Question
Who was specifically responsible for the invention of the "windows" GUI paradigm at Xerox PARC?
Answer
If you insist on assigning credit (a bad idea as I will explain) Alan Kay probably deserves much of the credit.
You need to remember that the legendary-era PARC was a very collaborative environment with a lot of ideas emerging in diffuse ways from their famous bean bag talks and general cross-fertilization of ideas among a set of really smart people who were the opposite of specialists. So who knows what germs of ideas were possibly planted by say, Butler Lampson, the hardware guy? Charles Simonyi is most associated with the applications layer, but chances are, he contributed at the more fundamental levels as well.
Also remember that PARC was a famously leaky institution in a very fertile broader environment. Douglas Engelbart and his collaborators at SRI (and SRI generally) was an important outside influence. With its open doors in/out policy who knows what ideas leaked in? We pay too much attention to the ideas that leaked "out" (i.e., Steve Jobs). There was also a lot of stuff that happened before PARC was ever formed (remember that Robert Taylor specifically went around hunting for talent during his earlier DARPA career, the institutions/places he found his talent were responsible for catalyzing many early stage ideas that eventually came to fruition at PARC, which gets possibly too much of the credit. The University of Utah and Kay's peers there probably deserve as much of the institutional credit for stuff that happend at PARC due to Kay.
More generally, PARC is an example of a late-stage industrial innovation hub where a systems innovation became crystalized. It was one of the last on-the-cusp revolutions where individual names became well known.
The 18th century idea of "invention" was genuinely more individual and less systemic. By the time the Wright Brothers took credit for airplanes, systemic effects were already extremely important (the Wrights deserve at most 20-30% credit for the airplane). Edison was more innovation manager than inventor, and since we didn't have the word back then, he gets an overblown personal reputation for inventiveness which came out of a system.
PARC represents the last major revolution where individuals got a lot of credit and became famous. Quick: who invented the Internet? Who invented gene sequencing? Who invented carbon fiber composite materials? Who invented IBM's Watson or Deep Blue? Who invented the Space Shuttle?
The reason you don't know the answers is that there ARE no meaningful answers. The age of idolized individual inventors has been over for about 30 years.
This does not mean groups/committees invented these things. It just means that system effects became more important than individual effects.
This is one reason true modern "inventors" who actually do work that is much less systemic than average seem so strange and anachronistic (I am thinking of people like James Dyson (the vacuum guy), Burt Rutan (Spaceship One) and Dean Kamen (Segway)).
You need to remember that the legendary-era PARC was a very collaborative environment with a lot of ideas emerging in diffuse ways from their famous bean bag talks and general cross-fertilization of ideas among a set of really smart people who were the opposite of specialists. So who knows what germs of ideas were possibly planted by say, Butler Lampson, the hardware guy? Charles Simonyi is most associated with the applications layer, but chances are, he contributed at the more fundamental levels as well.
Also remember that PARC was a famously leaky institution in a very fertile broader environment. Douglas Engelbart and his collaborators at SRI (and SRI generally) was an important outside influence. With its open doors in/out policy who knows what ideas leaked in? We pay too much attention to the ideas that leaked "out" (i.e., Steve Jobs). There was also a lot of stuff that happened before PARC was ever formed (remember that Robert Taylor specifically went around hunting for talent during his earlier DARPA career, the institutions/places he found his talent were responsible for catalyzing many early stage ideas that eventually came to fruition at PARC, which gets possibly too much of the credit. The University of Utah and Kay's peers there probably deserve as much of the institutional credit for stuff that happend at PARC due to Kay.
More generally, PARC is an example of a late-stage industrial innovation hub where a systems innovation became crystalized. It was one of the last on-the-cusp revolutions where individual names became well known.
The 18th century idea of "invention" was genuinely more individual and less systemic. By the time the Wright Brothers took credit for airplanes, systemic effects were already extremely important (the Wrights deserve at most 20-30% credit for the airplane). Edison was more innovation manager than inventor, and since we didn't have the word back then, he gets an overblown personal reputation for inventiveness which came out of a system.
PARC represents the last major revolution where individuals got a lot of credit and became famous. Quick: who invented the Internet? Who invented gene sequencing? Who invented carbon fiber composite materials? Who invented IBM's Watson or Deep Blue? Who invented the Space Shuttle?
The reason you don't know the answers is that there ARE no meaningful answers. The age of idolized individual inventors has been over for about 30 years.
This does not mean groups/committees invented these things. It just means that system effects became more important than individual effects.
This is one reason true modern "inventors" who actually do work that is much less systemic than average seem so strange and anachronistic (I am thinking of people like James Dyson (the vacuum guy), Burt Rutan (Spaceship One) and Dean Kamen (Segway)).