No corporate lab exists today that resembles the PARC of the 1970s and 1980s, not even the PARC of the 1990s, where great advances are being made in physics, information science, and graphic technologies. There are several reasons for this, some having to do with the life cycle of technological change. For the science of computing is no longer at the historic inflection point it occupied at the start of the 1970s, when every step on the road of discovery was the equivalent of a giant leap into a new world.
