IIRC Xerox PARC & co used the most powerful computers available at the time to "invent the future": the graphical environments and programming languages regular people use now. What would be the equivalent today? My (naive) impression is that programming language and HCI labs don't seem to make use of 64 core processors with a 100 GB of RAM and GPU computing to similarly invent the future.

I asked this question to Alan recently, and here were my takeaways: One important thing is to have a pretty full picture of the ongoing trends in CS software and hardware. They had this at PARC because their team included hardware and software specialists. All together they were up on all the literature. If you can pretty accurately predict the trends, it's usually not to hard to buy it today. However it may not be processing power or storage that's the key. For example Dynamicland buys very expensive projectors to "buy" the future of AR and VR