Xerox Corporation assembles a team of world-class experts in information and physical sciences to become what is known as ‘The Architects of Information.’ The company establishes the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) under the direction of Dr. George Pake. The charter for Xerox PARC is to create ‘The Office of the Future.’

Xerox PARC modulates a laser to create a bit-mapped electronic image on a xerographic copier drum. Not only does this demonstrate a novel way to print documents, but this invention of laser printing enables seamless rendering of digital documents onto paper, creating a multibillion dollar printing business for Xerox.

Xerox PARC designs Smalltalk – an object-oriented programming language that enables programs to be improved without being entirely rewritten. This innovation revolutionizes the software industry and influences subsequent programming systems.

The Xerox Alto personal workstation is created. Its client-server architecture means computing is no longer restricted to the hierarchical world of large, centralized mainframes. This evolving PC will subsequently employ the world’s first bit-mapped display, graphical user interface with windows and icons, WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor, local area network/file storage, and commercial mouse.

An internal memo proposes a system of linking workstations, files, and printers together using a coaxial cable within a local area network. The benefit is that components can join or leave the network without disturbing data traffic. The memo’s author coins the term “Ethernet” to describe the network. Ethernet grows into a global standard.

Xerox PARC computer scientists record the first video image on the first computer paint system – a graphics program and framebuffer computer. This paves the way for the earliest computer animations and later earns its inventors an Emmy and an Academy Award.

Xerox PARC coins the phrase to describe cut-and-paste bit-mapped editing: What You See Is What You Get (also known as ‘wizzy-wig’). This year, Xerox PARC also demonstrates the seminal Bravo word processing program (which leads to Microsoft Word) and device-independent imaging (which leads to Page Description Languages and influences subsequent design of Postscript).

Xerox PARC debuts the first GUI, which uses icons, pop-up menus, and overlapping windows that can be controlled easily using a point-and-click technique. The GUI famously (or infamously) influences the development of all subsequent personal computer interfaces.

Xerox PARC (with Caltech) defines a new representation of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuit design. This allows for greater computing power in more compact machines, reduces design time, and leads to a new generation of computer-aided design tools.

PARC pioneers the use of ethnography for human-centered technology design, work practice redesign, and more. It requires initiating collaboration among computer scientists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists. This approach leads to improvements in many workspaces, office products, and processes.

To enable spell-checking, dictionary, and other tools, Xerox PARC invents computational linguistic technologies based on understanding the structure of language. These lead to computer-automated visual recall, intelligent retrieval, and linguistic compression…and later enable deep meaning-based language parsing systems for search, text analytics, and more.

Non-erasable, magneto-optical storage device technology is developed at Xerox PARC. Initially, its purpose is to enable high-speed data access on the Palo Alto campus. Eventually, it becomes commercialized through Optimem (which evolves into Cipher Data Products).

Xerox files the software copyright for Smalltalk-80. It’s one of only three software copyrights in existence. Meanwhile, Interlisp and Cedar (the successor to Xerox’s Mesa programming environment) are implemented in Xerox systems, enhancing reliability and supporting rapid development.

The first optical cable-based local area network is operational. Eventually, it will enable commercial, fiber optic media for Ethernet, marketed through Synoptics (later acquired by Bay Networks, then Nortel Networks).

A one-inch array of amorphous silicon (a-Si), thin-film transistors is used to drive a small Corjet ionographic printhead. This technology enables Xerox to offer lower cost multifunction machines. Evolving expertise in a-Si thin-film transistors and sensors will become the backbone for many large-area electronic technologies.

Xerox PARC is home to the world’s first dual-beam lasers. These print twice as fast as single beams. Multi-beam lasers become a key enabler for high-speed, high-resolution production printing systems.

Xerox PARC designs a 16-bit coding system to represent any world script – in documents, user names, file names, or network services – in any combination with a single encoding. These scripts lead to the ISO/IEC 10646 and the corresponding Unicode industry standard that allow computers to consistently represent text.

The term ‘ubiquitous computing’ is coined at Xerox PARC to describe a future where people seamlessly access resources and control environments using mobile devices. Xerox PARC invents and builds fundamental devices that enables this to happen. Examples include the palm-sized PARCTab, notebook-sized PARCPad, lightweight portable document reader, and flexible computational infrastructure.

After inventing data glyphs, Xerox PARC pioneers the development of embedded data schemes that transform paper, and other surfaces, into computer-readable interfaces. Applications evolve to include check verification, smart paper, tracking codes, and much more.

Taking a unique approach to the visualization of information, Xerox PARC invents techniques that use human perceptual and cognitive capacities to help people make sense of large amounts of diverse information. The approach results in 3D rooms, the hyperbolic browser, and other ‘Focus+Context’ visualization techniques that present 3D views of information databases.

Xerox PARC builds the first x-ray imager using amorphous silicon. Continuing research will result in the formation of the company dpiX, which will market the world’s highest resolution active matrix, liquid crystal, flat-panel display and a digital x-ray system for medical imaging – thereby eliminating the reliance on traditional film.

Xerox PARC creates LamdaMOO, one of the oldest continuously operating real-time multi-user ‘dungeons’ or online environments. LamdaMOO provides a foundation for the U.S. Department of Defense’s collaborative computing systems, and later results in a company that provides live, web-based meeting and presentation solutions (and ultimately becomes Microsoft Live Meeting).

Collaborative filtering is implemented at Xerox PARC, inspired by the idea to involve human input (such as past user preferences and collaborators’ feedback) in helping information systems auto-filter content. Today, this approach enables recommender systems.