XEROX PARC /zee'roks park'/ n.
The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade,
from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an
astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software
innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of
software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer
and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines
anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a
decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in their
own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to
describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant
ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's
top-level suits has been well
anatomized in "Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then
Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and
Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN
0-688-09511-9).