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by teleforce 2052 days ago
Need to know what's type of water the people at Xerox Palo Alto were drinking.

They pioneered many groundbreaking and game changing works on computing including (but not limited to) windowing desktop environment, integrated programming/structural editor with CEDAR/Tioga, SQL (team moved to Oracle), Ethernet networks, laser printer, VLSI and Jupiter operational transform for distributed computing (precursor to CRDT). Each of this technology is now an industry of its own.
2 comments
vvanders 2052 days ago
I kinda feel like Dealers of Lightning should be required reading at this point[1], both for the breadth of invention and how they squandered it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

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pjmlp 2052 days ago
Unfortunately we are still quite far from the safe computing platforms they were using at Xerox (Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa and Mesa/Cedar).

The best we have gotten so far are the hybrids .NET/Windows, JME, Android Java/Linux, Chrome/Linux, Swift/iOS/macOS.

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