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A comment on The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Will Join SRI International. Parent comment

Re:The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Will Join SRI Intern... by retrocryptid on Monday April 24, 2023 @09:37PM (#35695543)
Yeah. SDS (later XDS) was bought up by Xerox just before Xerox launched PARC. In the "Fumbling the Future" book, there's several pages describing how PARC has to constantly push back against corporate who were trying to fold it (PARC) into SDS.

I wrote my first Lisp program on a 940 back in the 70s. IIRC, the Sigma series were the machines XDS built after the 940. I don't know they were super popular, but maybe you might have heard of them.

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Re:The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Will Join SRI Intern... by AlbertCory on Monday April 24, 2023 @11:39PM (#35696277)
There is actually a book which you can get for free (or could, at one time):

https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Nobody-Wanted-Years-Xerox/d...

we can call it "the book nobody wanted." /s

Strassman tells how he offered the PARC people a very good deal on an SDS machine, and they turned up their noses at it. They wanted a PDP-10, but they weren't allowed to buy from DEC, so they built their own lookalike (Maxc).

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