The 1970s Xerox Conference That Predicted the Future of Work

In November 1977, some 300 executives and their wives flew in from all over the world on first-class tickets to spend four days in the sun at the Xerox World Conference. Between meetings for the men and fashion shows for the wives, the visitors slept in luxury rooms at the Boca Raton Hotel and Club and attended cocktail parties and a keynote by Henry Kissinger. Now, on the last morning of the last day, they had assembled for the highlight of the conference: Futures Day, an invitation-only demonstration of the Alto personal computer system developed at Xerox PARC, the company's research center in Palo Alto. Bob Taylor, who ran PARC's Computer Science Laboratory that had helped develop the Alto system, was pleased to have a chance to show Xerox executives the breakthrough that today would be called a personal computer. He believed that the machines would be transformational, eliminating much of what he called the "drudgery of office work" and freeing office workers "to attend to higher-level functions so necessary to a human's estimate of his own worth."