alt Hacker NewsThere'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!
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> in return for giving Xerox the _opportunity_ to invest in Apple, wow
You're being sarcastic but this would have been the most lucrative thing Xerox ever did in its entire corporate life, by far, if it had held onto the stock. This was a really good deal in hindsight. Indeed, it would have been better to liquidate Xerox and put all the proceeds into Apple stock; I don't think anybody argues that Xerox could have made as much hay as Apple did with the technology, even in the best of scenarios. It couldn't have known that at the time, of course.
> ...that doesn't mean they had to give the technology away!
Xerox made ~$9 million off the visit(s), so not nothing. Had they held onto that stock, they might have made billions.
(Update: looks like the stock today would be worth 10-20x Xerox's current market capitalization.)
> Not to mention they also demonstrated object-oriented programming
Since 2023 we can study the source code of Lisa (see e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/lisapascal). Lisa’s system and applications were written mostly in Lisa Pascal (a compiled Pascal descendant) with some 68000 assembly; these compilers and their runtime bear no resemblance to the Smalltalk VM and bytecode system used on the Alto. The object‑oriented language Clascal was later created, as an "object‑oriented variant of Pascal", and used for the Lisa Toolkit; it later evolved into Object Pascal; both are statically compiled Algol‑family languages with Pascal syntax and a Simula‑style object model, not dynamically typed message‑sending systems like Smalltalk. Apple did not copy Smalltalk’s implementation or its language surface form for Lisa nor the Mac; there is barely any resemblance. What Apple mainly took from PARC were GUI interaction ideas (windows, menus, modeless mouse‑driven editing, later the desktop metaphor). While the December 1979 demos convinced Jobs of the direction, the specific knowledge arrived later primarily through the subsequent move of Xerox PARC personnel to Apple.
In the book "Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing", shows a bit more nuanced point of view.
She might have been against, but apparently many on the team were pretty much in favour, as Xerox already had a sharing culture with Standford people that would drop by, even without permission, which lead to drastic changes in Xerox PARC security.
Apple took the basic concept of a GUI and mouse-driven interface from Xerox, but the Lisa/Mac are far from a direct copy of what was demoed at PARC. Smalltalk didn't have a file browser, didn't have pull-down menus, didn't have desktop icons. It didn't even have window controls. If you wanted to move a window, you had to click on the window title, then select "move" from the pop-up menu, then click where you wanted the window to move to.
Besides just the graphical UI, Apple also implemented a lot of novel technical concepts. For example, Smalltalk windows couldn't redraw themselves when they were partially obscured. Apple didn't know this restriction existed, so Bill Atkinson in their Lisa group invented regions as a way to let partially obscured windows only repaint portions of themselves. Meanwhile Xerox's own solution for this restriction for the Star (their commercialized version of the GUI research) was to ban windows from overlapping at all.
Overall modern desktop GUIs have much more in common with the Lisa/Mac than the Lisa/Mac have in common with Smalltalk.