Biography | Eric Schmidt — Research Staff at Xerox PARC

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center stood on Coyote Hill Road in the Stanford Research Park. Between 1979 and 1983 Eric Schmidt worked here as a member of the research staff. He had just completed his master’s and was finishing his PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. PARC was then producing many of the ideas that would define personal computing: the Alto, Ethernet, laser printing, and graphical user interfaces. Schmidt later moved to Sun Microsystems as a software manager and eventually became its chief technology officer. The years at PARC formed an early chapter in a career that would later take him to Novell and then to Google. The building remains a landmark of Silicon Valley research history. Photo: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (2006 view of the Palo Alto Research Centre)