
What made Xerox PARC special? Who else today is like them? - mpweiher
https://www.quora.com/What-made-Xerox-PARC-special-Who-else-today-is-like-them/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1
======
Animats
_" You know what makes the rockets fly? Funding."_ \- The Right Stuff.

What really made PARC work is that they were funded to develop the future of
computing by building machines which were not cost-effective. It was too early
in the mid-1970s to develop a commercially viable personal workstation. But it
was possible to do it if you didn't have to make it cost-effective.

That's what I was told when I got a tour of PARC in 1975. They had the Alto
sort of working, (the custom CRT making wasn't going well; the phosphor
coating wasn't uniform yet) the first Ethernet up, a disk server, and I think
the first Dover laser printer. All that gear cost maybe 10x what the market
would pay for it. But that was OK with Xerox HQ. By the time the hardware cost
came down, they'd know what to build.

Previous attempts at GUI development had been successful, but tied up entire
mainframe computers. Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963)[1] and Engelbart's famous
demo (1968)[2] showed what was possible with a million dollars of hardware per
user. The cost had to come down by three orders of magnitude, which took a
while.

Another big advantage which no one mentions is that Xerox PARC was also an R&D
center for Xerox copiers. That's why they were able to make the first decent
xerographic laser printer, which was a mod to a Xerox 2400 copier. They had
access to facilities and engineers able to make good electronic and
electromechanical equipment, and thoroughly familiar with xerographic
machines.

Ah, the glory days of Big Science.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o)
[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

~~~
abalone
_> Ah, the glory days of Big Science._

This still happens! Silicon Valley gets a lots of long-term oriented funding
from taxpayers via DARPA and other government agencies. Siri (named after SRI
International where Engelbart did his work) and autonomous driving (DARPA
Grand Challenge) are just a couple of recent examples.

In fact PARC still does too. Although owned by a private company, PARC does
government-funded research.[1]

I would say generally people in SV are less consciously aware of the major
role government funding plays in it to this day. It's probably because of the
mythos of private entrepreneurship and the uncomfortable narrative of all this
so-called "free market capitalism" being supported by billions in govt funds,
with only a fraction of the profits returned to the public coffers via taxes.

[1] [https://www.parc.com/news-release/97/parc-awarded-up-
to-2-mi...](https://www.parc.com/news-release/97/parc-awarded-up-to-2-million-
from-darpa-to-develop-vanishing-electronics.html)

~~~
munin
I've been funded by DARPA in one way or another and DARPA is not big science.
DARPA is an applied R&D agency, meaning they want to see a path from what you
are talking about to some broad application, preferably in the military space.
If you can't describe that path to them, the odds of getting funded by them
are low (this is drawn from experience of winning more than 10mil in funding
from DARPA on many different programs).

The DARPA model is also not big science because the researchers on the outside
do not pick the problems, the PMs at DARPA do. The model works when a
visionary becomes a PM and is given a "big" (20-80 mil) bucket of money to
disperse to researchers to enact their big ideas. If the PMs are truly
visionary, then this works. If they are not, you wind up with a sort of soup
of crap.

Additionally, since it's applied, DARPA will do frequent (once a quarter and
once a year) check-ins, measurements, and progress reports. If you don't
measure up during those, your funding gets cut. So as a researcher, it is a
challenge if what you want to do is a little bit off the path of what the PM
wants to do.

I have much more limited exposure to IARPA but it seems to be the same way
there.

I have more experience with NSF, which is the total opposite: researchers
propose their own projects and there are infrequent touchpoints, and no cut
points really. However, NSF will give you one to two orders of magnitude less
money than DARPA.

~~~
srbl
I work on several DARPA programs and agree with most of this. But some
programs are by design far more basic or applied than others. Also worth
noting - DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the
private sector pays employees.

The programs (and their vision, and their success) depend quite a bit on the
PM, and on their ideas and engagement. To a lesser extent success depends upon
the SETAs as well.

~~~
munin
> DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private
> sector pays employees.

Eh. You can get like a $200/hr rate. If you're a small company with low
overhead, you can get paid quite competitively with the private sector in base
comp. Difficult to match big G stock grants, though, no one is becoming a
millionaire off of this work.

Unless of course what you do on the grant can be turned into a billion dollar
company, because (generally) contractors walk away from research programs with
liberal rights to the IP they create, with the government retaining some
rights to use, but very rarely (IME) retaining direct ownership. Of course,
it's probably not that likely that what you do can turn into a billion dollar
company but hey, one can dream...

~~~
omarchowdhury
Thankfully one doesn't (usually) need to create a billion dollar company to
become a millionaire.

------
jacquesm
To be like Xerox PARC today you'd have to move back to the time when Xerox did
what they did there. It's not just the company or the people but the total
environment in which that took place.

Once the canvas is no longer blank it becomes a lot harder to be that
innovative. All kinds of brakes on the system engage almost automatically:
conventions, languages, processors, window managers have all become a lot less
open to really new concepts.

The biggest changes of the last couple of years are deep learning coupled with
the advent of GPUs that have computing power that was only affordable to
universities not that long ago for very little money. Possibly that will
engender a totally new computing environment in which our 'old' stuff no
longer matters as much and we'll be more free to pursue things that are less
anchored in the practical requirement to make money.

I suspect the whole 'deep learning' revolution will be as big as the original
invention of the transistor or the web. It won't give us full AI but maybe by
the time we've mined that for all it's worth we won't feel the need for it
anymore.

~~~
nikofeyn
do you really think that about deep learning? it has zero application or
effect in my job (i don't see that changing for at least the next decade) and
in my personal life, it only serves to produce "better ads".

~~~
jacquesm
> do you really think that about deep learning?

Yes, absolutely. To put it bluntly: how many jobs do you think are affected by
being deaf and blind?

Computers are now able to see and hear, and on top of that they have become
better at most classification tasks than humans. Those are game changers, this
goes much further than advertising.

~~~
firebones
What you state is factual. In the context of "as revolutionary as transistor",
then I'd say yes as well. But when it comes to jobs, deep learning's impact is
overstated.

When I hear claims on how many jobs will be replaced because of deep learning
(in contrast to the base rate of the long, steady slope of automation over the
last 175 years), it's often about an abstract and simplified notion of the
complexities of jobs outside the claimant's area of expertise. In such cases,
it's useful to ask the claimant whether _their_ profession is soon to be made
obsolete. Will AI replace the pundit anytime soon? The economist? The
enterprise programmer? The AI researcher?

~~~
jacquesm
The welder, the courier, the truck driver, the cab driver, the pilot, the GP,
the gardener... I could probably make a _really_ long list of jobs that will
be affected, pundits are safe for now (but composers and painters are not),
economists are probably safe too if only because they always seem to manage to
weather the storm without damage even if they caused the storm and still
failed to predict it. Enterprise programmers are safe - for now -, but keep in
mind that humans already know how to teach each other stuff, as soon as
programming becomes hard to distinguish from teaching by example that
enterprise programmer had better watch out.

Let's review this in a decade or so and see what happened.

~~~
ianamartin
Well, what do you mean?

I think it's obvious that machines can, for example, weld better than humans
can. But machines can't decide _what_ to weld. For now in that arena, things
are mostly still human controlled.

I think your argument gets significantly weaker when you push truck, car, and
plane driving onto the conversation stack.

Even the best of self-driving AI automation isn't nearly as good as bad human
driving. Yet.

But the absolute best human weld joints are no better than the absolute best
robotic weld joints.

I think you're talking about two entirely different domains here when you
conflate welders and couriers. One of those needs a human decision to place
the components to be welded next it in front of a robot that basically does
one thing. The other is an actual adaptive AI that's trying to make decisions
on it's own.

Yes, it's obvious that the lowest-wage and lowest-skilled workers are going to
be displaced by robots the soonest. That's like arguing that the sun is going
to rise. And as a society, we need to account for that.

But arguing that the lowest hanging fruit of automation is going to displace
taxi drivers and gardeners in the next 10 years is pretty nuts, even for HN.

~~~
snowwrestler
It is definitely not obvious that machines can weld better than humans can. I
think a lot of computer tech people would be surprised by how much welding is
still done by hand. Most of the welds on a Boeing 787 are done by humans, for
example.

I feel like this fits the description in the comment above:

> When I hear claims on how many jobs will be replaced because of deep
> learning (in contrast to the base rate of the long, steady slope of
> automation over the last 175 years), it's often about an abstract and
> simplified notion of the complexities of jobs outside the claimant's area of
> expertise.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Machines have nowhere near the flexibility of humans, so obviously they're
worse at tasks _in environments designed for humans_.

But were you optimize the Boeing manufacturing process for machines, the way
car factories are optimized, you could utilize strengths of machines while
sidestepping their limitations.

(Why this does not happen often is I believe a combination of robots having
high initial costs, coupled with products starting as human-assembled
prototypes, and companies just optimizing that process incrementally, instead
of redesigning it around machines.)

~~~
jacquesm
And unions.

~~~
Macha
And relatively low volumes. If you're going to pump out 3 million cars a year
vs 2000 of that plane ever, it changes the equation somewhat.

------
CalChris
I'm less of a PARC fan and more of a Lampson fan. In fact, I'm a huge Butler
Lampson fan. I've read his PARC valedictory _Hints on Computer System Design_
many times and he's updated it recently. He went from PARC to DEC SRC (maybe 5
miles). I saw him give a talk at SRC and for about 15 minutes afterwards, I
understood.

 _Hints_ is the favorite paper of a lot of my heroes like John Regehr.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/acrobat-17.pdf)

[http://bwlampson.site/Slides/Hints%20and%20principles%20(HLF...](http://bwlampson.site/Slides/Hints%20and%20principles%20\(HLF%202015\).pdf)

[http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1143](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1143)

From SRC, he went to Microsoft and he also taught at MIT.

[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
compu...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-826-principles-of-computer-systems-spring-2002/)

~~~
alankay1
Let me encourage you to be both. Butler is one of the most amazing people I've
met and had the great pleasure of working in the same environment with him for
many years. I also think that all of us who were there would not want to try
to separate "the great people" from "the great environment" nor would it be
possible without great distortion (this is the point that most people miss
about ARPA/PARC).

~~~
CalChris
Thanks Alan. If my current project succeeds, and it should, I'm going to try
to reach out to Butler and present it to him because frankly, it has Lampson
written all over it with maybe some Thacker graffiti here and there.

~~~
tmccrmck
May I ask what your current project is?

------
tostitos1979
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (MSR-SVC) used to be like PARC of old. Too
bad it was shut down a few years ago. I don't know if any place comes close.
To be fair, there are pockets of awesomeness at places like IBM T.J. Watson
and MSR Redmond .. you need to be lucky enough to work with the right group of
people.

Edit: I should point out that while it is awesome to work in such a storied
place, there is some stress associated with it. Read about the weekly "Dealer"
meetings at PARC.

~~~
ultimoo
Interesting read on "Dealer" meetings.

From The Myths of Creativity By David Burkus

>> In the 1970s at Xerox PARC, regularly scheduled arguments were routine. The
company that gave birth to the personal computer staged formal discussions
designed to train their people on how to fight properly over ideas and not
egos. PARC held weekly meetings they called "Dealer" (from a popular book of
the time titled Beat the Dealer). Before each meeting, one person, known as
"the dealer," was selected as the speaker. The speaker would present his idea
and then try to defend it against a room of engineers and scientists
determined to prove him wrong. Such debates helped improve products under
development and sometimes resulted in wholly new ideas for future pursuit. The
facilitators of the Dealer meetings were careful to make sure that only
intellectual criticism of the merit of an idea received attention and
consideration. Those in the audience or at the podium were never allowed to
personally criticize their colleagues or bring their colleagues' character or
personality into play. Bob Taylor, a former manager at PARC, said of their
meetings, "If someone tried to push their personality rather than their
argument, they'd find that it wouldn't work." Inside these debates, Taylor
taught his people the difference between what he called Class 1 disagreements,
in which neither party understood the other party's true position, and Class 2
disagreements, in which each side could articulate the other's stance. Class 1
disagreements were always discouraged, but Class 2 disagreements were allowed,
as they often resulted in a higher quality of ideas. Taylor's model removed
the personal friction from debates and taught individuals to use conflict as a
means to find common, often higher, ground.

~~~
alankay1
This is overdrawn and misses the process and the intent. They weren't staged,
they were not "designed to train their people", etc. It was part of the larger
ARPA community to learn how to argue to illuminate rather than merely to win.
PARC came out of the ARPA community and Bob Taylor had been the third director
of IPTO.

The main purposes of Dealer -- as invented and implemented by Bob Taylor --
were to deal with how to make things work and make progress without having a
formal manager structure. The presentations and argumentation were a small
part of a deal session (they did quite bother visiting Xeroids). It was quite
rare for anything like a personal attack to happen (because people for the
most part came into PARC having been blessed by everyone there -- another
Taylor rule -- and already knowing how "to argue reasonably".

~~~
tostitos1979
As a relatively young scientist, I feel I lack the "argue reasonably" skill.
How does one get better at this?

------
aerovistae
This link led me on to a little bit of wikipedia reading where I learned
something that _really_ surprised me: according to wiki, Xerox today still
employs more people than either Microsoft or Apple, 130k to their 115k each.
Am I the only person who finds that shocking? I had no idea they were still so
huge. And this despite their market cap being a hundredth of Apple or
Microsoft's.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Wow. What do those people _do?_ For that matter, what does _Xerox_ do these
days?

~~~
jon-wood
Xerox these days still make photocopiers, but they also work as really nice
printers and network connected scanners.

I imagine a lot of their employees are in the service division. When you buy a
high end printer it also comes with a service contract where someone will
proactively come and do things like clean the printer and make sure toner is
stocked.

------
mseebach
"Who else today is like them?"

I don't know, but for sure, they're not in computing. PARC was special, among
many other reasons, because it existed (and had the vision and the funding) in
the early, gold rush era of computing. Google Research isn't it, not because
they're not generously funding important and worthy research, but because
computing as a field is too far along for them to have a chance of introducing
truly fundamental research in the area. Self-driving cars comes close, no
doubt hugely important, but even they have a quite incremental feel to them,
especially next to inventing something like the graphical user interface.

~~~
United857
I'd say quantum computing is still in a very early stage with many unsolved
problems, especially on the implementation side.

------
Dangeranger
There are some especially qualified answers on Quora. But to have your
question answered by Alan Kay on the topic on Xerox PARC is truly special.

~~~
throwaway7645
Agreed. I think he is a hackernews user as well

~~~
jasonkostempski
Wasn't he going to do some kind of work with ycombinator attempting to
recreate some of the spirit of Xerox PARC? Maybe I just dreamt it.

~~~
jacquesm
HARC

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680)

~~~
jasonkostempski
That was it. Official site: [https://harc.ycr.org/](https://harc.ycr.org/)
Nothing super interesting there yet, at least to me :/

~~~
azeirah
Bret Victor (worrydream.com) is a PI at HARC, having seen his previous demos,
I'm very optimistic about HARC's future.

------
zengid
I've been reading the book he mentions, "The Dream Machine", by Mitchell
Waldrop. It has been a great read so far (I'm a little past the point of the
creation of ARPA), particularly the section about John McCarthy developing
LISP and conceiving of the architecture for time-sharing.

Reading it has felt like I'm paying my respects to the pioneers of our field,
because I am humbled by what they achieved.

~~~
noir_lord
It's interesting (to me at least) how much of the ideas they had back then are
still waiting to be expounded on, they (and people like them) did the
foundational work we still build new things on now, I read a book (I wish I
could remember the title) about the architecture of the 2nd and 3rd
generations of IBM's mainframes as they battled with the problem of "how do we
keep the same software running on different hardware" and came up with
virtualisation etc.

I wonder how many dusty copies of papers sat in university libraries contain
ideas that brushed up and given a new coat of paint would be considered
revolutionary.

The other side of it is I still use stuff those guys _wrote_ every day, while
typing this I switched a bash terminal to run an install command using a
program that is pretty much identical (if a superset) of a program written in
1977, 3 years before I was born.

------
steveeq1
For those interested, more answers from alan kay available here:
[https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-
Kay-11](https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11)

------
fuzzygroup
I’d strongly recommend the book Dealers of Lightning. Now I should comment
that Alan Kay was at Parc and its where he did amazing work that holds up to
this day so pay the most attention to his answer of course. But I learned a
ton about Parc’s history from Dealers of Lightning.

I’d also point out that Bob Taylor apparently had a hard limit of 50
researchers because he felt that was all he could manage. This meant that he,
by this criteria, had to get the absolute best, smartest scientists /
researchers he could find. If you look at the sheer number of absolutely
brilliant people assembled at Parc during the same time period, it is
astonishing: Alan Kay (smalltalk), Butler Lampson (alto, *), Bob Metcalf
(ethernet), the founders of Adobe (postscript), Charles Simonyi (bravo which
later became Microsoft Word), etc. Close to 100% of modern computing directly
came from Parc.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
This might be relevant: in the AMA that he did less than a year ago [1], Alan
Kay said [2]:

> "Dealers of Lightning" is not the best book to read (try Mitchell Waldrop's
> "The Dream Machine").

That said, I have read Dealers of Lightning myself, and really liked it. I
have not yet got around to The Dream Machine.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940756)

------
sounds
> Who else today is like them?

> PARC still exists, but Google advanced technology projects is probably the
> closest. Neither of these is that close to the old Xerox PARC since they
> tent to focus on near term commercializable projects.

[https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-similar-thing-to-
Xerox-...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-similar-thing-to-Xerox-PARC-
that-exists-today)

...

While I can see how Google is an engine of scientific progress, Silicon Valley
is bigger than Google. Stanford deserves a lot of credit.

Without diving into "what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley," I think I
should point out that Stanford has consistently produced disruptions since at
least Xerox PARC's founding.

(Obligatory: I have only ever visited Stanford, long after graduating from a
different university.)

~~~
akinalci
When you look at PARC's contributions (laser printer, bitmap graphics,
GUI/windows/icons, WYSIWYG editor, Ethernet, OOP, MVC) or those of Bell Labs
(transistor, laser, information theory, Unix, C & C++, radio astronomy), we
haven't seen anything comparable from Google's Advanced Technology and
Projects program. We can give them another 20-30 years and reassess, but so
far, it's not there. Most of the projects have been announced with great
fanfare and then quietly scrapped, or are solutions that haven't found
problems.

PARC and Bell Labs were at the right place and right time to make fundamental
contributions in the nascent areas of digital computers, software, and digital
communications. They caught that wave perfectly. Now we're searching a similar
revolutionary technology that will open the floodgates of innovation, but it's
not apparent yet. Machine learning and AI? If that pans out, Google
Brain/DeepMind would be well situated.

~~~
jacquesm
> we haven't seen anything comparable from Google's Advanced Technology and
> Projects program

And we won't because all those things have already been done.

The laser didn't come from Bell but from Hughes btw.

> PARC and Bell Labs were at the right place and right time to make
> fundamental contributions in the nascent areas of digital computers,
> software, and digital communications. They caught that wave perfectly.

Precisely.

> Now we're searching a similar revolutionary technology that will open the
> floodgates of innovation, but it's not apparent yet. Machine learning and
> AI? If that pans out, Google Brain/DeepMind would be well situated.

Machine learning is disruptive to a degree that the web never was. The web is
augmentative, machine learning is pure disruption. Jobs that require lots of
people will soon open up to automation, this is going to change the world in
very fundamental ways if it keeps going at the rate that it does right now.

The last three years have seen one humans-only benchmark after another give
way and the party is just getting started.

~~~
milesrout
I 100% disagree. The web is far more significant than machine learning.
Machine learning hasn't changed _anything_ yet and I doubt it will ever
significantly affect society.

Web has made society unrecognisable only 20 years later.

~~~
blub
Unrecognisable means that if you take someone from 1997 and transport them
into the present they wouldn't recognise today's society.

In reality societal changes in the past 20 years are superficial, so they
would have no trouble recognising it.

~~~
noir_lord
I think that is a little unfair, unrecognisable would only really apply after
a revolution/war, and even 1955 Germany would be recognisable to 1935 Germans
(as one example).

To say that the changes have been merely superficial understates the case.

Online dating, online gaming, the disruption of existing media companies,
Facebooks influence over the election, a president of the united states who
tweets from the can, khan academy, youtube, the fact you can learn almost
anything you can wish to learn by pulling a device out your pocket that is
attached to an appreciable part of all human knowledge.

Computation on demand, I can pull out a credit card and have access to
computing power that would have been unimaginable in 1997.

Social movements that have leveraged the web to achieve greater reach.

Those are things that mostly existed prior to 1997 but not in the sheer scope
and _reach_ that they do now.

The social changes in current teens who live an always connected life (I'm not
sure that's a good thing but I'm 36, I'm too old to judge without it sounding
like 'back in my day').

I think when it comes to the web things are just getting started, the utility
of the network is so great that barring the fall of civilisation I can't see
it ever going away and the impact will just keep growing and we'll just keep
connecting more and more stuff to it until it becomes a planetary zeitgeist.

~~~
blub
The changes you mention are almost invisible in day to day life though, so
there's nothing to recognise.

Perhaps those innovations which the tech community considers revolutionary
didn't really change society in a recognisable way?

------
jtraffic
A desire to recreate great things from the past always comes with some
hindsight bias. What we'd like is a dataset about hundreds of labs like PARC
and what happened to them. Of course, we could never get it, so we have to
work with our observed history. But sometimes, in the case of these big labs,
I wonder how much we can conclude.

I recently read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and it has great insights,
to be sure, but enough information about the causality to recreate Bell Labs?
I don't know.

Maybe it really does come down to one thing, like funding, as the top comment
(currently) on this thread suggests. But I doubt it.

When I was younger, my siblings and I played this game that we sort of made up
as we went (too detailed to explain), and it was awesome. Years later, in a
bout of nostalgia, we tried to recreate it and it was just awful. Enough small
details had changed that it didn't work. One of the important details that
changed was a total lack of spontaneity. All of us knew what the outcome
_should_ be like, and it made us behave differently. I don't think big orgs
are at all immune from this effect of expectations.

Don't get me wrong, I'm obsessed with the famous labs like anyone, a big fan
of Alan Kay, etc. I just think somebody needs to call attention to a giant
hurdle in learning from them.

~~~
azeirah
There's another lab that was successful in a somewhat similar manner, a way
larger scale, but still great results.

I recently bought a book on the Philips Natlab, same idea as Xerox PARC. They
invented the optical drive (cd's), the wafersteppers that bootstrapped ASML,
the company behind the machines that create chips and some other inventions
that I can't find right now.

I have more details in the Natlab book which I have at home, if you're (or
anyone else is..) interested.

------
JustSomeNobody
>There was no software religion. Everyone made the languages and OSs and apps,
etc that they felt would advance their research.

I feel like there is a lot of software religion in this industry today,
however it is mostly perpetuated by mediocre developers.

~~~
pekk
Naturally that group does not include you or most of HN.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Me? I try not to. I don't like windows but I don't preach about it. C++,
Java,C#, etc. I like em. I prefer Python. But I don't preach about it. Python
2 vs 3? Who freaking cares? Just get stuff done. But I don't preach about it.

I just go about getting my work done.

I think my only true religion is that I want open protocols. Chat, home
automation, auto, etc. should all use open and documented protocols.

------
jv22222
> The commonsense idea that “computer people should not try to make their own
> tools (because of the infinite Turing Tarpit that results)”. The ARPA idea
> was a second order notion: “if you can make your own tools, HW and SW, then
> you must!”

All the best breakthroughs of my career have come from a build don't buy bias.

~~~
dualogy
Got some examples to roughly outline? Am curious for encouraging anecdotes as
a chronic (semi-willing) NIH syndrome "sufferer" in all areas I can
hypothetically attack with just a laptop and a compiler..

------
cpr
I can vouch for the "fund people, not projects" aspect of ARPA funding in the
early 70's.

I was a lowly undergrad but working with Tom Cheatham (who ran the grad
Harvard Center for Research in Computing Technology) and others, and helping
in minor ways with their annual ARPA proposal. ARPA pretty much was sending
money our way, and we just had to cast the annual work in terms of what was
"hot" at the time (mostly "program understanding" at Harvard) to get the
funds.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
To like PARC you need the following things:

1\. A monopoly that prints money

2\. Company desire to investigate cool stuff

3\. No pressure to productize the research

4\. Smart people hired and given lots of leeway.

I think parts of Google, Microsoft,AT&T, and IBM are/have been like this.

------
Simorgh
As mentioned by Alan right at the beginning of his answer, the true visionary
behind our current technological age was Licklider. He was an ARPA researcher
who, it is argued [1], initially dreamt up the connected network we now know
as the internet. Interestingly, when an early iteration of the 'net was put to
UCLA academics, they refused to get involved!

[1] Sharon Weinberger, The Imagineers of War (2017).

------
surfmike
YC HARC ([https://harc.ycr.org](https://harc.ycr.org)) has a lot of talented
people working on PARC-like problems. Alan Kay has close contact with a lot of
the team as well.

~~~
Glench
Having worked there, HARC is explicitly modeled after PARC (it's even there in
the name) e.g. give a few visionaries a relatively small amount of funding and
let them go. Even if nothing interesting happens your investment wasn't very
large, but if anything interesting does come out of it then it might be as big
as the personal computer and networking (so the theory goes).

------
dpflan
Related to this special time in computing that Kay discusses is the book "What
the Doormouse Said?" It's a good, relatively quick read about the rise of
personal computing in the 1960's.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said)

------
zem
i wonder why he (presumably) did not think "dealers of lightning" was a good
book. not read "the dream machine" yet, but i thought "dealers of lightning"
was a great look at the history of xerox parc.

~~~
alphadevx
Superb book, recommended reading for those managing engineering teams as you
will learn a great deal about the culture at Xerox Parc, and what made it so
successful (peer review was a huge part of it, or as they called it "beat the
dealer"): [http://amzn.to/2nLvMFO](http://amzn.to/2nLvMFO)

~~~
zem
recommended reading for engineers too; I found it very inspiring in a "makes
you feel like building things" sense.

------
jacinabox
It is special because it happened in a different era and its technological and
cultural ideas are no longer legible. Time was computers were for mathematics,
now they are Potemkin villages and vehicles for almost stunning cultural
paranoia and new sectarian hatreds.

~~~
dualogy
> vehicles for almost stunning cultural paranoia and new sectarian hatreds

Expound =)

------
carapace
Kay's own Viewpoints Research Institute is worth mentioning in this context.
[http://www.vpri.org/](http://www.vpri.org/)

------
wonderous
Organization succeed when people understand and believe in WHY they do what
they do and how.

PARC's mission was to "create the architecture of information" in a way that
enabled strategic business growth.

In hind sight, it's obvious how important this was, but back then, it was just
a belief, and one that turned out to be adopted in mass.

If you want to be like PARC, understand WHY you do what you do and how in a
way that makes sense strategically for the organization, it's members, and
those it impacts.

------
derstander
I was working as my department's internal R&D director a couple years ago and
I was interested in the first question as well. Note that that position
probably sounds way more important than it actually was. Coincidentally, it
was at one of the places Alan Kay mentions in an answer to the linked Quora
question.

I pretty much focused on 3 different entities: DARPA, Xerox PARC, and Bell
Labs. These are the books I read to try to answer that question:

[1] Dealers of Lightning. [https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-
PARC-Computer...](https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-
Computer/dp/0887309895) [2] The Department of Mad Scientists.
[https://www.amazon.com/Department-Mad-Scientists-Remaking-
Ar...](https://www.amazon.com/Department-Mad-Scientists-Remaking-
Artificial/dp/0062000659) [3] The Idea Factory. [https://www.amazon.com/Idea-
Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-
Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797)

I personally thought that having access to a diverse set of disciplines &
skills and a reasonable budget were two of the more important things.

------
partycoder
Xerox was an immensely profitable business once. Being first to market with
photocopiers, and keeping a large market share for a long time.

In the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), they had the right team, the right
ideas and research was absolutely going in the right direction.

For instance, they had former SRI International researchers that participated
in the Douglas Engelbart's "oN-Line-System", presented in 1968 in what is now
known as "the mother of all demos" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY),
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)).

Their achievements include the creation of the excellent Xerox Alto computer
system featuring a GUI and a mouse as input device, which inspired the Apple
Macintosh and MS Windows (a story dramatized in multiple occasions, notably in
the classic "Pirates of Silicon Valley").

Xerox leadership failed to visualize how innovations like the Alto could be
converted into profitable products... even if it looks self-evident today.
That's a once in a lifetime opportunity that they let go and as a result other
companies heavily profited from PARC's findings and continue to do so today.

In addition, photocopiers are no longer at the center of business activities,
and usage paper is decreasing. This makes Xerox a company of the past, like
Kodak or Blockbuster (not trying to be offensive, but it is fair to say so).

------
coldtea
> _What made Xerox PARC special?_

All expenses paid, pure but pragmatic research without having to rush to
market and add buzzwords and marketing-inspired crap. Oh, and no
compartmentalization between teams and narrow-focused projects either.

> _Who else today is like them?_

Nobody. Google research labs for example is more like a "throw something out
there as a marketing gimmick to show we do 'innovation', and see if it sticks"
affair.

------
Stranger43
It's probably not anywhere in america.

Szhenzen is pretty close to being the global center of hardware innovation and
getting into software in a climate where state funding and commercial
enterprise is merged in a way california havent seen since the rise of modern
liberatarian economics in the 80ies.

The birthplace of the web at CERN is also still in play as a center where lots
of things happens.

And thats before we head into the fringes where the oil exploration industry
is leading in VR research almost as an afterthought of having to process and
visualize the kind of big data most big data start ups only dreams about being
able to handle.

Remember that Xerox wasn't an IT company but a printing/photocopier copier so
it's just as reasonable to expect that the next big leap will come from
someone that is not currently seen as an IT giant, as to go looking within the
Californian IT industry.

~~~
tellarin
The Shenzhen model is really nothing anywhere close to Xerox PARC. If any
place gets close, I'd say it's Microsoft Research.

But even that has changed a lot in the last few years.

Disclaimer: I work there.

------
_pmf_
I'll say it: Microsoft. They have a lot of research stuff that never makes it
onto (mass) products. It's atrange that Apple does not publish its internal
research projects; maybe they are more focused on actual direct applicability,
which is decidedly un-PARC like.

~~~
jon-wood
I feel like Apple's culture is one of extreme secrecy even where its
counterproductive or unnecessary. I once worked at an ad agency who did a lot
of work with Apple and it was ridiculous. People working on banner ads for
artists to be shown in iTunes had to go and sit in a windowless office behind
a card lock. This wasn't highly secret stuff, this was stuff like "You can buy
the new Coldplay album on iTunes".

------
GrumpyNl
They did great groundwork for Apple, they monetized on it while Xerox was left
behind empty handed.

------
bane
There's a few, not quite the same, but bits of pieces of places like this
exist. Monopoly driven companies like Google or Microsoft have nice R&D arms,
car companies can get involved in weird things. There's the big research
universities, who are these days just as commercial as PARC ever was. There's
also DoE National Labs who, because of the downturn in the nuke business, get
involved in all kinds of cool R&D and are surprising to most people only semi-
government. And finally there's pure government R&D centers, mostly in the
military.

~~~
nataz
Control F for national labs, and this is the only comment that came up. That
makes me sad.

The DOE and NNSA national labs are enormous R&D institutions and have grown
far beyond their original propose in the atomic weapons complex.[1]

I personally work for an office that pumps over 100 million annually into the
system, and frankly that's small change. Probably about 40%-60% of that money
goes into overhead and facilities which enables research outside of my
project.

There are a lot of fair criticisms of the system, but most of that is because
real R&D works like ycombinator. Lots of investment, with the hope that
eventually something pays off in a huge way. Like the system or not, most
people who are unhappy with it are really just unhappy about government
sponsored R&D. Almost by definition, it's not going to be "efficient" in the
short term.

If people are interested in big money, complex problem science, i encourage
you to take a look at the labs. They cover everything from supercomputers, to
marine science, to renewable energy.

[1] [https://energy.gov/about-national-labs](https://energy.gov/about-
national-labs)

------
gradstudent
> Fund people not projects — the scientists find the problems not the funders.
> So, for many reasons, you have to have the best researchers.

> Problem Finding — not just Problem Solving

Lessons not yet learned

------
11thEarlOfMar
I've always wondered what enabled Xerox PARC to 'succeed' and Interval
Research to languish. PARC was developed more or less organically where IR was
an intentional construction. To me, that contrast is a proxy for other regions
attempting to re-create Silicon Valley.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_Research_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_Research_Corporation)

------
icelancer
I try to run the R&D side of my sports science business like Xerox PARC. I
take a ton of inspiration from them.

------
tyingq
Different space, but after reading Alan Kay's answer, the only current entity
that comes to mind is CERN.

------
kilroy123
I'm not sure what places are like Xerox PARC now, but I want to create
something like it again in the near future. Only for space-related ventures.

My uncle was on the original PARC team so I'll see if I can get an answer from
him to answer the quora question.

------
agumonkey
I remember thinking a lot about PARC when visiting biohacklabs. The feeling of
random ideas implemented by people of various skills organically without clear
goals. Lesser costs, new designs, new implementations.

------
morphle
We are (playing the Wayne Gretzky game of invention).

------
77ko
Zzz, suuwuuuojuuusujuuojoljllujluo ass wasàhhhhhl

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Bob Taylor made it that way.

------
grabcocque
1) Smart people who have great ideas

2) A business model that has no need of those ideas

3) Management who have absolutely no idea how to capitalise on those ideas
outside of a core business?

...

That's Google. Google are Xerox.

~~~
moolcool
Google is an ad company which makes products to put ads on

~~~
nine_k
Like self-driving cars? I think they are desperately groping for something to
diversify, because the ad models come and go, and the revenue can some day dry
up.

~~~
petepete
Well, what are you going to watch while you're being driven around?

------
bitwize
A blank check from the Feds in the hopes that giving money to smart people
will make tgem develop something we could use to blow up the Russkies. That's
what made Xerox PARC.

~~~
rurban
You mean DARPA. But DARPA was far from being a blank check. It was highly
controlled, and based on projects not talent.

------
mozumder
A similar organization today is DARPA.

You can submit proposals to them and they may fund you.

~~~
alankay1
It isn't similar, either to PARC or to ARPA-IPTO (before the "D"). It was that
"D" that caused PARC to happen, because of the qualitative change in what
"Advances Research Projects" were supposed to mean.

------
milesrout
Yeah people go on and on about how much 'amazing' stuff Google does or
Microsoft does as if they just have a knack for picking the right people.

No, they have some good people and a huge amount of money gained from
monopolies, which are by definition not legal.

~~~
chrisseaton
> monopolies, which are by definition not legal

By exactly what definition?

Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly is illegal in some cases.

~~~
milesrout
If it's not illegal, it's not a monopoly.

Microsoft still has an illegal monopoly with Windows. There's no political
will to deal with it, but it absolutely exists and has for years.

~~~
chrisseaton
> If it's not illegal, it's not a monopoly.

Where are you getting this information from?

"The courts have interpreted this to mean that monopoly is not unlawful per
se, but only if acquired through prohibited conduct."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Monopoly_and_power),
which cites a 1945 court case United States v. Aluminum Corp. of America.

~~~
milesrout
Why would American law be relevant?

~~~
chrisseaton
You've mentioned two companies - Microsoft and Google. Both of these are
American companies so they're subject to US competition law in at least their
home markets. No other country would have the power to do anything fundamental
about their monopoly such as breaking them up. They could only fine them,
require them to support competitors, or lesser things like that.

If you want to talk about some other countries, a monopoly is also not illegal
in the UK. Again, only abusing the monopoly may be considered illegal.

[https://www.gov.uk/cartels-price-fixing/overview](https://www.gov.uk/cartels-
price-fixing/overview)

If you were thinking of a different country's law (which would be odd since
you mentioned two US companies) can you name one where a monopoly is by
definition illegal?

~~~
milesrout
>You've mentioned two companies - Microsoft and Google. Both of these are
American companies so they're subject to US competition law in at least their
home markets. No other country would have the power to do anything fundamental
about their monopoly such as breaking them up.

That's quite untrue. Any sovereign country can impose whatever restrictions
they like on any company they like. That company can withdraw from that
country, but in doing so they are giving up on all the income they could get
from that country.

They might not be able to _force_ them to break up, but they can _certainly_
force them to either break up or fuck off.

>If you want to talk about some other countries, a monopoly is also not
illegal in the UK. Again, only abusing the monopoly may be considered illegal.

You don't seem to understand. By definition, if it isn't abusive, it isn't a
monopoly.

~~~
chrisseaton
> You don't seem to understand. By definition, if it isn't abusive, it isn't a
> monopoly.

That's not what you said originally. You said 'if it's not illegal, it's not a
monopoly' I've shown that it at least is not true in the US and even referred
you to a precedent which says that you can have a monopoly that is legal -
'monopoly is not unlawful per se'.

So if you weren't referring to the US, which country do you think your claim
is true in?

~~~
milesrout
I'm going to end this conversation before you get too confused

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and
ignoring our requests to stop.

~~~
rurban
Could you please undo that? I don't know this person, but all his arguments
are worth discussing, his points are valid, and don't see any other site
violation, than the monopoly discussion being of course only a side discussion
of Google/Microsoft. I also don't see any request to stop. His last post on
this was 19 hrs ago, you de-attached it 15 hrs ago, and then banned him 15 hrs
ago.

Rob Taylor by himself explained how important it is to let discussions happen
at PARC. They trained it. RIP

~~~
dang
Even if that were true, it's like arguing a good hockey player shouldn't get
penalties or ever be suspended.

Taylor did not foster a 'no-holds-barred' culture. Alan Kay has explained this
many times, e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14120241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14120241).

There were many violations and several warnings.

