For more than a decade now, I’ve listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This “fact” is reported over and over, by people who don’t know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn’t true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial.
Related:
- The Xerox PARC Visit (Stanford University Library):
The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. These wonders had been locked away at PARC by a staff that didn’t understand the revolutionary potential of what they had created. Jobs, in contrast, was immediately converted to the religion of the graphical user interface, and ordered them copied by Apple, starting down the track that would eventually yield the Lisa and “insanely great” Macintosh. The Apple engineers – that band of brothers, that bunch of pirates – stole the fire of the gods, and gave it to the people.It’s a good story.
Unfortunately, it’s also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong…
- Steve Jobs and Xerox: The Truth About Innovation by ZURB
quoting Creation Myth (by Malcolm Gladwell for the New Yorker):
Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would ‘open its kimono.’
Deal of the century, for Apple! Also, assuming Xerox held onto those shares, today they’d be worth:
100,000 x 8 x $663.22 = $ 530,576,000 (that’s over half a billion dollars)
Note: Apple’s stock was split 2:1 on three separate occasions, hence the multiplication by 8.