[alankay]

Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research.

Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wound up doing further research.

But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I and many others.

It was a calling, never a job.

[Aloha]

When I was 17-18, I read 'Dealers of Lightning' it clued me into the foundations laid for modern computing in the 60-70's in the Bay Area (between SRI, CSAIL and PARC), and markedly changed my own approach to information and computing.

I've always wondered how those who were featured in the book felt about it?

[alankay]

The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA) is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and most accurate.

"Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level but far from the bottom. Its flaws are too much "Heroes' Journey" and a very complex and confused jumping around timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also has a lot of good stories, of which a reasonable number are "true enough".

"Fumbling The Future" is extremely inaccurate.

[kalberg6429]

"It was a calling, never a job." - This is so heart-warming to read, in a world where the lust for more and more money seems to be so depressingly high at times.

[danmaz74]

> Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did).

Metcalfe?

[impeachgod]

I think Alan Kay is referring to Charles Simonyi. According to Forbes, his net worth is $4.3 billion: https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-simonyi/

[exdsq]

Looking at all of the work that came out of Parc during your time there... What drew you to that company to begin with? I find it amazing that so many of the Big Names in computer science/software engineering came from the same place.

[alankay]

Parc was an "extension" or "outgrowth" of the ARPA (before the "D") sponsored computer research in the 60s that was catalyzed by Congress overreacting to Viet Nam protests and changing ARPA's charter for the worse.

ARPA/Parc as a community had the best and most enlightened funding for computing research starting in 1962 (Parc started in 1970), and a very large percentage of the familiar technologies of today -- including personal computing, tablets, dynamic OOP, the GUI, the Internet, etc -- were invented by it.

The best (and pretty accurate) book about this remarkable group is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop.

Bob Taylor, who had been a director of the ARPA computing research, looked for a way to fund some of the "ARPA Dream" projects that Congress was curtailing, and found Xerox (which wanted to set up a longer range research lab).

Taylor was particularly interested in recruiting a number of the young Phds that ARPA had funded, and I was one of them.