Xerox PARC

In 1970, Xerox Corporation gathered together a team of world-class researchers and gave them the mission of creating "the architecture of information." The scientists of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) lived up to this challenge by inventing personal distributed computing, graphical user interfaces (GUI), the first commercial mouse, bitmapped displays, Ethernet, client/server architecture, object-oriented programming, laser printing, and many of the basic protocols of the Internet.

PARC technologies have changed the world. Director John Seely Brown, a brilliant technologist and business thinker, advocates that it is time to look beyond our obsession with technology and information and rather appreciate how social networks (the people-to-people kind) shape ideas of how we work and how we live. PARC's motto: The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.