A screen with many rooms. (Palo Alto Research Center is looking for a way to organize information on a computer screen)

Economist (US), The, June, 1991

MAKING computers easier to use is difficult. So is making them more useful. Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay and George Robertson of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) are trying to do both. They are looking at how people organise information when they work at a desk or a dining-room table at home--and asking whether a computer could help them work in the same way, but better.

This sort of research has long been a PARC speciality. The centre's scientists pulled together many of the ideas that eventually found commercial form in Apple's Macintosh computer: a screen divided into windows, a mouse for "point and click" commands, and "icons" that represent programs and other objects within the computer in terms of a familiar metaphor--the top of a desk, with files...

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