Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

What it is

The Palo Alto Research Center, almost always called PARC, is a research laboratory in Silicon Valley. Xerox founded it in 1970 as a corporate research organisation, and it spent its early decades producing technology that reached well beyond the document business that paid for it ^[1]. Its name is now attached to several of the basic building blocks of modern computing.

Origins and ownership

Xerox set up PARC in 1970 as its own research arm ^[1]. Corporate laboratories of this kind are usually funded by a parent company's product business, and that connection shapes what they are asked to work on. In 2002 PARC was established as an independent company, separating the laboratory from the corporate structure of its founder while keeping the name and the site ^[1]. In 2023 PARC joined SRI International, bringing the two Silicon Valley research organisations together ^[1].

What it is known for

Three lines of work are singled out in the record of PARC: Ethernet, laser printing and the Alto personal computer ^[1]. Ethernet is the family of standards used to connect computers inside a local network. Laser printing writes an image onto a photosensitive drum with a laser and then transfers toner to paper, which is the mechanism behind laser printers. The Alto was built around the idea of a computer used by one person at a time, rather than a shared machine reached through terminals.

In 2024 those three lines of work earned PARC three IEEE Milestone awards ^[1]. IEEE Milestones are markers that the professional engineering body places on technical achievements it judges historically significant; they are attached to specific pieces of work and the places where they happened. Counting other achievements as well, SRI, PARC and Sarnoff Labs together have earned SRI nine IEEE Milestone awards ^[1].

PARC alumni honoured when the IEEE Milestones were presented include John Shoch, Ron Rider and Bob Metcalfe, a Turing Award winner ^[1].

The PARC Forum

PARC also kept an event series that reached beyond its own staff. The PARC Forum was conceived in 1977 and relaunched in 2024 ^[1]. A series of that kind is one of the ways a laboratory stays in contact with the wider research community around it.

Later directions

PARC's later work focused on autonomous and distributed systems, human-machine collaboration, advanced sensing, edge analytics, materials science and bio-inspired devices ^[1]. Autonomous and distributed systems are systems in which several nodes each make their own decisions and coordinate without a single central controller. Edge analytics means processing data close to where it is generated instead of sending everything to a central data centre. Bio-inspired devices borrow their design from structures and mechanisms found in living organisms.

Place in the landscape

SRI notes that the trajectories of PARC and SRI were deeply intertwined from the beginning ^[1]. It also argues that the internet, personal computing and the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem were marked by cross-pollination between the two organisations ^[1]. On that account PARC is less a solitary inventor than one half of a long exchange between two laboratories in the same valley.