Word: parce
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Researcher, Xerox PARC...
...PARC has a pretty good track record when it comes to radical new visions, even if its record of holding onto them has been spotty at best. The mouse, the GUI (graphical user interface, like Windows) and arguably the PC itself were all born in this hothouse of Silicon Valley R. and D.; they ended up making a lot of money for Apple and Microsoft. Xerox has got a lot of prestige but little cash out of the PARC, which is why the beleaguered copier giant intimated in October that it would put its crown jewel up for sale...
While its future ownership is in doubt, the buttoned-down brain trust at PARC has lost none of the anything-goes enthusiasm that made it famous in the first place. It's a place where experts from entirely different academic disciplines mind-meld furiously, then run off in pursuit of the most challenging technological problems they can come up with. And right now, at the dawn of the Internet age, PARC scientists are most motivated by the question of how we digest our increasingly bloated diet of data. After all, they say, your total potential reading matter increased...
Gold's RED team seems to have reached the same conclusion: it's O.K. to skim, and it's O.K. to read pictures instead of text. Its Hyperbolic Reader (based on the hyperbolic tree, a Xerox PARC invention) tells a children's story in Perspective Wall style. Cartoons and speech bubbles grow large as you move a joystick over them, then shrink as you turn to another part of the story's tree. In Fluid Fiction (also created with PARC software), another children's story is told in just 24 sentences. But touch the end of any sentence...
...lumps of paper on our shelves have been sacred in this form for very long. It's less than 200 years since the arrival of the novel, and less than 100 since the average best seller came with illustrations. The brave new world of reading under construction at Xerox PARC may be only the latest step in the book's evolution. The more forms it can mutate into, the more likely it is that one of those forms will survive in an age of intensive information foraging and visual literacy. And if that form happens to be Speeder Reader--well...