The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):

XEROX PARC
 /zee'roks park?/, n.

    The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early
    1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
    groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows,
    and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser
    printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines
    anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade.
    Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in their own company, so
    much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that
    specialized in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.

    The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suits has
    been well anatomized in Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then
    Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C.
    Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).


The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

XEROX PARC
Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto Research Centre
PARC

   /zee'roks park'/ Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research
   Center.

   For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the
   mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
   ground-breaking hardware and software innovations.  The modern
   mice, windows, and icons (WIMP) style of software interface
   was invented there.  So was the laser printer and the
   local-area network; Smalltalk; and PARC's series of D
   machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the
   1980s by a decade.  Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without
   honour in their own company, so much so that it became a
   standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialised in
   developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.

   The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's
   top-level suits has been well described in the reference
   below.

   ["Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the
   First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert
   C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN
   0-688-09511-9)].

   [Jargon File]

   (1995-01-26)