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.