Roy Want holds his invention - the Xerox parctab. This hand-held, 200-gram prototype allows the user to beam information to a personal computer by writing a series of shorthand-like symbols, each of which represents a letter of the alphabet, on a pressure-sensitive screen. Want is a researcher at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) in California's Silicon Valley. One of the most innovative computer companies in the USA, PARC is the birthplace of the mouse, the computer workstation and the "graphical user interface", the now-universal system of windows and icons that makes it possible for a novice to use a computer. (1995)