Nobody’s Perfect: Xerox PARC's Failures

While PARC may have had more than its share of successes, like any organization it couldn't escape some failures. The one most frequently cited by former PARC researchers is Polos.

Polos was an alternate approach to distributed computing. While Thacker and McCreight were designing the Alto, another group at PARC was working with a cluster of 12 Data General Novas, attempting to distribute functions among the machines so that one machine would handle editing, one would handle input and output, another would handle filing.

With Altos," Sutherland said, everything each person needed was put in each machine on a small scale. Polos was an attempt to slice the pie in a different way-to split up offices functionally."

By the time Polos was working, the Alto computers were proliferating throughout PARC, so Polos was shut down. But it had an afterlife: Sutherland distributed the 12 Novas among other Xerox divisions, where they served a the first remote gateways onto PARC's Alto network, and the Polos displays were used as terminals within PARC until they were junked in 1977. Another major PARC project that failed was a combination optical character reader and facsimile machine. The idea was to develop a system that could take printed pages of mixed text and graphics, recognize the text as such and transmit the characters in their ASCII code, then send the rest of the material using the less-efficient facsimile coding method.

It was fabulously complicated and fairly crazy," said Charles Simonyi, now manager of application development at Microsoft Corp. On this project they had this incredible piece of hardware that was the equivalent of a 10,000-line Fortran program." Unfortunately, the equivalent of tens of thousands of lines of Fortran in those days meant tens of thousands of individual integrated circuits.

While we made substantial progress at the algorithmic and architecture level,'' said Conway, who worked on the OCR project, it became clear that with the circuit technology at that time it wouldn't be anywhere near an economically viable thing." The project was dropped in 1975.