[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by RickS

Nope... they pinched it from Xerox See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star

Apple didn't merely "pinch" it - they paid a blanket fee to license a group of WIMP/GUI technologies from Xerox PARC in the form of a pre-IPO stock swap with Apple. Many of the PARC engineers moved to Apple as well and worked on Lisa/Macintosh.

Prior to that, Xerox had NO idea what to do with it. The Star was never intended to be commercialised. It took Jobs to realise its commercial value and further engineer the GUI I/F and added manipulatable icons, the menu bar and drag n' drop functionality within the file system. Bill Gates then truly "pinched" this from Apple a little later.