People say things like this and because they haven't researched the matter more deeply they miss out on some great gems from that such as the way overlapping windows worked on Apple's Macintosh compared to how Xerox did things because the Apple engineers didn't know how Xerox did it, thought they were doing more than they did and in the course of trying to recreate it invented something better.
A reference to what I mean can be found here:
http://novel.tingroom.com/lizhi/1019/30667.html
The bottom line is that even re-implementing something can lead to creativity and extend the original in exciting new ways as a result. To my mind that makes it much less a 'ripoff' since it's a new way of doing things.
It was not a ripoff. They had a license agreement and a whole bunch of people went from PARC (where they felt they had amazing technologies but could not do much with them because Xerox did not care) to Apple (where they could actually put a lot of ideas in practice).
> That is where things really went from zero to one, on a lot of things.
Some things. Others did not exist at the time and there have been a lot of improvements since then. Things done at PARC also depended on a lot of groundwork done by people like Turing and in places like the Bell Labs. Yet we don’t argue that Babbage was the real revolution and nothing of note happened since then.