Another One Gone

[stickmaker]

Physicist Jack Goldman has died. Goldman was the chief scientist for Xerox Corp. In 1970, he was put in charge of California's Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC for short, purposely located 3,000 miles from Xerox headquarters. Goldman staffed PARC with top scientists to create new technologies, and they quickly churned out results. They invented the the first modern personal computer (complete with a new idea called a graphical user interface, through which the user would manipulate the computer with something developed with the Stanford Research Institute called a "mouse"). They invented the laser printer, and they networked their new "personal" computers with something else they invented: Ethernet. That's still not all: they developed InterPress, the precursor to PostScript, and object-oriented programming. They then showed their work off. Including most famously to a visitor named Steve Jobs.

Comments

[donsimpson.livejournal.com]

That graphical user interface, though the PARC scientists were developing it on desk-sized consoles called "Alto"s, was intended to eventually be part of a device they called a "Dynabook", which we would call a "tablet computer" today. And they developed computer-assisted design programs for things like integrated circuits. They built their mainframe computer themselves, out of off-the-shelf parts, plus custom cables. I was working at Hawley Laboratories, so I got to solder all the connections on those cables. Jack Hawley also designed and built mice for PARC (their original Englebart mice were made of balsa wood and radio volume knobs), so I got to visit and try out the Alto stuff, and look at their "server" (a roomful of washing-machine-sized hard disk drives), their DARPA internet node, and similar stuff that I was totally unequipped to properly appreciate at the time.