9 Mar
2025
9 Mar
'25
1:30 a.m.
On Mar 8, 2025, at 7:52 PM, Rob Pike
<robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I visited PARC a few times and found it salubrious. The culture was
peculiar (not necessarily in a bad way, but I didn't understand yet
how SV worked (literally)), but the building was cosy and the people
seemed happy.
I worked in the PARC building as a grad student and later as research staff. I liked the
building, not least because one could bike there from campus or houses in Palo Alto. As
for the culture, I think the book "Dealers of Lightning" is fairly accurate.
In the 70's and 80's there was little connection between PARC and the rest of
Silicon Valley. PARC had lots of contacts and visitors from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU,
Cambridge UK, ETH, and other schools, but not all that much interchange with other SV
companies. Connections were stronger with Xerox in LA as they tried to make a go of
products.
I was especially fond of the PARC softball leagues and trips to the Goose in Menlo Park.
After a bunch of folks (including me) left to join Digital research labs in Palo Alto,
there were still more connections with universities and with Digital back east than with
the rest of the valley. There was little contact with other industrial research except
for program committees.
As for the Unix Way (tm) I think the folks at PARC were honestly puzzled, if they thought
about it at all. Most were Tenex sorts of folks, or interested in languages, GUIs, and
distributed computing. Unix was time sharing, and something you did if you didn't
have your own computer.
-L