Quote:
Originally Posted by Omaroo
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.
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Hi Chris,
Not historically completely correct ...
It was the Xerox Alto, not the Star, that the two groups of Apple engineers who
passed through Xerox PARC saw demonstrated.
The Alto was conceptualized and then first built around '72-'73.
Engineers working on the Apple Lisa wanted to show Jobs the types of
technology they were advocating to use which they had already seen for themselves
at PARC. Jobs was apparently reluctant to go, but he received additional
incentive when Xerox's venture capital division invested some cash into Apple.
The two main Apple visits to PARC were said to be circa 1979.
Keep in mind that the Stanford campus was literally across the road from PARC
and many of the PARC engineers had come from Stanford Research International (SRI),
including Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse and an early researcher
into the use of networking and hypertext.
PARC was relatively "open" and sometimes students who were friends with workers
there would almost casually come and go, including sitting in on some meetings.
Some Stanford graduate students were also employed part time at PARC.
Simultaneously on the Stanford campus there was what was known as the
Stanford University Network or SUN. They had developed their own Ethernet
connect workstation around 1980 and eventually licensed it to Sun Microsystems
around 1982.
Then over in Massachusetts, Apollo Computer Inc. had been founded in 1980 by
William Poduska (who had previously founded Prime) and they brought out their DN100
workstation in 1981, nearly two years earlier than Sun. Apollo dominated the
professional workstation market in the period 1980-87, eventually being
outstripped by DEC and Sun.
However, these systems, which employed bitmapped displays, a mouse, a networked
file system, distributed networking computing capability and most of the features
we associate today with modern workstations pre-dated the Apple Lisa, which
was not introduced until 1983.
And these workstations out of Apollo Computer were hugely commercially successful.
However, unless you moved in the industries within which they were used -
in aerospace companies such as Boeing, in automotive design, companies
such as Ford, GM & Chrysler and in electronic design, companies such
Mentor Graphics - the lay public would largely be unaware of them.
I had the pleasure of using Apollo's in the 1980's to work on custom application
integrated circuit design and attributes such as 1024x800 and later 1280x1024 bitmapped
displays, four, eight and later forty-plane color graphics, three button mouses, 300MB disk
drives, high speed networking and a windowed GUI made them an absolute pleasure
to use.
So the use of bitmapped displays and windowing and mouses was not first commercially
introduced by Apple in any way nor were they the first to make these technologies
commercially successful.
Anecdotally, when we first saw Lisa's and later Macintosh's at trade shows,
we said to each other "what would we ever do with those?" Compared to the
high-end workstations we were using at the time, these earlier Apple offerings were
really just toys. They didn't have anywhere near the screen sizes, CPU speed,
RAM capacity, disk capacity and networking features for the types of tasks
we were commercially performing, but we did recognize them as some of the
earlier attempts to enter the low-end market. My recollection was that the Lisa
was regarded generally as commercially unsuccessful.
The Xerox Star was a commercial product that was derived from work on the
earlier Alto and was introduced in 1981. Xerox targeted it at the office environment
and though they sold quite a few, like the Lisa, it was never regarded as
commercially successful either.
Readers who are very interested in the history of computing might wish to consider
subscribing to the IEEE "Annals of Computing History".
See
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/annals/home
We have to see both sides of the story, always.
