parc

For the last week, attorneys for Apple and Samsung have been arguing over rounded corners, icons, bezels, ornamental designs and horizontal lozenge-shaped slots.

After hearing testimony -- first from Apple's witnesses and then from Samsung -- a jury at the U.S District Court in the heart of Silicon Valley will decide whether Samsung's broad array of mobile products infringed on patents and designs associated with the iPad and iPhone. 

Samsung is contending that its devices are not illegally derivative of Apple's products, and that Apple looked to Sony in developing designs for the iPhone. … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Since 2006, Maker Faire has offered tens of thousands of people an annual celebration of the best and brightest in the do-it-yourself movement.

But while everyone from individual tinkerers who have built small rockets to two people doing amazing things with Diet Coke and Mentos to paper airplane masters and crafters making magic out of felt has had a venue for the last five years to showcase their innovative projects, there's never been a forum for the growing number of people and companies that are developing the new business platforms that are merging manufacturing and making. … Read more

The famed Xerox PARC has lost its founder.

Jacob Goldman, a physicist who started Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, died on Tuesday in Westport, Conn., at the age of 90.

Goldman was lauded in a New York Times obituary as a "dynamic leader and ardent supporter of innovative technologies."

Launched in 1970, Xerox PARC is known in computer history as the hub that developed many of the technologies we take for granted today. Its scientists and researchers teamed up to design the Alto, the first modern personal computer; laser printing; the graphical user interface; the first WYSIWYG (… Read more

At a Churchill Club event in San Jose, Calif., former PARC engineer Larry Tesler talks about Steve Jobs' trips to Xerox's PARC, including the one where Jobs eyed the company's graphical user interface prototype, which ended up making it into the Mac OS. Tesler decided to leave Xerox soon after and started working at Apple.

See also: The story behind Apple's NeXT OS in 1996 (video)

This story originally appeared at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline "PARC scientist recalls Jobs' famous Xerox visits (video)."

At age 17, Daniel Brusilovsky had his moment in the media spotlight, but not for reasons to brag about. In February 2010, the then-intern at TechCrunch was fired for allegedly soliciting bribes for a MacBook Air in exchange for start-up coverage.

"Unfortunately, without going into the particulars, I made a mistake and publicly paid the price for it," said Brusilovsky, now 18. "It's something I hope others don't have to go through, but I never lost sight of my vision to help entrepreneurs and specifically teens, and wasn't going to let this get in … Read more

PALO ALTO, California--It's hard to believe, but PARC is 40.

Known for years as Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center is now a wholly owned Xerox spin-off working for a wide variety of corporate clients after years of doing world-class R&D exclusively for the copier giant.

And on Thursday, with dozens of the research institution's alumni on hand, PARC threw itself a 40th birthday party.

For those not familiar with its accomplishments, PARC may best be remembered for its roles as the birthplace of the laser printer, the graphical user interface, Ethernet networking, and more. … Read more

Update, Tuesday, 12:17 PST: This piece was originally intended as an audio slide show, but was published prematurely. We've reworked the images into a more traditional non-audio slide show embedded below.

Almost 40 years ago, Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center as a West Coast center of research and development. Since then, research at these labs has produced some of the technological innovations that have been widely adopted across today's modern computing systems, including laser printing and Ethernet.

Spun off as a subsidiary of Xerox in 2002, today PARC collaborates with clients, acting as an incubator … Read more

Think of it as the future of today's paper.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and parent company Xerox are experimenting with a type of paper and a complementary printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours. A restaurant, for instance, could print its daily specials on a piece of paper, attach the pieces of paper to menus, and then collect the sheets of then-blank paper in the morning to run through the printer again.

How does it work? The paper is coated with photosensitive chemicals that turn dark when hit with UV light. … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--It looks and feels like a square, yellow crayon.

But it's actually a lot more sophisticated than that. It's ink in solid form (aptly called "solid ink") made of a polymeric resin, and Xerox researchers are using it, combined with advances in print head technology to make a greener printer.

Solid ink is different from what's used in the average desktop printer. Instead of buying cartridges filled with liquid ink, which are inserted into small print heads that race back and forth to transfer an image to paper, solid ink is melted, … Read more