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Xerox PARC in the 1970s had, IIRC (not sure!), three main groups - the computing group, the physics group, and a third group. The computing group gets all the praise. What were the other two groups? And what did they do?
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Dealers of Lightning is the best book about PARC. Fumbling the Future is more of a polemic but less respectful. I’d recommend reading both if interested. Also Copies in Seconds, the og Xerography story, provides context from the copy/print history. They’re not quite villains.
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Someone at HP Labs once explained to me the tension between interesting research and finding a way to make a tiny improvement to ink jet cartridges. As he said: the latter were probably worth $100 million / tiny improvement. So it was a difficult line to walk...
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