📙 Book Review – Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
Continuing with biographies, I picked up Dealers of Lightning and was absolutely stunned by PARC. It’s no secret their work brought about the UI for both Windows and Mac. But, there is so much more. Dare I say, the UI was the tip of the iceberg. There was the laser printer, Ethernet, multi-node networking, ARPANET, photo editing, the “desktop” paradigm, object oriented programming, the mouse, bitmap graphics, and of course, the Alto which tied all this together. Even the concept of the iPad was conceptualized at PARC, the DynaBook. So much of our everyday computing lives trace their roots back to PARC. It’s amazing and impressive how much they developed, and this was before 99% of the public even knew what a computer was or what they could do with it. It’s almost laughable there was a time when a computer didn’t have an express purpose. And the idea of an idle computer was unheard of. You paid for compute […]
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