The Palo Alto Research Center, commonly referred to as Park, and which was formerly known as Xerox Park,

is a research and development company with a great many accomplishments to its name.

Xerox created Park as a separate division within its broader umbrella company,

so that it would have an entity under its corporate egos that would, despite

being under that larger umbrella, still be separated from the everyday activities and deadlines

that defined normal operations at Xerox proper. The main park facility was even located on the

other side of the United States, in Palo Alto,

California, while the main Xerox headquarters was located in Rochester, New York.

And that ensured that there was something of an air gap between the usual corporate goings-on

and whatever the park folk decided to get themselves up to.

In its first decades of life, the people at Park invented or incubated the laser printer,

bitmap graphics, the graphical user interface, meaning the foundations of pretty much every

operating system and all the software that is run on an

operating system that you've ever used on any device ever. The what you see is what you get,

or whizzywig, text editor, meaning the type of editor that is used in software like Microsoft Word

and Google Docs, that allows you to type something and add line breaks

and to bold certain words by clicking on a button, things like that. They developed Interpress,

which was the precursor to PostScript, which is the technology that allows you to print

text at a high resolution, and which sparked the so-called desktop publishing revolution.

They invented Ethernet, object-oriented programming, prototype-based programming,

and the Model View Controller programming architecture, which is used by programming languages

like Java, C-sharp, Ruby, and PHP.

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