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)