>Jobs came to PARC in December 1978. 4 years later was an eternity.
Not in desktop GUI land, since nobody did anything interesting commercially in desktop GUIs for those next 4 years.
And of course in those 4 years Apple started the project, designed the hardware and implemented the OS, GUI, and basic programs. Lisa actually began in 1978 itself, so it took all those years until its release in 1983. By which time they'd probably also had a look at the Star's ongoing developments.
Doesn't mean they didn't take a lot of their inspiration from that demo.
>"The Lisa end user experience wasn't that different from the Xerox Alto" -- except that the Alto had many different programs, each with their own interface, so I don't know what you're referring to.
He's referring to the GUI concepts as implemented in it (and exhibited in those programs), not necessarily some overall GUI shell or some particular individual program.
>I guess you're talking about Smalltalk, but that was a tiny part of what people at Xerox were doing. It had a negligible influence on the Star.
TFA mistakenly talks about the Smalltalk GUI as if the common understanding is that Smalltalk-80s' GUI was what Apple saw and copied from Xerox.
TFA then goes on to reject that Apple copied Xerox, because he finds that Smalltalk-80 GUI was hardly like a Desktop, but more like an IDE.
That description of Smalltalk-80 GUI is of course correct, but he missed the crucial part: people don't say Apple copied Xerox because of Smalltalk-80, but because of Alto's (and perhaps Star's) GUI concepts.
So it's not the parent who is confused, he merely replies to TFA.
Except the Xerox Star, which was "interesting" enough to attract spillover crowds to the Xerox booth at the May 1981 NCC. Including Jobs himself.
If you mean "users didn't buy it" you're certainly correct.
> He's referring to the GUI concepts as implemented in it (and exhibited in those programs),
GUI concepts: if you mean mouse manipulation, you're right. However, the Lisa had a unified interface that enforced some choices, while the Alto let every developer make his or her own choices. Also, as far as I remember, dropdown menu bars across the top weren't prominent on the Alto.
>Except the Xerox Star, which was "interesting" enough to attract spillover crowds to the Xerox booth at the May 1981 NCC. Including Jobs himself.
Yeah, I mean except Xerox. The context here is you saying that "Jobs came to PARC in December 1978. 4 years later was an eternity" and I take it you implied with this that Xerox didn't influence the Mac/Lisa.
So, my point is that not a lot of developments happened between that and 1983 in the commercial space for it to actually be "like an eternity". Star did happen which is also Xerox, but the "let's copy this" spark was already lit in Jobs from 1978 (and Lisa itself started being designed after that time).
>GUI concepts: if you mean mouse manipulation, you're right. However, the Lisa had a unified interface that enforced some choices, while the Alto let every developer make his or her own choices. Also, as far as I remember, dropdown menu bars across the top weren't prominent on the Alto.
Mouse manipulation, but also a hodgepodge of GUI ideas from the programs he saw demoed (and later on Star). E.g. Alto had Bravo with WYSIWYG, scrollbars, etc.
TFA was like: (a) People say Apple copied Xerox GUI ideas because Jobs saw Smalltalk-80 demo (b) But the Mac GUI is quite didfferent than Smalltalk-80, so this is wrong
And basically I'm pointing out that people don't just say it based on Smalltalk-80, but also Alto stuff Jobs saw in that visit, and Star stuff which came out before the Mac.
"Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, where he was shown the Smalltalk-80 object-oriented programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG, mouse-driven graphical user interface provided by the Alto."
"According to Jobs, “I thought it would be an interesting afternoon, but I had no real concept of what I’d see.” What he and his Apple engineers did see was the Alto with its bitmapped display and mouse-driven GUI, the graphical word processor, Bravo, and a few demo applications in Smalltalk, PARC’s revolutionary object-oriented programming language. This was a carefully curated demonstration created by PARC’s researchers to give a taste of what they had created without giving away any secrets deemed too precious. “It was very much a here’s-a-word-processor-there's-a-drawing-tool demo of what was working at the time,” according to PARC researcher Adele Goldberg. “What they saw everyone had seen.”"
> "and most importantly the WYSIWYG, mouse-driven graphical user interface provided by the Alto"
This should be better, "available on the Alto". Neither was this in the/any OS, nor was Smalltalk or Bravo/Gipsy for the matter the sole software available on the Alto. The wording suggests a consistency, which simply wasn't there.
Notably, what was going on at PARC wasn't a secret: PARC published papers and key developers at Apple, like Bill Atkinson, were familiar with at least some of them. The latter were also those, who wanted Jobs to see this in real live and who accompanied him on the trip, and they came prepared. Moreover, numerous tours to PARC and its software had been given to outsiders before (compare A. Goldberg), some of these tours even more complete. However, Jobs was the first – at least in part (he later said, he totally missed out on the network and its importance) – to grasp what he was shown, which in turn convinced some of PARC personal like Larry Tesler (who was giving part of the presentation) to switch to Apple, in order to see this technology become a reality. (Jobs getting the GUI must have been some of an experience.)
(Mind bitmapped graphics being documented before the visit and, probably also before this, a first prototype of a windowed document. It is also interesting to see how the influence of the PARC visit shows also as some of a distraction, and it's only when they gradually inch back towards the original window design that things start to come together. May we interpret this as a process of emancipation from PARC's influence?)
This is fantastic—thanks for the link. I always defend Apple when people say they "stole" their GUI from Xerox, but this post has a lot of great details, including what Xerox's VC arm did with their $1M of pre-IPO Apple stock (sold it for $1.2M :facepalm:)
"Dealers of Lightning" by Michael Hiltzik is an interesting book about the story of Xerox Parc.
About Steve Jobs and his programmers visit: <<They asked all the right questions and understood all the answers. It was clear to me that they understood what we had a lot better than Xerox [corporation] did.>>
Even more amazing, in the 80s they finally realized they should capitalize on all this technology, and allowed a bunch of entrepreneurial employees to use it (although they didn't invest $$$). Several of these (Spectra Diode Labs, Synoptics) could have made them a rival to Berkshire Hathaway.
To be fair, Star development started as about as soon as this had become a viable project. Compare the availability of D-processors, and things like Smalltalk76, the Gipsy editor, Mesa as the base operating system being less than a year old, then.
I think, the narrative of Xerox just not knowing what they had doesn't add up with the timeline.
it's not so much "not knowing", it's not being interested in taking over the computer industry and not wanting to understand it. They wanted a machine they could sell through their copier sales channel, period.
The part where Don Massaro says, "The desktop is OUR market. The 820 is just to hold our place on it until the Star is ready" (and yes, he really did say that) betrays a stunning blindness to what was going on:
"People are bringing their Apple II's to work so they can use VisiCalc? Well, we'll put an end to that stupidity!"
I think, it's complicated. As I see it, Xerox tried to follow through on the paperless office vision, but it was either too early from a technological/price/scale perspective, and/or the organizational challenges and requirements for any adopters of such a complex system were too great and it was too early for these to be tackled in all seriousness (even Steve Jobs got just half the message), and/or it was already too late, as alternatives that required much less adjustments and promised better scalability (in adoption/deployment as well as in production) were already on the market, and these had also far less development costs to cope with. From this perspective, the Star was doomed from the beginning, nevertheless it was still an important and remarkable project. — Maybe, Xerox could have tried more intensely, maybe they could have been more interested, but I'm not sure, if it would have made much of a difference. (However, people like Larry Tesler switching to Apple, illustrates that there may have been also a systemic problem. In contrast to you, I wasn't there, and I haven't witnessed the frustration.)
Having said that, I'm definitely ordering your book (probably today)! :-)
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Edit:
Regarding the appearance of the IBM's PC in the article, "IBM ignoring the personal computer revolution" is much a popular myth, as is the IBM PC coming out of nowhere. In actuality, IBM had several projects over the 1970s, like Yellow Bird, Aquarius (both home computers, also under the lead of Bill Lowe), the latter, which would have included an app-store-like ecosystem of software on bubble memory cards, evolved to fully functional production prototypes, but was canceled last-minute in the meeting where it should have been finally approved over concerns regarding the reliability of bubble memory. Various other PC prototypes were designed at Eliot Noyes Associates. None of these internal projects succeeded. By this, the frustration had apparently grown to the extent that there had been deliberations of acquiring Atari's computer devision instead (at least, there were design prototypes for this.) Project Chess (IBM 1550) was just the final step in this process, which must have come with its own frustrations.
Thanks for the kind offer! But this would be Europe/Austria — I guess, I'd rather spare ourselves the postage. (Let's see…) :-)
PS: Lowe is quoted in "Delete." with, "The Aquarius would have blown the socks off of everybody. I felt, and a lot of people felt this was going to be a big deal and make IBM believe in this whole business." Now imagine that frustration… They had invented, designed and developed iPhone-like home computing in 1977, and they believed in it and in its transformative potential, and then they came out of the meeting that should have approved it all with the project canceled.
(I understand that IBM didn't want to risk the reputation of their core business by deploying a potentially unreliable technology for what must have still been an experiment to them. [Well, that changed with the Jr. ;-)] But, I think, this also illustrates that personal/home computing ultimately had to come out of startups and not from industry leaders. As you rightly observed, IBM eventually managed to square the circle by implementing a startup-like process and putting their weight behind it. But they probably learned it the hard way.)
TFA ( https://collindonnell.com/the-xerox-smalltalk-80-gui-was-wei... ).
>Jobs came to PARC in December 1978. 4 years later was an eternity.
Not in desktop GUI land, since nobody did anything interesting commercially in desktop GUIs for those next 4 years.
And of course in those 4 years Apple started the project, designed the hardware and implemented the OS, GUI, and basic programs. Lisa actually began in 1978 itself, so it took all those years until its release in 1983. By which time they'd probably also had a look at the Star's ongoing developments.
Doesn't mean they didn't take a lot of their inspiration from that demo.
>"The Lisa end user experience wasn't that different from the Xerox Alto" -- except that the Alto had many different programs, each with their own interface, so I don't know what you're referring to.
He's referring to the GUI concepts as implemented in it (and exhibited in those programs), not necessarily some overall GUI shell or some particular individual program.
>I guess you're talking about Smalltalk, but that was a tiny part of what people at Xerox were doing. It had a negligible influence on the Star.
TFA mistakenly talks about the Smalltalk GUI as if the common understanding is that Smalltalk-80s' GUI was what Apple saw and copied from Xerox.
TFA then goes on to reject that Apple copied Xerox, because he finds that Smalltalk-80 GUI was hardly like a Desktop, but more like an IDE.
That description of Smalltalk-80 GUI is of course correct, but he missed the crucial part: people don't say Apple copied Xerox because of Smalltalk-80, but because of Alto's (and perhaps Star's) GUI concepts.
So it's not the parent who is confused, he merely replies to TFA.