When he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe briefly considered pursuing a career in tennis. He was captain of the 1968–1969 MIT tennis team, which had a record of 15 wins and 4 losses, and he was ranked sixth in New England in doubles, even while taking classes and holding a programming job at defense contractor Raytheon. That, unfortunately, was not enough to make a go of it. "There's playing pros and there's teaching pros," Metcalfe says. "I could easily be a teaching pro, but that just seemed boring. Metcalfe wrote his undergraduate thesis on a bus coming back from a tennis match and submitted it to Minsky at the last possible moment. The tennis world's loss was the computer world's gain, however, as Metcalfe went on to become an Internet pioneer, develop Ethernet, and help get it named a networking standard, actions that earned him the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award on the 50th anniversary of the invention of the technology.

Back in 1982, computers meant one of two things in the popular imagination. Either they were room-sized machines used by the military-industrial complex to crunch data on stuff like nuclear wars and stock markets, or they were fridge-sized arcade games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Kraftwerk were singing about home computers, but if you owned one at all, it was probably a Sinclair ZX81, which was only marginally more sophisticated than a calculator. And yet, that summer, cinemagoers were catapulted into the digital future. Few appreciated it at the time but with 40 years' hindsight, Steven Lisberger's sci-fi adventure Tron was the shape of things to come: in cinema, in real life, and in virtual life.

Goldman tells it in another way. In 1969 Xerox had simply purchased Scientific Knowledge Methods (SDS), a mainframe pc producer. "When Xerox purchased SDS," he recalled, "I walked promptly into the workplace of Peter McColough and stated, 'Look, now that we're on this digital pc enterprise, we higher damned nicely have a analysis laboratory!' " In any case, the outcome was the Xerox Palo Alto Analysis Middle (PARC) in California, probably the most uncommon company analysis organizations of our time. PARC is one in all three analysis facilities inside Xerox; the opposite two are in Webster, N.Y., and Toronto, Ont., Canada. It employs roughly 350 researchers, managers, and help employees (by comparability, Bell Laboratories earlier than the AT&T breakup employed roughly 25,000). Within the mid-Seventies, near half of the highest 100 pc scientists on the earth have been working at PARC, and the laboratory boasted comparable energy in different fields, together with solid-state physics and optics.

A new GamesBeat event is around the corner! Learn more about what comes next. Customer expectations and needs are on the rise, exacerbating the challenge for companies facing a higher volume of customer requests during the pandemic. The issue is acute in field service work, where employees have to work on equipment with varying technical specifications -- often in confined, bandwidth-constrained, and hard-to-reach spaces. In a recent survey by The Service Council, over 90% of field workers said that more knowledge is required to service modern products while nearly 70% said that products are more complex today.

Anyone who uses the cut, copy and paste commands on their computer or mobile device has Larry Tesler to thank for making them so simple and easy to use. Tesler, who has died aged 74, began his work on cut, copy and paste in 1973, when he was hired by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Parc) in California. Among other things he worked with a fellow computer scientist, Tim Mott, on the development of Gypsy, a "modeless" word processor. At the time most software had modes: for example, you might press I to enter the insert mode, or R for the replace mode. But Tesler's research showed that non-expert users found modes confusing – and so he began to fight against them.

Cisco Systems (ticker: CSCO), IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), Seagate Technology (STX), Western Digital (WDC), Xerox Holdings (XRX), HP Inc. (HPQ), and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) still employ a total of 900,000 people. They account for $363 billion in annual revenue and $840 billion in stock market value. But their sales, accounting for inflation, are mostly going in reverse. The best of the bunch, Western Digital, is forecast to grow 4.4% next year. Xerox, the worst, is likely to see a 4.7% decline. Wall Street bankers have begun to mount a rescue effort.

As Marcus du Sautoy greets me at the entrance to New College, Oxford, his appearance is a quiet riot of colour. His clothes rather suggest someone who ran into White Stuff or Fat Face and frantically grabbed anything he could find – in this case, a salmon zip-up top, multihued check trousers and shoes that are a headache-inducing shade of turquoise. When we settle down to talk in a nearby meeting room, he repeatedly glances at a notepad – whose pages, just to add to all the garishness, are a bold shade of yellow. They are full of what look like scrawled equations, mixed with odd-looking shapes: the raw material, he explains, of a project involving very complicated geometry. "There's an infinite symmetrical structure that I'm looking at," he says, "and I think the top bit of it will tell me everything that's going on inside it. It's almost like an infinite lake, and I should be able to know everything that's happening in it by looking at the first centimetre."

Expert system projects arc often based on collaboration with a single domain expert. This article is based on work performed in collaboration with many other colleagues and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their influence on the ideas plescnted here The MDX pro,ject was a collahorat,ion between the first ant,hor, B Chandrasekaran, and J W Smith at Ohio State Solnc of the key people in the DARN project were Daniel Bohrow, Johann dcKlcer, and Mark Stefik at Xerox PARC and Milt Mallory and Ron Brown at Xerox OSD. The approach described here is an empirical one based on our experience with different expert, systems. Anecdotes from various prqjects illustrate the issues. Judging the Suitability of an Expert Systems Task Before cvcn bcginuing to build an expert, system, you must decide if the domain is suitable, given the current statcof-the-art of both the t,cchnology of knowledge eugineering and the art, of acquiring knowledge.

An informal workshop on concurrent logic programming, metaprogramming, and open systems was held at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on 8-9 September 1987 with support from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The 50 workshop participants came from the Japanese Fifth Generation Project (ICOT), the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, Imperial College in London, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), Cal Tech, Science University of Tokyo, Melbourne University, Calgary University, University of Wisconsin, Case Western Reserve, University of Oregon, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Quintus, Symbolics, IBM, and Xerox PARC. No proceedings were generated; instead, participants distributed copies of drafts, slides, and recent papers. A shared vision emerged from the morning session with concurrent logic programming fulfilling the same role that C and Assembler do now. Languages such as Flat Concurrent Prolog and Guarded Horn Clauses are seen as general-purpose, parallel machine languages and interface languages between hardware and software and not, as a newcomer to this field might expect, as high-level, AI, problemsolving languages.

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."