Despite a decade's head start and more, history was passing them by. The business writers Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander said it all in the title of their 1988 account, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Indeed, in the pop mythology of the personal-computer era, the story of PARC and the Alto has become an endlessly repeated classic: visionary genius stifled by leaden bureaucracy.
