During the 1970s 80s and 90s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center was seen as a Mecca of technology innovation.
From its halls came inventions such as personal laser printers, Adobe's PostScript (John Warnock, Chuck Geschke), Ethernet (Bob Metcalfe) and the Xerox Altos and Star computers, which implemented ideas protyped by Doug Engelbart at SRI in the late 60s.
Here is a page of PARC history.
