Entertaining account of the heyday of Xerox PARC in the 1970s when Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, and Thacker were all there spewing out inventions such as the ALTO; arguably the most complete, first personal computer. Although it was never successfully brought to market, it heavily influenced personal computing. Xerox is where the foundation of human-computer interaction was developed: mouse, GUI, WYSIWYG, and so on. Ethernet was built at XEROX too, where the appeal of an "ARPANET for Everyone" (ARPAnet was a small University 'internet') was a vision I imagine was often discussed at lunch.. In addition, Smalltalk was invented here and it allowed the engineers to work faster than anyone else. In particular, the speed of re-compilation was one of the things that really wow'ed Jobs when he made his historical visit.

Why not 5 stars? I was reading this book to really hope to get under the skin of the culture of XEROX. What made this such a creative environment? It's more of a historical account, which is still thoroughly enjoyable--but it didn't go as deep as I would've liked.

I listened to the audiobook, which I probably wouldn't recommend. Audio sounds like something recorded on cassette in the 90s, which upon further inspection seems to be fairly close to the truth..