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Dealers of Lightning

Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

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Dealers of Lightning

Written by: Michael Hiltzik
Narrated by: Forrest Sawyer
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About this listen

 Dealers of Lightning is the riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC - a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the '70s and '80s. Here for the first time is revealed in piercing detail the true story of the extraordinary group that aimed to bring about a technological dawn that would change the world - and succeeded.

Based on extensive interviews with scientists, engineers, administrators, and corporate executives who lived the story, Dealers of Lightning takes the listener on a journey from PARC's beginnings in a dusty, abandoned building at the edge of the Stanford University campus to its triumph as a hothouse of ideas that spawned not only the first personal computer, but the windows-style graphical user interface, the laser printer, much of the indispensable technology of the Internet, and a great deal more. It shows how and why Xerox, despite its willingness to grant PARC unlimited funding and the responsibility for developing breakthroughs to keep the corporation on the cutting edge of office technology, remained forever unable to grasp (and, consequently, exploit) the innovations that PARC delivered, and details the increasing frustration of the original PARC scientists, many of whom would go on to build their fortunes upon the very ideas Xerox so rashly discarded.

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"...for any student of business or technology, Dealers of Lightning offers a gem of a story that has never before been so well told." (The New York Times Book Review)

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Not as magical a story as expected

In the end PARC is a corporate story more than an innovation story. Maybe I’m more disappointed by the factual truth of the story than the storytelling or maybe it has been written too long ago to hit home. Regardless, it is a valuable cautionary tale about corporate innovation. The conclusions are misguided in hindsight won’t he likes of Google Labs having greatly surpassed the results of PARC.

Alternative reading : The Idea Factory ( The story of Bell Labs was a lot more fun to read)

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