Thursday, September 12, 2013

My Tour of PARC - The Legendary Palo Alto Research Center


On of my dreams came true yesterday when I was given a private tour of the legendary PARC -  Palo Alto Research Center.

 Above is what you see when you pull in parc.


Here I am standing in front of the very famous photo of the early days of PARC.

The list of incredibly talented individuals and inventions are literally too numerous to list on a blog post.  Here are just a tiny subset of the ground breaking inventions (as listed at PARC's homepage)

  • the laser printer
  • object-oriented computing
  • the personal workstation
  • ethernet
  • distributed computing
  • VLSI circuit design
  • WORM
  • natural language programming


On the right are some very early robots.


Above is the world's first laser printer.

Above is the world's first scanner.


Above is me touching the world's first production mouse created by Douglas Englebart.
I remember being ten feet away from Steve Jobs at Sun event when he retold the famous December 1979 "Steve Jobs visits PARC and sees a GUI and a mouse for the first time."

The world's first personal computer - the Xerox Alto.



Above is Bob Metcalfe's ethernet boxes that were invented at PARC and the first VOIP which was the 1982 etherphone that you see as well.


The next day, I thought as long as I visited the legendary PARX, I should at least swing by the legendary venture capitalist, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers on Sand Hill Road.  On my way to Tesla, after having lunch with my oldest son John at Facebook, I had to swing by Khosla Ventures below.