The Xerox PARC Visit | Hacker News Reader

The Xerox PARC Visit

www-sul.stanford.edu

24 pointsshawndumas6 comments

One factor many people forget was that Doug Engelbart did "The Mother of All Demos" back in 1968 to over 1000 computer professionals:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayint...

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Far more primitive than Alto or the Mac, but the ideas were percolating out there. SRI's NLS/Augment system definitely inspired the work at PARC (which didn't open until at least a year after the demo).

Steve Jobs later said that the GUI overshadowed other innovations at PARC (ones which later drove a lot of the work done at NeXT).

"And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system ... they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day."

Triumph of the Nerds transcript http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

"Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."

I think this is kind of the point they make in Steve Jobs bio as well. Xerox allowed Apple to use some of the concepts in the lab because they were investors in the company. Also, if I recall correctly, Apple engineers went a little farther in the window metaphor, allowing, for example, to overlap and stack windows, something XEROX wasn't able or willing to do.

More details here --> http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

FTA "This essay was written by Bruce in 1996, and is reprinted here with his permission. Bruce was one of the main designers of the Macintosh software, and he worked at Xerox for years before that, so he's uniquely qualified to discuss their relationship."

I once read an anecdote saying that that Jobs remembered this part wrong: he told Apple's engineers about the stacking, overlapping windows he thought he had seen; armed with this piece of misinformation, they went ahead and "duplicated" that feature.

Not quite the same thing but here is a corollary...

"Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC." --http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

> Xerox allowed Apple to use some of the concepts in the lab because they were investors in the company.

I'm not sure "allowed" is the right word here. Didn't they sue Apple over this a few years later...? I guess you could say the period before they filed suit, they were allowing it. (?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com