[8] In 1969, Goldman talked with George Pake, a physicist specializing in nuclear magnetic resonance and provost of Washington University in St. Louis, about starting a second research center for Xerox.

[10] Its 3,000-mile distance from Xerox headquarters in Rochester, New York, afforded scientists at the new lab great freedom in their work, but it increased the difficulty of persuading management of the promise of some of their greatest achievements.

In its early years, PARC's West Coast location helped it hire many employees of the nearby SRI Augmentation Research Center (ARC) as that facility's funding from DARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force began to be reduced.

[11] After three decades as a division of Xerox, PARC was transformed in 2002[7] into an independent, wholly owned subsidiary company dedicated to developing and maturing advances in science and business concepts.

[17] PARC's distinguished researchers include four Turing Award winners: Butler Lampson (1992), Alan Kay (2003), Charles P. Thacker (2009), and Robert Metcalfe (2022).

Lampson, Kay, Bob Taylor, and Thacker received the National Academy of Engineering's prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2004 for their work on the Alto.

[18] Xerox has been heavily criticized, particularly by business historians, for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations.

Metaphor Computer Systems extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office-automation model and sold the company to IBM.