At IT School with Apple Lisa

There's something in this article that all the reading and research I have done contradicts: "For this reason, the researchers at PARC were, understandably, extremely impressed by Jobs’s desire to finally use that technology, therefore, on the Team’s second visit, they were shown even more of PARC’s new and exciting discoveries, alongside another look at Smalltalk."

This, from what I can tell, was at least mostly untrue. The woman who helped create most of the technologies, Adele Goldberg, stated on film more than once that she _strongly_ opposed showing the Apple team anything, as she knew they would just take the technology (in return for giving Xerox the _opportunity_ to invest in Apple, wow, what an incredible deal /s). She specifically said that she would NOT give the tour unless ordered to in writing, and her boss did indeed write that order.

So she and her team very reluctantly gave the entire GUI desktop concept away for free. Not to mention they also demonstrated object-oriented programming and a networked office, things that Apple (and NeXT) would capitalize on later as well.

In later years, Jobs even admitted as much -- he said Xerox could have been IBM or Microsoft. They had everything needed to start the home computer revolution but squandered it. While it's true that Xerox execs didn't want to market the research done at PARC, and they wanted to focus on their very lucrative copier business, that doesn't mean they had to give the technology away!

Something missed out of that great article is that the Lisa efforts contributed to Clascal and the creation of Object Pascal with Nitklaus Wirth blessing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal

Which eventually got adopted by Borland, giving great projection to one of their engineers, which not only took Object Pascal beyond Apple's original design, ended up creating Delphi, contributing to J++, creation of C#, TypeScript, and influencing other programming languages whose authors got inspired by his work.

Anders Hejlsberg contributions to the computing industry, probably would have taken a different path had Apple Lisa never come to be.

Kind of interesting how these kind of events are all interwined.

Essay on this at https://www.folklore.org/On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.html

My wife's aunt ran one of the largest installation of Xerox Alto machines and her budget was very glad of the chance to switch to the Mac (the Lisa was _not_ a competitive option).