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).