4 ms·

I'll plug the book "Dealers of Lightning" for those who want to read more.

• nikolayasdf123 4y ago
  +1 to this one too. It is specifically focused on on Xerox PARC only. The Dream Machine covers broader scope of ARPA, ENIAC, MIT, etc.
• jinto36 4y ago
  I first came across this book in a library (a while ago) and basically read the whole thing on the spot. From my entirely biased perspective as someone with a "vintage computer" collection, it's the best book ever. The staggering magnitude of the accomplishments and inventions of PARC are almost as fascinating as fiction. The ineptitude of Xerox management in figuring out what to do with the output of PARC was similarly unreal. Bell Labs was able to commercialize (or at least license IP) from some of their work with reasonable return, but eventually lost momentum from the series of spinoff-layoff-mergers. How does an organization successfully manage or balance that kind of research productivity with commercialization in the long term? Is there any management literature on that in particular? I know some places like Microsoft and Google have had research programs for quite some time, although of course Google mostly fails to adequately support products that come out of Google X before killing them off or scaling them back (such as Glass), and I'm not sure how much of what Microsoft Research does is actually commercialized. Notably, Butler Lampson, who was one of the key folks at PARC, has been with Microsoft Research since 1995.