Net Results: In 2000, I got one of those offers you can't refuse: a press visit to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), writes Karlin Lillington.
Even though I'd grown up in the heart of Palo Alto,I'd never heard of PARC when I was young - Hewlett-Packard and Intel were the looming tech names in Silicon Valley in those days. But PARC?
That little slice of engineering magic was a non-entity as far as the average citizen was concerned. And it still won't mean much to most people, unless you happen to be one of those who enjoys devouring books on computing's past.
Yet PARC is legendary in the history of the computer, one of those names that brings a small thrill to digital history fans, as evocative as Britain's Bletchley Park (famous for the great cryptography breakthroughs of the second World War) or New Jersey's Bell Labs or IBM's upstate New York Thomas Watson Laboratory or that US government funder of the early internet, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency).
But PARC is special, because it's where the modern computer found its form and essence, a decade before it would be commercialised - and then, famously, by Apple and not by Xerox.
Computing found its soul at PARC: point and click navigation, windows, screen icons, the mouse, the laser printer, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) screen to paper printing, and ethernet (a method of connecting computers into a high-speed local network). Even funny screensavers - all were developed in the 1970s in Xerox's PARC.
At the time, the lab had gathered together one of the finest teams of computer-minded researchers. Xerox mostly left them alone, giving them carte blanche to explore their interests in an extremely open, creative environment.
Last week, the National Academy of Engineering in the US made a nice gesture of recognising four of the PARC pioneers on that team, men now in their late 50s, 60s and 70s who quietly led a revolution without the payback of either vast riches or fame.
How out of step that seems with our greedier, more in-your-face times, when no incident, event or product launch is too trivial for a press release or corporate event.
Now, these fellows will get a little cash (well, a lot of cash: the $500,000 Draper Prize split among them), and fair dues to them. The four are Robert Taylor, Alan Kay, Charles Thacker and Butler Lampson.
They were in charge of the Xerox team that developed the Alto. The what, you say? Ahhh, the Alto. A non-commercial prototype to Xerox's never-successful Star computer. The Alto was a little boxy thing in a wooden frame.
It is loved and remembered because it incorporated all those modern computing things first - a graphical user interface (GUI) with point and click navigation, so you didn't have to type in line commands. A document editing program that allowed the user to cut and paste chunks of text. Windows you could move about onscreen. It had a mouse.
Most importantly, the television-sized device was small enough to sit on your desktop, rather than occupying a corner of a room of its own, as did most computers of the 1970s.
Mr Taylor, who until 1971 was in charge of the ARPA project that eventually became today's internet, led the team. Retired now, he was recruited by Xerox after his ARPA stint because they felt he could persuade the bright young things from ARPA to do interesting things at Xerox.
He reeled in Kay, who is credited with creating the Alto's GUI system, a way of communicating with a machine that seems obvious today but was pretty "out there" when the norm was to type in commands. Kay eventually went to Apple, and now works for HP.
Thacker and Lampson are now with Microsoft. Thacker developed the Alto's brain, 600 logic chips stacked on circuit cards. Lampson - who was just in his mid 20s at the time - designed the Alto's operating system.
The four-man team worked primarily from 1971 to 1973 to create a computer that would only find truly successful expression 11 years later, with the launch of Apple's Macintosh.
But how extraordinary that it was all there in prototype back when Elvis was still playing Las Vegas and NASA's Apollo moon landings were in full swing.
Why Apple and not Xerox? That's all a curious and much-debated titbit of computing lore. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple computer, convinced PARC to give him a demonstration of its technologies in 1979, then promptly began to work nearly all of them into Apple's ground-breaking, user friendly Lisa and Macintosh computers.
Controversy still exists over whether Xerox's ideas were borrowed, stolen or willingly exchanged - the protagonists all have differing stories. I'd sure love to get that team of four together and pepper them with questions about those times.
Their story - and the story of computing's early days - is a fabulous read. If that period interests you as much as it does me, I recommend delving into these four personal favourites: Robert X Cringely's Accidental Empires; Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late; John Naughton's A Brief History of the Future; and Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray's Computer: a History of the Information Machine.
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