What kind of work was being done at XEROX PARC in 1992: study of self assembly which might be applicable to space exploration. Implies nano-scalar materials like those that might be operable in a drone.
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/selfRepJBIS.html
Below are two quotes from Dr. Keith Edwards PhD. Resume. This gives us a clue as to what he was working on at PARC in the early 1990s. He worked at PARC for 8 years.
Quote:
Iâ??m probably in some government file someplace because I ordered the Roswell Report online. You can have a file on yourself too [ Ed. no longer available]. I work at PARC, where we actually get to use a lot of the technology that our government got from the small greys in the abductee-for-flying-saucer swap that followed Roswell. I also encountered evidence of alien visitation on my trip to Eastern Europe .
Before that, I worked on the Placeless Documents System, which isâ??in a nutshellâ??a â??radically extensibleâ? document management system. That makes it sound far more boring than it actually is. A better description might be that itâ??s a system that manages a collection of distributed information sources by overlaying a prototype-based object system on them. Iâ??ve also been working on Flatland, a framework for creating pen-based applications for large surfaces like whiteboards (sorry, no page yet). One of my main projects used to be time travel (sort of) and its applications to collaboration.
Iâ??ve also worked on a number of other projects at PARC, including Bayou, a weakly-consistent replicated data store for applications with sporadic network connectivity. [end of quote]
Dr. Edwards also worked on a type of computer that could be in any part of a room. You walk into a room and the computer and keyboard could be anywhere you desired. Every part of the computer is a projection. The keyboard and computer screen is a projection. There is no visible hardware. The screen could be floating [invisible] in the middle of the room and the keyboard could be projected on a coffee table, your shirt, the bed, anywhere there is a surface.