[TUHS] Step Into the Real-Life Lumon Industries, the Breakout Star of ‘Severance’

[Serissa]

> On Mar 8, 2025, at 7:52 PM, Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I visited PARC a few times and found it salubrious. The culture was
> peculiar (not necessarily in a bad way, but I didn't understand yet
> how SV worked (literally)), but the building was cosy and the people
> seemed happy.

I worked in the PARC building as a grad student and later as research staff.  I liked the building, not least because one could bike there from campus or houses in Palo Alto. As for the culture, I think the book "Dealers of Lightning"  is fairly accurate.  In the 70's and 80's there was little connection between PARC and the rest of Silicon Valley.  PARC had lots of contacts and visitors from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, Cambridge UK, ETH, and other schools, but not all that much interchange with other SV companies. Connections were stronger with Xerox in LA as they tried to make a go of products.

I was especially fond of the PARC softball leagues and trips to the Goose in Menlo Park.

After a bunch of folks (including me) left to join Digital research labs in Palo Alto, there were still more connections with universities and with Digital back east than with the rest of the valley.  There was little contact with other industrial research except for program committees.

As for the Unix Way (tm) I think the folks at PARC were honestly puzzled, if they thought about it at all.  Most were Tenex sorts of folks, or interested in languages, GUIs, and distributed computing.  Unix was time sharing, and something you did if you didn't have your own computer.

-L