A walk in the Parc

Mark Wai mwai at ibm.net
Sat May 23 13:51:31 UTC 1998


Squeakers -

There is an article in this issue of computerworld titled: 'A walk in the
Parc'.  It is a very short article that talks a little about the famous
Xerox Parc lab and how they are now seriously treat their inventions,
patents and intellectural properties as oppose to give away in the past.

It is interesting to note that for some of the most 'important' things that
the article mentioned, most of them are somewhat related to Smalltalk:  GUI,
icons, pull-down menus, overlapping windows interface, bit-mapped display,
object-oriented language and notebook computer etc.,.  When asked John Seely
Brown, the director of Xerox Parc, what is the largest impact project, Brown
mentioned the 'Smart matter'.  One other interesting project mentioned was
hyperbolic tree browser.  The idea is simple and sound and it looks like it
will have some practical use though I have tried it before and it was not as
smooth as I wanted (the one that I tried was implemented in Java).

I thought that I should mention here because I know quite a few Squeak team
members were from Xerox Parc and others who have admired the work from Xerox
Parc might be interested in the article as well.

Thanks.
--
Mark Wai
Frontier Systems Architecture Inc.	
mailto: mwai at ibm.net or:[ mwai at frontiersa.com] 
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