ParcSlope is our great new Hybrid MacBook Stand that you can type on. It also happens to be a cool neighborhood in Brooklyn. But why the ‘c’ in ParcSlope instead of the typical ‘k’?
There’s actually an homage to Mac built into the name ParcSlope. Here’s the rest of the story.
Picking up the story from CNET (full version here)…
“In 1979, Apple was working on a successor to the Apple II called the Lisa. But the product team hadn’t yet settled on implementing a graphical user interface. The Macintosh at that point was a research project with four people, and wasn’t even on Steve Jobs’ radar. It was a visit by Jobs to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center late in 1979 that set Apple on a new course that would revolutionize personal computing.
During a couple of visits to Xerox PARC, Jobs and a few other Apple employees got to see the Xerox’s Alto computer in action. This was an eye-opener. The Alto computer came with with icons, windows, folders, a mouse, pop-up menus, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor, Ethernet-based local networking, and network-based printing and games. The concept of “cut, copy and paste,” was also part of the demonstration as well as the Smalltalk programming environment.
“Steve was very excited and was pacing around the room, and occasionally looking at the screen,” said former Xerox PARC and Apple computer scientist Larry Tesler. He recalled Jobs’ reaction as he led them on the product tour. “You are sitting on a goldmine. Why aren’t you doing something with this technology…you could change this world.’ It was clear to him that Xerox was never going to do the kind of revolution things he was envisioning.” (Tesler was so impressed by Jobs that he went to work at Apple the following year to manage the Lisa applications team.)”
So what’s in a name? The PARC in ParcSlope is there as a hat-tip, an Easter Egg, to the team at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that helped inspire the Mac. As Paul Harvey says, now you know the rest of the story.
Read the full CNET article “Tracing the origins of the Macintosh” here. And get a brand-new ParcSlope for your MacBook here.
