a long time as standards for much of the computing industry. Many advances were not equalled or surpassed for two decades, enormous timespans in the fast-paced high-tech world. Xerox PARC has been the inventor and incubator of many elements of modern computing: Laser printers Computer-generated bitmap graphics The graphical user interface, featuring skeuomorphic windows and icons, operated with a mouse Bravo, the WYSIWYG modal text editor Interpress, a resolution-independent graphical page-description language and the precursor to PostScript Ethernet as a local-area computer network Fully formed object-oriented programming (OOP) (with class-based inheritance, the most popular OOP model to this day) in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment Prototype-based programming (the second most popular inheritance model in OOP) in the Self programming language Model–view–controller software architecture AspectJ, an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) extension for the Java programming language The Alto Most of these developments were included in the Alto, which added the now familiar Stanford Research Institute (SRI) developed mouse, unifying into a single model most aspects of now-standard personal computer use. The integration of Ethernet prompted the development of the PARC Universal Packet architecture, much like today's Internet. The GUI Xerox has been heavily criticized (particularly by business historians) for failing to properly commercialize and profitably exploit PARC's innovations. A favorite example is the graphical user interface (GUI), initially developed at PARC for the Alto and then sold as the Xerox Star by the Xerox Systems Development Department. It heavily influenced future system design, but is deemed a failure because it only sold about 25,000 units. A small group from PARC led by David Liddle and Charles Irby formed Metaphor Computer Systems. They extended the Star desktop concept into an animated graphic and communicating office-automation model and sold the company to IBM. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said that the Xerox graphical interface influenced both Microsoft and Apple. Steve Jobs of Apple said that “Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties." While there is some truth that Xerox management failed to see the potential of many of PARC's inventions, this was mostly a problem with its computing research, a relatively small part of PARC's operations. A number of GUI engineers left to join Apple Computer. Technologies pioneered by its materials scientists such as liquid-crystal display (LCD), optical disc innovations, and laser printing were