Seeing the first Ethernet cable (and reusable paper) at Xerox PARC

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I got a tour of Xerox PARC and got a look at a few research projects as part of a press day today. That all is pretty cool, you can see my videos over on my Qik page, there’s a few.

But the last one was pretty fun. The President of PARC, Mark Bernstein, gave me a tour around the famous lab where so much of our world was invented. We started at the first Ethernet cable in the world.

If you don’t know why Xerox PARC is so important, please read up on it on Wikipedia.

At the end of the interview I asked Mark if he met Steve Jobs the day that he visited back in the early 1980s (which was a famous meeting in of itself). I love his answer about that day, but I’ll let you listen to the video.

I have a feeling the wall in the video where the Ethernet cable is will eventually be cut out and put into the Smithsonian. It’s a hugely important piece of cable to our history. It was an honor to see it in place.

Here’s a video of the reusable paper that the researchers are working on.

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Published by Robert Scoble

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4 thoughts on “Seeing the first Ethernet cable (and reusable paper) at Xerox PARC”

  1. I had a backstage pass at Xerox PARC in 1997 for a day. I was a CS student at the Naval Postgrad School in Monterey. This visit was so enlightening — I used examples of some of the things that they were working on to make points about the realm of the possible for the past 10 + years. That place is magical.

    They were experimenting with “ubiquitous computing” at that time, and I have taken the spirit of what they were working on and applied it to the concept of ubiquitous training for the military. Think “the system’s on and supports training, whenever and where ever.”

    Fun stuff. Thanks, PARC.

    Like

  2. I had a backstage pass at Xerox PARC in 1997 for a day. I was a CS student at the Naval Postgrad School in Monterey. This visit was so enlightening — I used examples of some of the things that they were working on to make points about the realm of the possible for the past 10 + years. That place is magical.

    They were experimenting with “ubiquitous computing” at that time, and I have taken the spirit of what they were working on and applied it to the concept of ubiquitous training for the military. Think “the system’s on and supports training, whenever and where ever.”

    Fun stuff. Thanks, PARC.

    Like

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