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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

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Again, this was a business deal. Xerox was allowed to purchase $1M of pre-IPO Apple stock in exchange for the visit. No one was tricked, nothing was stolen, and everyone knew what the deal was.

"Well, Steve [Jobs], I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." - Bill Gates

https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html

It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

Only on HN is $1,000,000 in stock considered "free."

Compared to the value of that technology to Apple and Microsoft? $1,000,000 is "free" (within rounding error, anyway).

In hindsight, yes, but I’m not sure it looked like it at the time. Surely, it took Apple years to start making ‘real’ money on selling Macs. They needed their Apple 2 line to pay the bills for years.

Also, it wasn’t as much tech (bitmapped displays and computer mice existed elsewhere) as a vision that Apple took from Xerox, and they improved upon it/changed it quite a bit. Examples:

- Alto’s GUI is verb-object, Mac is object-verb

- Alto doesn’t have overlapping windows.

- did Alto have cross-process copy-paste?

- simplifying the mouse down to a single button may have been necessary to gain acceptance. (For comparison, look at https://youtu.be/2Z43y94Dfzk?feature=shared)

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