50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World

Re:50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World by matt_s on Thursday March 02, 2023 @07:10AM (#34994772)

Do you realize the concepts for computing tablets came out of PARC as well?

Alan Kay gave a couple lectures at Stanford on "How to Invent the Future" and went over all the stuff that came out of there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

Much of what we use today was conceptualized 50+ years ago. PARC's outputs paid off immensely for Xerox over a very long period of time since they picked a tech (laser printing) that was perfect for their wheelhouse. Companies and our culture these days don't allow for exploration like PARC was allowed. There is too much focus on monetizing everything and having an ROI.

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Re:50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World by HarHarVeryFunny on Thursday March 02, 2023 @08:43AM (#34995515)

Yes - so much of modern computing came from PARC. Ethernet too. The reputation of PARC though has always been that it was a squandered asset - they invented so much genuinely useful technology and Xerox failed to capitalize on the majority of it.

For a while Blue Skies research labs such as PARC, IBM Watson, Bell Labs seemed to have disappeared, but arguably they are back (different companies/labs though) now with a focus on ML/AI. I'm not sure which commercial labs are still doing fundamental material science research though.

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Re:50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World by theGnuMe on Thursday March 02, 2023 @03:19PM (#35001401)

I think we will see engineering innovation in the AI/ML space as new processors are developed. We may get more interesting software as well. One problem is that academics need million dollar compute budgets at the moment to even get close to the output of Google/OpenAI/FAIR. Hopefully the DOD, DOE, NSF and NIH and ultimately Congress will act.

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