PARC Wally.
Palo Alto Research Center, Massive innovation came through PARC. It is what created Silicone Valley. Xerox led the revolution from big iron to the world we know today.
en.wikipedia.org
PARC has an interesting history, but it did not create 'silicon valley', and Xerox die not lead the nation from big iron to the PC either.
PARC did like the concept of the 'theatrical operating system', but still supported the rX type of system underneath it.
In the 'theatrical operating system', which was developed at the University of Illinois (not PARC), the screen is treated as a 'stage', and you would costume your characters (loadable fonts) and 'choreograph' them on the stage as the method of programming. Later this became known as the 'windows' style operating system. PARC did develop this into a kind of tablet, and they invented the mouse (which was really just a modification of a slewball, used in air traffic control systems since WW2). The U of Illinois called their system Plato, which ran as a subsystem under NOS on a pair of Cyber 174 mainframes.
When PARC presented their wonderful machine to the execs at Xerox, it was rejected, since Xerox made copiers, not computers.
The leader of that project, Dr. Alan Kay, quit and took his crew with him to Apple, where the project was retooled as the Lisa.
The Lisa, which was named after the daughter that Steve Jobs had abandoned (!), was a failure in the marketplace because it was too expensive.
To retool into a less expensive machine, they contracted with Microsoft (and Bill Gates(!)) to condense the thing down so it would fit. That's how Microsoft got their hands on this type of OS. When the Macintosh hit the market, Windows soon followed, which offered color (not black and white) and ran on the rather large number of PCs already running DOS. The mouse was used for both systems, and PARC and Xerox never got proper credit for it.
Plato had no mouse, but used a touch screen instead. It's special terminals were all based on the 8080. It didn't use EBCDIC, baudot, or ASCII, but instead used a special 20 bit telegraph code, which Control Data called CDCDC (Control Data Corporation's Date Code). It was the first theatrical operating system, what we call Windows or X Windows today.
The first desktop computer wasn't developed in California. It was developed north of Boston in a town called Tewksbury. It was the Wang 2200. This machine had it's own display and keyboard and ran a rather extensive version of a nonstructured BASIC running as a condensor ('compiling' to an intermediate code and interpreting that, similar to the way Python runs. This mass produced machine was first marketed in 1973 and had no microprocessors in it. The processor was implemented entirely in TTL. It was most popular for business, hospital, and college use. Only later did updated versions of it came out that started incorporating LSI chips, first starting the the u793 (a disk controller), and an AY-1015 (a serial port controller).
The first 'portable' (more of a 'luggable') computer was the Osborne, developed from the failed Sol-20 project. The Osborne was fairly successful in the market, but they carried a fatal flaw, which was mounting several bypass capacitors too close to the mounting rails for the circuit board. These were tantalum capacitors, and if one burned due to shorting out against the rails, people simply discarded the smoking stinking thing rather than try to fix it. It ran CP/M, P, ISIS, or some other 8080 based OS.
