You could almost call him the father of modern computing. Jacob Goldman (pictured below), founder of Xerox PARC (now an independent company simply known as PARC), has passed away at the age of 90, New York Times reports. PARC’s contribution to technology ranges from the GUIs on all of today’s computers to laser printing and Ethernet.
For those of you who don’t know, the Mac is not completely Steve Jobs’ creation. He essentially copied PARC’s prototype UI (PARC had allowed him to do this in exchange for stock options) and put it into the first Macintosh. And that is the basis of all modern computers, be it Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
Goldman’s contribution to technology is huge, and it is a great shame that he is often forgotten about. It wasn’t really Apple who created the first UI with icons and a mouse, it was him and PARC. They were the very first to do it.
PARC’s fatal flaw however was that nothing was truly commercialised, and as a result, they did not and have not received much credit. Ethernet and laser printing were also two defining inventions from PARC: imagine how different things would be if we had to rely on inkjet and how the internet would never have come about without Ethernet technology.