7 ms·

Can Xerox's PARC find new life with SRI?

129 points by mitchbob 3y ago

mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.is/2024.03.27-144438/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/26/business/silicon-valley-tech-xerox-parc-sri.html https://archive.is/2024.03.27-144438/https://www.nytimes.com...
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  Only about 15 minutes in and it's much more illuminating than the article (not saying that the article is bad, but this video is better).
snsr 3y ago
Gift link w/o paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/26/business/silicon-valley-tech-xerox-parc-sri.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.gE0.gM2G.ilR2kKr-h9Yf&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/26/business/sili...
anotherhue 3y ago
Can researchers spend 10 years there doing meaningful research without: a) Having to show product market fit and appease magpie investors b) Emerge after 10 years with devastating debt and with poor career prospects. Those answers are what matters.
- klysm 3y ago
  that doesn't sound very agile /s
- whiplash451 3y ago
  Why would they emerge with devastating debt if they were paid reasonably well all along? (I am with you on the other points)
  - anotherhue 3y ago
    Postdocs tend to be paid poverty wages, so if they have student loans those won't have been paid. Additionally if they emerge at 30-something but on the lowest run of the career ladder they may never catch up. Obviously less of an issue if well paid, but well paid academia is kind of a contradiction.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      I think you are reading the past with the eyes of the present. "Student debt" was not a thing back in the 70's and 80's. Secondly, PARC researchers were not paid university postdoc-level salaries. They were paid quite well. I would guess that's still true.
      - linguae 3y ago
        I’m away from home right now so I can’t verify this, but if I remember correctly from reading Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC researchers were paid the equivalent of six figures when adjusted for inflation. When considering the much lower housing prices in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, this enabled many PARC researchers to purchase homes in Palo Alto and vicinity, though I do recall a passage from The Dream Machine about people moving from other parts of the US to the Bay Area dealing with higher housing costs even in the 1960s and 1970s. My mom grew up in Oakland in the 1960s and she told me she’s always heard of people complaining about the Bay Area’s high cost of living, especially in San Francisco.
        AlbertCory 3y ago
        They were paid corporate salaries, not academic salaries. But yeah: Bay Area prices were always higher.
linguae 3y ago
As a researcher, it would be wonderful if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI (like how most industrial research labs sadly demand) and also avoids the “publish or perish” pressures of academia. Rather, my ideal lab would be dedicated to providing an environment that enables researchers to pursue ambitious visions that will change computing. Xerox PARC would easily return to its former glory if it returned to its style under Bob Taylor in the 1970s. In fact, it would be quite fitting if Alan Kay gets tapped to run the lab. While there’s a need for more directed short-term research, I feel that industry has largely moved away from more free, longer-term, “pure” research, and I also feel that academic research has become affected by “publish or perish” and fundraising demands. There seems to be no room these days for researchers who want to do more exploratory work, short of becoming independently wealthy or relegating such exploration to nights and weekends.
- rented_mule 3y ago
  I would love to see the glory days of pure research groups like PARC and Bell Labs return. But, so many business folks are aware of how Xerox was embarrassed by PARC that it's unlikely that approach will be tried again anytime soon. When I speak of embarrassment here, it's not about the incredible innovation that came out of PARC, but about Xerox management's handling of that innovation. Billions and billions (trillions?) of dollars in value was created (e.g., Adobe, 3Com, SGI→NVIDIA, Mac / Windows, laser printers, ethernet, etc.) based on their research, but ~0% of that value went to Xerox. From a business point of view, it was a disaster. And business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded at this level. If I'm an executive who's not sure if I, or my organization, will be able to tell the great ideas from the duds, why spend money that might expose that?
  - coliveira 3y ago
    > business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded A large part of the money that was funned into research at Xerox came from the government itself in the form of tax breaks and other benefits. So it was not a big sacrifice for Xerox to maintain that lab. If they had to change course was due to government policy becoming less interested in industrial innovation and more focused on offshoring and financial gains for the last decades.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> Xerox executives had always responded that though they did not successfully compete in the computer market, they got a huge return on their investment by commercializing the laser printer technology PARC invented. >But many researchers who were at PARC’s halcyon early days said that its strength was that their research was unconstrained by the need to create a specific product — a notion that seems hard to imagine in today’s product-oriented Silicon Valley. The "but" is not necessary there. Both are true. Printers became a $2B a year business. Coulda been so much more? Absolutely.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  Wait, how much did they get from selling Apple the UI and mouse?
  - linguae 3y ago
    $200,000 net ROI from a $1.2 million sale of Apple’s pre-IPO shares in 1979 or 1980 dollars, though it could’ve made much, much more had Xerox held on to those shares: https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/What-Really-Happened-Steve-Jobs-@-Xerox-PARC-79.aspx https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/What-Really-Happened-Steve-...
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      excellent. Jerry Morrison and I analyzed in depth what they should have done: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight Most people don't know that, in the 80's, they DID spin off a number of companies, where Xerox's only investment was a license to use the technology. Had they held onto Apple and all those, they'd be one of the biggest holding companies in the world, if not the biggest.
      - readyplayernull 3y ago
        Amazing! Please do an HN submit.
jmspring 3y ago
Every time I see Parc mentioned, I miss going their for various talks. A friend worked there in the AV department and I got to see a lot of talks I would not otherwise. I also loved showing up one time when they had an exhibit of David Huffman's paper folding - https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/collection/david-a-huffman-collection https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/collection/david-a-huf... Parc, HP Labs, etc. were places of innovation back in the day - even things going on well into the 2000s. Sadly most companies don't do or value that type of research anymore.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Reminds me: I THINK I heard PARC was going to resume those evening talks. No details, sorry.
skadamat 3y ago
Highly recommend reading Scientific Freedom (published by Stripe Press in fact) which touches on the important topic of the shrinking freedom in professionalized scientific research: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donald-Braben/dp/0578675919 https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...
lispm 3y ago
Alan Kay recently gave a talk touching similar topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZQ7x0-MZcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZQ7x0-MZcI
kensai 3y ago
This: "Whatever happened to Xerox’s $1.05 million dollar investment in Apple in 1979? Had Xerox held onto this stake of the company, approximately 5-8% of the total outstanding equity in Apple at that time, their investment could be worth tens of billions of dollars today. Famously however, Xerox did not even retain their stake until Apple’s 1980 IPO. Instead, they almost immediately turned around and sold their shares for approximately $1.2 million, netting a return on their investment of around $200,000. Apple and their competitors, inspired by PARC’s inventions, would go on to generate trillions of dollars of revenue over the coming decades selling desktop personal computers with bitmapped displays and mouse-driven GUIs just like the Xerox Alto." What a facepalm! >_<
- nilamo 3y ago
  > What a facepalm! >_< Making 20% profit, and freeing up that capital for other uses, is not a face palm event. Not for you or I, and not for businesses big or small.
  - kensai 3y ago
    Considering what the financial condition of Xerox would have been if they had kept on them, am sorry, but it is a facepalm.
    - nilamo 3y ago
      Would they still be in business today if they didn't have that cash on hand, though?
- cancerhacker 3y ago
  When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he was given 1.5M shares - he sold all but 1 share almost immediately.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
> PARC could be revived only if Mr. Parekh could find a way to build some “slack” into the system by finding money to support open-ended research projects. SRI may have found that slack. The research laboratory is located in Menlo Park, Calif., in walking distance to the San Francisco to San Jose commuter rail line on 63 of Silicon Valley’s most valuable acres. Are they saying that they'll raise the money by doing real estate development? Could work, they certainly don't need all of the 63 acres. Or maybe they don't need any of those 63 acres? They could sell all of it off and move SRI/PARC to some much cheaper area of the country.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  [dead]
whyenot 3y ago
My dad worked at SRI for over thirty years and my mom also worked there. Money has always been an issue at SRI. You always had to be on the lookout for the next contract. If some company or part of the government wasn't paying for your work, there was always the chance that you would get laid off. On the other hand, my dad got to work on a lot of different projects over the years, from growing silicon crystals, to working on holograms, laser range finders, and a laser chemical weapons detector (deployed during the Iraq war), something called the Spindt cathode, which I honestly don't understand, LED printing, and many other projects. I think it was a very fun place to work, but also quite stressful. You always needed to be ready to switch to something new if the money started running out. It doesn't sound all that different from the way it is today. The employee open house was really neat, with different labs showing off whatever they were working on, from early noise canceling tech, to computers with color screens, cell counters, you name it. I know we visited "Doug's Lab" but I have no idea what we saw there. As any aspiring nerd, I was quite impressed that my dad and him were on a first name basis.
- sybercecurity 3y ago
  Every beltway bandit is like that to some degree. Some try to manage an internal fund and have "on the bench" staff do training or some internal projects, while others will give you a week or two to find something or you're let go. The real pychopath contractor encourages you to "poach" contracts from fellow employees. Basically think of yourself as an independent contractor and the company acting as a support staff and expect little to no loyalty from corporate. I know government staff hates this too. When a project starts to wind down or enter the last 3-6 months, the contractors start disappearing: not showing up for meetings, progress slows, etc. because they are all out looking for their next contract so they don't have a gap. "Every day is a billable day"
- nxobject 3y ago
  Sounds like a standard soft money research unit at a university, sadly. At least there isn’t the pressure to salami slice publications.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 3y ago
My perspectives from being a software developer at Xerox Canada until being downsized: 1. The folks running the show started out as copier salesmen who had trouble getting their heads around the fact that the banks, utilities, governments etc running high volume printers used mainframes which required mainframe software for the printers to be useful. 2. Revenue from printers (click charges) was entirely credited to sales. The software that enabled the sale and click charges was looked upon only as expense. Its contribution to revenue was ignored. 3. Technologies were abandoned at a slightly lower rate than Chromebooks. Customers were left holding the bag with dead ended platforms and applications. The concept of investment protection, providing a growth path for customer software on Xerox platforms simply did not exist. As many have mentioned, Xerox was expert at throwing away the future and continues to shrink.
williamDafoe 3y ago
In 1970 Xerox snapped up most of the top engineers from dozens of silicon valley companies, and was roundly hated EVERYWHERE. Thus began a decade of great research but even greater hype ... But after 12 years of failing to capitalize on all the technologies invented at PARC and Office Systems Division - from 1983 to 1987 - Xerox experienced a mass exodus itself and many researchers in Computer Science joined Dec Systems Research Center or DEC Western research Lab (DEC SRC and DEC WRL). The latter (DEC WRL) was credited with developing the DEC Alpha CPU; DEC SRC invented Altavista which was the #1 search engine until Google arrived. I was an Office Systems Division engineer 1984-6 and watched the exodus unfold before I left for grad school. Overall DEC SRC/WRL didn't have as much impact as PARC; there is a time and place for everything and that kind of systems research - its time had passed ..
pugworthy 3y ago
Perhaps they can absorb the last remnants of HP Labs too.

129 points by mitchbob 3y ago

https://archive.is/2024.03.27-144438/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/26/business/silicon-valley-tech-xerox-parc-sri.html https://archive.is/2024.03.27-144438/https://www.nytimes.com...

UncleOxidant 3y ago
Only about 15 minutes in and it's much more illuminating than the article (not saying that the article is bad, but this video is better).

snsr 3y ago

Gift link w/o paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/26/business/silicon-valley-tech-xerox-parc-sri.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.gE0.gM2G.ilR2kKr-h9Yf&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/26/business/sili...

anotherhue 3y ago

Can researchers spend 10 years there doing meaningful research without: a) Having to show product market fit and appease magpie investors b) Emerge after 10 years with devastating debt and with poor career prospects. Those answers are what matters.

klysm 3y ago
that doesn't sound very agile /s
whiplash451 3y ago
Why would they emerge with devastating debt if they were paid reasonably well all along? (I am with you on the other points)
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Postdocs tend to be paid poverty wages, so if they have student loans those won't have been paid. Additionally if they emerge at 30-something but on the lowest run of the career ladder they may never catch up. Obviously less of an issue if well paid, but well paid academia is kind of a contradiction.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I think you are reading the past with the eyes of the present. "Student debt" was not a thing back in the 70's and 80's. Secondly, PARC researchers were not paid university postdoc-level salaries. They were paid quite well. I would guess that's still true.
    - linguae 3y ago
      I’m away from home right now so I can’t verify this, but if I remember correctly from reading Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC researchers were paid the equivalent of six figures when adjusted for inflation. When considering the much lower housing prices in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, this enabled many PARC researchers to purchase homes in Palo Alto and vicinity, though I do recall a passage from The Dream Machine about people moving from other parts of the US to the Bay Area dealing with higher housing costs even in the 1960s and 1970s. My mom grew up in Oakland in the 1960s and she told me she’s always heard of people complaining about the Bay Area’s high cost of living, especially in San Francisco.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        They were paid corporate salaries, not academic salaries. But yeah: Bay Area prices were always higher.

linguae 3y ago

As a researcher, it would be wonderful if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI (like how most industrial research labs sadly demand) and also avoids the “publish or perish” pressures of academia. Rather, my ideal lab would be dedicated to providing an environment that enables researchers to pursue ambitious visions that will change computing. Xerox PARC would easily return to its former glory if it returned to its style under Bob Taylor in the 1970s. In fact, it would be quite fitting if Alan Kay gets tapped to run the lab. While there’s a need for more directed short-term research, I feel that industry has largely moved away from more free, longer-term, “pure” research, and I also feel that academic research has become affected by “publish or perish” and fundraising demands. There seems to be no room these days for researchers who want to do more exploratory work, short of becoming independently wealthy or relegating such exploration to nights and weekends.

rented_mule 3y ago
I would love to see the glory days of pure research groups like PARC and Bell Labs return. But, so many business folks are aware of how Xerox was embarrassed by PARC that it's unlikely that approach will be tried again anytime soon. When I speak of embarrassment here, it's not about the incredible innovation that came out of PARC, but about Xerox management's handling of that innovation. Billions and billions (trillions?) of dollars in value was created (e.g., Adobe, 3Com, SGI→NVIDIA, Mac / Windows, laser printers, ethernet, etc.) based on their research, but ~0% of that value went to Xerox. From a business point of view, it was a disaster. And business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded at this level. If I'm an executive who's not sure if I, or my organization, will be able to tell the great ideas from the duds, why spend money that might expose that?
- coliveira 3y ago
  > business folks are primarily the ones deciding what's funded A large part of the money that was funned into research at Xerox came from the government itself in the form of tax breaks and other benefits. So it was not a big sacrifice for Xerox to maintain that lab. If they had to change course was due to government policy becoming less interested in industrial innovation and more focused on offshoring and financial gains for the last decades.

AlbertCory 3y ago

> Xerox executives had always responded that though they did not successfully compete in the computer market, they got a huge return on their investment by commercializing the laser printer technology PARC invented. >But many researchers who were at PARC’s halcyon early days said that its strength was that their research was unconstrained by the need to create a specific product — a notion that seems hard to imagine in today’s product-oriented Silicon Valley. The "but" is not necessary there. Both are true. Printers became a $2B a year business. Coulda been so much more? Absolutely.

readyplayernull 3y ago
Wait, how much did they get from selling Apple the UI and mouse?
- linguae 3y ago
  $200,000 net ROI from a $1.2 million sale of Apple’s pre-IPO shares in 1979 or 1980 dollars, though it could’ve made much, much more had Xerox held on to those shares: https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/What-Really-Happened-Steve-Jobs-@-Xerox-PARC-79.aspx https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/What-Really-Happened-Steve-...
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    excellent. Jerry Morrison and I analyzed in depth what they should have done: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight Most people don't know that, in the 80's, they DID spin off a number of companies, where Xerox's only investment was a license to use the technology. Had they held onto Apple and all those, they'd be one of the biggest holding companies in the world, if not the biggest.
    - readyplayernull 3y ago
      Amazing! Please do an HN submit.

jmspring 3y ago

Every time I see Parc mentioned, I miss going their for various talks. A friend worked there in the AV department and I got to see a lot of talks I would not otherwise. I also loved showing up one time when they had an exhibit of David Huffman's paper folding - https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/collection/david-a-huffman-collection https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/collection/david-a-huf... Parc, HP Labs, etc. were places of innovation back in the day - even things going on well into the 2000s. Sadly most companies don't do or value that type of research anymore.

AlbertCory 3y ago
Reminds me: I THINK I heard PARC was going to resume those evening talks. No details, sorry.

skadamat 3y ago

Highly recommend reading Scientific Freedom (published by Stripe Press in fact) which touches on the important topic of the shrinking freedom in professionalized scientific research: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donald-Braben/dp/0578675919 https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...

lispm 3y ago

Alan Kay recently gave a talk touching similar topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZQ7x0-MZcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZQ7x0-MZcI

kensai 3y ago

This: "Whatever happened to Xerox’s $1.05 million dollar investment in Apple in 1979? Had Xerox held onto this stake of the company, approximately 5-8% of the total outstanding equity in Apple at that time, their investment could be worth tens of billions of dollars today. Famously however, Xerox did not even retain their stake until Apple’s 1980 IPO. Instead, they almost immediately turned around and sold their shares for approximately $1.2 million, netting a return on their investment of around $200,000. Apple and their competitors, inspired by PARC’s inventions, would go on to generate trillions of dollars of revenue over the coming decades selling desktop personal computers with bitmapped displays and mouse-driven GUIs just like the Xerox Alto." What a facepalm! >_<

nilamo 3y ago
> What a facepalm! >_< Making 20% profit, and freeing up that capital for other uses, is not a face palm event. Not for you or I, and not for businesses big or small.
- kensai 3y ago
  Considering what the financial condition of Xerox would have been if they had kept on them, am sorry, but it is a facepalm.
  - nilamo 3y ago
    Would they still be in business today if they didn't have that cash on hand, though?
cancerhacker 3y ago
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he was given 1.5M shares - he sold all but 1 share almost immediately.

UncleOxidant 3y ago

> PARC could be revived only if Mr. Parekh could find a way to build some “slack” into the system by finding money to support open-ended research projects. SRI may have found that slack. The research laboratory is located in Menlo Park, Calif., in walking distance to the San Francisco to San Jose commuter rail line on 63 of Silicon Valley’s most valuable acres. Are they saying that they'll raise the money by doing real estate development? Could work, they certainly don't need all of the 63 acres. Or maybe they don't need any of those 63 acres? They could sell all of it off and move SRI/PARC to some much cheaper area of the country.

oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]

whyenot 3y ago

My dad worked at SRI for over thirty years and my mom also worked there. Money has always been an issue at SRI. You always had to be on the lookout for the next contract. If some company or part of the government wasn't paying for your work, there was always the chance that you would get laid off. On the other hand, my dad got to work on a lot of different projects over the years, from growing silicon crystals, to working on holograms, laser range finders, and a laser chemical weapons detector (deployed during the Iraq war), something called the Spindt cathode, which I honestly don't understand, LED printing, and many other projects. I think it was a very fun place to work, but also quite stressful. You always needed to be ready to switch to something new if the money started running out. It doesn't sound all that different from the way it is today. The employee open house was really neat, with different labs showing off whatever they were working on, from early noise canceling tech, to computers with color screens, cell counters, you name it. I know we visited "Doug's Lab" but I have no idea what we saw there. As any aspiring nerd, I was quite impressed that my dad and him were on a first name basis.

sybercecurity 3y ago
Every beltway bandit is like that to some degree. Some try to manage an internal fund and have "on the bench" staff do training or some internal projects, while others will give you a week or two to find something or you're let go. The real pychopath contractor encourages you to "poach" contracts from fellow employees. Basically think of yourself as an independent contractor and the company acting as a support staff and expect little to no loyalty from corporate. I know government staff hates this too. When a project starts to wind down or enter the last 3-6 months, the contractors start disappearing: not showing up for meetings, progress slows, etc. because they are all out looking for their next contract so they don't have a gap. "Every day is a billable day"
nxobject 3y ago
Sounds like a standard soft money research unit at a university, sadly. At least there isn’t the pressure to salami slice publications.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 3y ago

My perspectives from being a software developer at Xerox Canada until being downsized: 1. The folks running the show started out as copier salesmen who had trouble getting their heads around the fact that the banks, utilities, governments etc running high volume printers used mainframes which required mainframe software for the printers to be useful. 2. Revenue from printers (click charges) was entirely credited to sales. The software that enabled the sale and click charges was looked upon only as expense. Its contribution to revenue was ignored. 3. Technologies were abandoned at a slightly lower rate than Chromebooks. Customers were left holding the bag with dead ended platforms and applications. The concept of investment protection, providing a growth path for customer software on Xerox platforms simply did not exist. As many have mentioned, Xerox was expert at throwing away the future and continues to shrink.

williamDafoe 3y ago

In 1970 Xerox snapped up most of the top engineers from dozens of silicon valley companies, and was roundly hated EVERYWHERE. Thus began a decade of great research but even greater hype ... But after 12 years of failing to capitalize on all the technologies invented at PARC and Office Systems Division - from 1983 to 1987 - Xerox experienced a mass exodus itself and many researchers in Computer Science joined Dec Systems Research Center or DEC Western research Lab (DEC SRC and DEC WRL). The latter (DEC WRL) was credited with developing the DEC Alpha CPU; DEC SRC invented Altavista which was the #1 search engine until Google arrived. I was an Office Systems Division engineer 1984-6 and watched the exodus unfold before I left for grad school. Overall DEC SRC/WRL didn't have as much impact as PARC; there is a time and place for everything and that kind of systems research - its time had passed ..

pugworthy 3y ago

Perhaps they can absorb the last remnants of HP Labs too.