But PARC is also famous because the products and profits associated with these breakthroughs arrived through other companies. Steve Jobs and Apple are credited with introducing the first commercial GUI workstations: the Lisa and the Mac. Bill Gates and Microsoft gave us Windows on x86 PCs. 3Com successfully exploited Ethernet. And profits from laser printers flowed to Cannon, Lexmark, and Hewlett-Packard.

Worse for PARC: 3Com, Adobe, and Digital Equipment Corp were formed by former PARC staffers who'd left out of frustration with PARC's direction and unwillingness to realize their inventions. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft hired away other brains. Alan Kay, who'd built the world's first object-oriented programming language, SmallTalk, went to Apple, while a fresh-faced Charles Simonyi, who'd worked on PARC's WYSIWYG interface, left to join Microsoft, where he gave us Word and Excel and helped Gates become one of the world's richest men.

At ESUG, the GemStone/S team announced that the free web edition of GemStone/S has had its limits raised. Maximum repository size is now 16GB (up from 4), shared page cache is 2GB (up from 1), CPU limit is 2 (up from 1), and the limit on the total number of objects in the repository has been eliminated. So if it was possible to fit ‘em in 16GB, you could keep track of 2^40 objects (approx. 1 trillion).

This is very cool!

The Seaside core developers are pleased to announce the release of Seaside 3.0.

This release began development as the 2.9 codebase, but the significant scope and nature of the changes led us to realise that the work justifies bumping the version to 3.0. This change reflects the maturity of Seaside, and we believe the 3.0 codebase will be a solid foundation for the foreseeable development of the premier web application development framework in Smalltalk and for the applications and frameworks built upon it. We are confident that the new architecture will allow Seaside to continue to grow, while minimising the impact on our user base.

In an unexpected statement today, Apple have again changed their stance on the use of third-party development tools. In particular, they say that “we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need”. Daring Fireball has a nice summary of the key changes to the terms and conditions.