111–120 of 122 posts
SRI has its fingers in a lot of pies..including surgical robotics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight "It's a good story. Unfortunately, it's also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong." Full details at https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html and there are many other references on the Web about that visit.
That first link was a fascinating read. I guess you wrote books about it?
Inventing the Future forbids any hindsight. No one knows how it will turn out.
Hence the title: what if we DO allow hindsight?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xerox received Apple stock for those meetings which they sold in the IPO. I’ve never seen anyone do a calculation of the present value of that stock but it’s probably a significant fraction of Xerox’s market cap today.
I'm pretty sure it was sold a long time ago. However, in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight I calculate some of the other PARC spinoffs they did. If they'd held onto all of it, it would dwarf the value of the copier & printer business.
It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.
Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.
Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was at the Computer History Museum 50th anniversary of Smalltalk event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loEREmEPEOY
This one is different from the other source I recall. It could have been someone else's oral history and she was mentioned. This is what she says in her own OH: -- [emph added: p.12 of https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... ] -- "When Stewart Brand came into PARC and there was a book Cybernetics 2? [II cybernetic frontiers], half of it was about the "secret" company and Stewart had pictures o…
https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
they did "capitalize" on their technology in the 80's and 90's, mainly by allowing entrepreneurs a license to build with it (with no money put in).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure it was sold a long time ago. However, in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight I calculate some of the other PARC spinoffs they did. If they'd held onto all of it, it would dwarf the value of the copier & printer business.
Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing. It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has. Beyond t…
https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
Butler Lampson quoted some Xerox executive at the time as saying, "We don't want to be a holding company!"
Nonetheless. Damn, WHAT a holding company!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have heard of Siri though that was named after SRI!
No it wasn't. https://www.gottabemobile.com/why-siri-is-called-siri/
Here’s the president of SRI saying it was a pure coincidence: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...
Here’s the cofounder saying that at least some of the appeal of the name was that some people liked the resemblance to SRI: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/12/21/how-did-siri-g...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I wonder how much money they milked out of the DoD on remote viewing and stuff like that.
My favorite explanation for the remote viewing stuff is that it was cover for advanced spy satellite imagery and transmission. Explaining away new capabilities you want to keep unknown to the world as "magic." https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1371213766734573569?t=lrW... The other theory I've encountered is that it was cover for ongoing mind control research after MKULTRA had to be wound down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one is different from the other source I recall. It could have been someone else's oral history and she was mentioned. This is what she says in her own OH: -- [emph added: p.12 of https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... ] -- "When Stewart Brand came into PARC and there was a book Cybernetics 2? [II cybernetic frontiers], half of it was about the "secret" company and Stewart had pictures o…
re the CVC program: I wrote about that extensively in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight they did "capitalize" on their technology in the 80's and 90's, mainly by allowing entrepreneurs a license to build with it (with no money put in).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Mouse, of course - Magnetic check ink - ERMA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Recording_Machine,_... More importantly: Stanford, SRI, and the high signal of connected people in Palo Alto created lots of inventions and companies. Sports metaphor: when they're on the team, the team scores more indirectly by their presence. Palo Alto-Stanford has been a modern "Venice" in terms of center of business-meets-acad…
Boston used to have a viable computer industry but it's all largely faded away with the minicomputers. Oh well. They've got the drug business now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
re the CVC program: I wrote about that extensively in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight they did "capitalize" on their technology in the 80's and 90's, mainly by allowing entrepreneurs a license to build with it (with no money put in).
Thanks for the interesting link. Who knew about Beretta? TIL!