Xerox PARC
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The Palo Alto research lab that invented the modern computer's furniture, and famously let others sell it.
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center produced, in one astonishing 1970s run, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, Ethernet, object-oriented Smalltalk, and the Alto workstation that tied them together. Apple and Microsoft commercialized the GUI; 3Com commercialized Ethernet; Xerox kept the printers. PARC became the standing parable about the distance between inventing the future and owning it, and its alumni seeded half of this site's other stories, from Ethernet to Juniper's founder.