Physicist Jacob "Jack" Goldman, the founder of Xerox's fabled idea incubator in Palo Alto, Calif. and the company's long time chief scientist, has died at the age of 90. Goldman died of congestive heart failure on Tuesday, his son Melvin told The New York Times.
Goldman, born in Brooklyn on July 18, 1921, was on the physics faculty at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and served as a visiting professor at MIT in 1959. He worked at the Ford Motor Company as director of the automaker's Scientific Research Laboratory before joining Xerox in 1968.
While presiding over four research labs and serving as chief technical officer and senior vice president for research and development at Xerox, Goldman created two of the company's R&D hubs, the Xerox Research Center of Canada and, of course, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC.
Goldman hired fellow physicist George Pake (April 1, 1924 March 4, 2004) to run Xerox PARC in 1970. Researchers at the famous Silicon Valley lab would go on to develop the laser printer, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet, and other technological breakthroughs that formed the foundation of personal computing, as well as arguably inventing the PC itself.
Despite the wishes of Pake and others to do so, Xerox never created a PC division around its Xerox PARC resources, instead watching as othersmost famously Apple and its late co-founder Steve Jobsbuilt upon and commercialized the Palo Alto lab's inventions.
In his retirement, Goldman assumed various advisory positions with government and business, while serving as a director on the boards of Xerox, General Instrument, United Brands, and several other companies.