Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

The result was that in the early ’80s Palo Alto was computorily multilingual, at a geographic overlap between the Xerox PARC protocols and DARPA’s—the added D, for “Defense,” was an attempt to conform with a congressional restriction on civilian research by the DOD.1 The researchers could talk to computers halfway around the world but not to the ones next door.