Triumph of the Nerds: Great Artists Steal

Due Date:

Friday, March 14, 2008

Objectives

  1. Describe in detail the impact on the development of the computer industry of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
  2. Define in your own words: GUI and OOP and relate these concepts to the work at Xerox PARC.
  3. List the computers companies that developed out of the work done at PARC. Include the names of the researchers who started these companies.

Proceedure

Add a document to your digital portfolio with the title: Contributions of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to the History of Computing. Answer each of the following questions in this document:

  1. What was Xerox PARC and why was it important to the history of the computer? Be sure to mention the three innovations developed at PARC and describe the importance of each.
  2. What is the Smalltalk system? Who developed it? What did it do?
  3. Who is Alan Kay? What did he contribute to the development of computing? What is the Dynabook? Is there any contemporary project which bares a similarity to the goals of the Dynabook? What did Alan Kay say about the best way to predict the future?



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