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Also, see One
Lucky Night
TEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PALO ALTO
1. Palo Alto is named in honor of the city’s symbol, a 110-foot-tall
coast redwood named “El Palo Alto” (“the tall tree”
in Spanish). The tree is estimated to be 1,066 years old.
2. The city of Palo Alto came into being because
of reform. Rejecting the raucous saloon life of neighboring city Mayfield, Leland
Stanford formed Palo Alto, which eventually grew so large that it swallowed
Mayfield up.
3. Herbert Hoover, who later became the 31st
president of the United States, graduated from what was then called Leland Stanford
Junior University at Palo Alto in 1895. The Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House,
built in 1919, is now the official residence of the President of Stanford University.
4. Debbi Fields – also known as Mrs. Fields
– began her takeover of the world cookie market in 1977 with her first
store in Palo Alto.
5. Parts of the movies Harold and Maude, Escape
To Witch Mountain, Raising Cain, and the Robin Williams Flubber remake were
filmed in Palo Alto.
6. Palo Alto currently has approximately 61,200
residents. The median age is 40. Seventy-four percent of Palo Altoans have a
college degree.
7. The Grateful Dead (then The Warlocks) played
their first show in Palo Alto. Ken Kesey’s infamous Merry Pranksters also
got their start here.
8. Palo Alto is 26 square miles. One-third of
that area is open space.
9. Every Saturday, from 8am to noon, mid-May
through mid-December, there’s a farmers market on Gilman Street, behind
the Palo Alto Post Office in downtown. See http://www.pafarmersmarket.org for
more information.
10. The Palo Alto Art Walk takes place on the
first Friday of every month, from 6pm to 9pm. For more information see www.pacificartleague.org/artwalk/home.html.
INVENTED IN PALO ALTO
Palo Alto has a long history of changing the world. Maybe there’s something
in the soil that makes great ideas grow like weeds. Many of these brainstorms
occurred at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, now known as Palo Alto Research
Center Incorporated (PARC). Give it up for the gadgets born in Palo Alto.
The laser computer printer. Invented at PARC in 1971, the laser
printer became the jumping point for Xerox’s $1 billion-per-year xerographic
printing business.
Ethernet. The engineers at PARC invented this protocol allowing
multiple computers to communicate over a single computer.
The personal computer. The Xerox Alto glimmered on tech’s
horizon in 1972, the world’s first computer designed for a single user (unlike
the giant mainframes and minicomputers then in existence). It had 128KB of memory
and its CPU was the size of a dorm-room refrigerator. The screen was vertical.
“Worm” program. A computer program that seeks computer
hosts, copies itself, and deconstructs, was created by two PARC researchers. Gee,
thanks.
Smalltalk. Smalltalk, the first object-oriented programming language
(treating system components as objects), was copyrighted in 1980. At the time,
only two other software copyrights existed.
The Multi-User Domain (MUD). In 1990, a PARC computer scientist
established the LambdaMOO MUD to create a sense of “place” and community
on the internet.
GUI. The graphical user interface was invented at the Stanford
Research Institute (headquartered in Menlo Park) and refined by researchers at
PARC, who used it as their interface for the Xerox Alto.
ALSO INVENTED IN PALO ALTO...
The Audion. In 1906, Lee de Forest invented the Audion, a vacuum tube amplifier
and oscillator, the foundation for the electronics industry, in Palo Alto.
The computer mouse. The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford
Research Institute, which is headquartered in Menlo Park. The engineers at PARC
replaced Engelbart’s external wheel with a single ball that could rotate.
The birth control pill. Perhaps more revolutionary than all these electronic inventions
combined, the modern oral contraceptive was invented by Frank Colton, a chemist
at G. D. Searle in Palo Alto. When Colton developed his synthetic progesterone
compound, norethynodrel, he was simply joining the race for “miracle drug”
steroids; he had no intention of creating birth control. However, norethynodrel
worked as an anti-ovulent, and Searle began secretly developing “The Pill.”
The drug was released for clinical use in 1957.
Sources: www.parc.com,
Wikipedia, PBS’ The Pill
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