PARC was in the glory days of corporate research labs. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Almaden, Sarnoff Labs, HP Labs, etc. Research labs that were part of big companies. I was lucky enough to visit many of those in their prime.<p>I got to tour PARC in 1975, years before Steve Jobs did, when I took a summer course in computer architecture taught by William McKeeman. He was the architect of a generation of Burroughs CPUs, and knew everybody in CPU design. So I met Alan Kay before anybody had heard of him. He had a vision, but it wasn't quite what most people think it was. He said the big advantage they had was that they were funded heavily enough to build the single-user computers of the future now. The Alto was over $20K (some said $50K) per unit, which was insanely expensive for a single user computer. It took another decade to get the cost down. Kay's group saw as their job to get the software ready for when the hardware came down in price.<p>Kay was thinking that the killer app for personal computers was going to be simulations. He later had a demo graphical hospital simulation, which was a discrite-event simulator where patients came in with a complaint ("I am a victim of Bowlerthumb"), and went through Admitting, Examination, Surgery, etc. out to Discharge. Smalltalk is based on Simula, an Algol-derived simulation language, and was originally intended for discrite-event simulation. Document preparation and mail were a sideline.[1]<p>Kay was operating in an empty world. Almost nobody else was throwing money at what software should look like a decade or two hence, for a class of machines that didn't exist yet. That was a huge advantage. Anything good that was done there advanced the state of the art.<p>Kay's group was only a small part of PARC. There were other people in the large building working on copier technology and the physics behind xerography. (Unfortunately for Xerox, they didn't invent organic photoconductors, which made xerography machines much smaller and cheaper. IBM did.) Kay's group had considerable engineering resources to draw upon, machine shops and electronics shops and chemistry labs that could make things. They were able to have their own CRT tubes made for the Alto. It's a lot easier to invent when you have that kind of substantial engineering backup. That's why they were able to build a laser printer - they were in an engineering facility that could build both a CRT and a copier. Kay's group just did the software and some of the electronics.<p>That's hard to reproduce - all that engineering backup. It's only available within a big business that makes real stuff. Today, Samsung and Fujitsu have labs like that, but few US companies, at least in the electronics/computer sector, do. There are a few military operations with such capabilities - China Lake Naval Weapons Center is one; they can design, build, and flight-test something in-house.<p>So that's why it's hard to reproduce PARC - you need an empty field of research, and heavy engineering backup.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1977/03/01646405.pdf</a>