Aside from his tenure at Xerox, McColough was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee between 1973 and 1974,[1][2][3] was chairman of United Way of America, and served on the Board of Trustees at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York Stock Exchange, Bank of New York, Wachovia, Citigroup, Knight Ridder, and Union Carbide Corporation.

Reginald McColough was a director of public works for the Parliament of Canada, and was responsible for the modernization and development of Cape Breton Island in northern Nova Scotia.

While living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, McColough met and married socialite Mary Virginia White, daughter of James J.

As one of the first companies to step into the lucrative arena and potential growth market, Xerox's annual revenues soared from $40 million in 1960 to almost $3 billion in the early 1970s.

is that McColough as CEO was a restless, energetic but amiable man who had little time for memos, letters and meetings that normally make up the routine of daily corporate life.

[citation needed] McColough started the PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), meant to operate something like AT&T's Bell Labs.

PARC researchers developed pioneering commercial products in the field of personal computers—such as the Alto personal computer, GUI (graphical user interface), the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, the first commercial mouse, Ethernet network architecture, OOP (object-oriented programming), PDL (Page Description Language), Internet protocols, and laser printing.

"In spite of being a veritable cradle of innovation during the formative years of personal computing and the Internet, PARC rarely convinced Xerox to take its ideas from laboratory prototypes to commercially successful products," stated an article about PARC at the "Smart Computing in Plain English" Website.