not quite
| fundamental research. However some of them achieved it
| through ponzi schemes with world changing amounts of carbon
| burned for cryptomining waste heat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship#Recipients
| w10-1 wrote:
| I get a bit tired of this:
|
| > Xerox failed to turn most of the technologies that it developed
| at PARC into successful commercial products
|
| PARC didn't try -- and it did make a boatload of licensing fees.
|
| PARC from the start followed a policy of licensing intellectual
| property instead of trying to build it out because that set the
| expectations of researchers: your ideas will get out, but you'll
| only get glory and a paycheck and the chance to be a part of a
| fantastic team. That was essential to the culture and team
| dynamics.
|
| I was on a PARC team that went through the commercialization
| process when PARC just started licensing IP en masse (e.g., to
| help large IP holders in their patent battles). PARC researchers
| are very smart and can envision the future as well as anyone, and
| if it's possible they can hold something back and then capitalize
| on it for themselves, they will do so, which completely screws
| and politicizes the team dynamic of open discussion and
| development.
|
| If you think about the pace of new findings in new territories,
| slowing down to capture and carry value will be a serious drag,
| and PARC wouldn't be what it was. I think PARC was right to only
| monetize patentable ideas (in a parallel stream of lawyers),
| ignoring opportunities that stem from speed or execution because
| that's where business uncertainty lies.
|
| Indeed, I suspect that in the rapidly-evolved AI space, the
| companies that can gather the best teams to do the best work in
| this semi-open fashion will end up with the most (and most
| valuable) intellectual property. (And if their lawyers are better
| than PARC's at licensing by recognizing new forms of residual
| opportunities in AI, it will be beyond profitable.) The captured
| groups at openai/microsoft, Google, Apple, et al will get tangled
| in the culture, forces, and technologies driving their patrons.
|
| Don't turn your scouts into farmers or builders.
| tom_ wrote:
| Not unrelated: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-
| pioneers-settlers-to...
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