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A good book (pretty much the only good book) to read about the research community that Parc was a part of is “The Dream Machine” by Mitchell Waldrop. There you will find out about the ARPA (before the “D”) IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) set up in 1962 by the visionary JCR Licklider, who created a research community of 15 or 16 “projects”, mostly at universities, but also a few at places like RAND Corp, Lincoln Labs, Mitre, BBN, SDC, etc.

There was a vision: “The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone in the world pervasively networked worldwide”.

A few principles:

1. Visions not goals
2. Fund people not projects — the scientists find the problems not the funders. So, for many reasons, you have to have the best researchers.
3. Problem Finding — not just Problem Solving
4. Milestones not deadlines
5. It’s “baseball” not “golf” — batting .350 is very good in a high aspiration high risk area. Not getting a hit is not failure but the overhead for getting hits. (As in baseball, an “error” is failing to pull off something that is technically feasible.)
6. It’s about shaping “computer stuff” to human ends per the vision. Much of the time this required the researchers to design and build pretty much everything, including much of the hardware — including a variety of mainframes — and virtually all of the software needed (including OSs and programming languages, etc.). Many of the ARPA researchers were quite fluent in both HW and SW (though usually better at one than the other). This made for a pretty homogeneous computing culture and great synergy in most projects.
7. The above goes against the commonsense idea that “computer people should not try to make their own tools (because of the infinite Turing Tarpit that results)”. The ARPA idea was a second order notion: “if you can make your own tools, HW and SW, then you must!”. The idea was that if you are going to take on big important and new problems then you just have to develop the chops to pull off all needed tools, partly because of what “new” really means, and partly because trying to do workarounds of vendor stuff that is in the wrong paradigm will kill the research thinking.
8. An important part of the research results are researchers. This extends the “baseball” idea to human development. The grad schools, especially, generally admitted people who “seemed interesting” and judgements weren’t made until a few years down the road. Many of the researchers who ultimately solved most of the many problems of personal computing and networking were created by the ARPA community.

Parc was the last of these “ARPA Projects” to be created, and because of funding changes from the Vietnam war, got its funding from a corporation rather than from ARPA-IPTO. But pretty much all of the computer people at Parc had grown up in ARPA projects in the 60s, and Bob Taylor, who set up the computing research at Parc, had been the 3rd director of ARPA-IPTO.

Bob’s goal was to “Realize The ARPA Dream”.

Parc was highly concentrated with regard to wealth of talents, abilities, vision, confidence, and cooperation. There was no real management structure, so things were organized to allow researchers to “suggest” and “commit” and “decommit” in a more or less orderly fashion.

Quite a lot of the inventions Parc is most known for were done in the first 5 years by a rather small pool of researchers (Butler Lampson estimates about 25 people, and that seems about right).

One of the most interesting ideas at Parc was: “every invention has to be engineered for 100 users”. So if you do a programming language or a DTP word processor, etc, it has to be documented for and usable by 100 people. If you make a personal computer, you have to be able to make 100 of them. If an Ethernet, it has to connect to 100 devices, etc.

There was no software religion. Everyone made the languages and OSs and apps, etc that they felt would advance their research.

Hardware was trickier because of the time and costs needed for replication and doing and making new designs. In practice this worked out pretty easily most of the time — via not too many meetings — and the powers of HW geniuses like Chuck Thacker. A few things — like the disk sectors and simple Ethernet protocols, etc. — were agreed on, mainly to allow more important things to be done more idiosyncratically. In practice, Parc designed and put in the field a variety of Alto designs (about 2000 Altos were built), MAXCs, Dolphins, Dorados, NoteTakers, Dandelions, etc over a period of about 10 years — i.e. quite a lot.

There were key figures. For example, Parc would not have succeeded without Bob Taylor, Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and a few others.

I would call the first 5 years “effectively idyllic”. And the second 5 years “very productive but gradually erosive” (the latter due to Xerox’s many changes of management, and not being able to grapple with either the future, or a possible grand destiny for the company).

Being at Xerox PARC during Steve Jobs’s visit felt like watching two worlds collide — an almost theatrical moment when decades of quiet invention met an impatient, design‑driven entrepreneur. Accounts from engineers, designers and managers who were there converge on a few consistent impressions: curiosity, guarded pride, mild bewilderment, and a sudden clarity that ideas would move from lab to market in new ways.

What people remember, in practical terms

• The setting: PARC’s Alto lab was informal and intensely focused. Engineers and researchers worked in small groups with chalkboards, early bitmapped displays, and prototype hardware that looked more like art-studio pieces than polished products. The atmosphere balanced academic rigour with a hacker’s messiness.
• Jobs’s energy and intent: He arrived not as a passive visitor but as an active interrogator. He wanted to see what worked, what was usable, and — crucially — what could become a product. He asked pointed questions about interaction, user experience, and implementation constraints. Observers described him as laser‑focused on how to simplify and commercialize the concepts.
• Demonstrations that mattered: PARC researchers showed the Alto’s graphical user interface, the bitmap display, object-oriented linking, the mouse, and early WYSIWYG text editing. The demonstrations were technically impressive; many researchers expected interest, but were surprised by Jobs’s immediate fixation on the GUI and mouse as the future of personal computing.
• Cultural mismatch: PARC’s culture prized exploration, publishing, and architecture for the long term. Jobs’s approach prioritized user experience, integrated product design, and tight control over software/hardware integration. That difference wasn’t hostile, but it was stark — researchers were thinking about possibilities and building blocks; Jobs was thinking about a finished, delightful product people could buy.
• Emotional tone: Pride mixed with bemusement. Researchers were proud that their ideas impressed someone of Jobs’s stature; they were bemused by his impatience for refinement and his aesthetic demands. Some recollections include a mild defensiveness when Jobs dismissed certain designs as “not elegant” or “not ready.”

Concrete outcomes and the ripple effect

• Inspiration for the Macintosh: Jobs’s enthusiasm for the Alto’s GUI and mouse played a direct role in shaping the Macintosh. He recruited PARC alumni (notably, people like Andy Hertzfeld later joined Apple teams) and absorbed interaction metaphors and UI patterns. Apple translated experimental demos into focused, consumer-facing features: menus, icons, drag-and-drop, and WYSIWYG document editing.
• A lesson in productization: PARC’s prototypes were powerful but not productized. Jobs’s visit exposed the gap between research prototypes and mass-market products — an essential lesson in engineering trade-offs, manufacturing, simplicity, and design constraints. That lesson influenced Apple’s insistence on end-to-end integration.
• Attribution and controversy: The visit intensified debates about credit and intellectual property. PARC’s research was foundational, but Apple’s consolidation, refinement and design made those ideas commercially successful. That dynamic later became a frequent talking point in technology history: invention versus execution.

Typical anecdotes that circulate

• The mouse and the GUI demo left Jobs visibly excited; he reportedly returned to Apple and pushed aggressively to integrate similar ideas into projects already underway.
• Researchers recall Jobs dismissing some interface elements as superfluous, then insisting that core interactions be beautiful and intuitive — a kind of tough love that pushed engineers to think differently about users.
• A few people remembered a mix of amusement and irritation when Jobs quipped about commoditizing PARC’s research — he saw a market sooner than many researchers did.

Why the story persists

• The visit crystallizes a recurring pattern in tech history: labs producing radical ideas, and product teams translating them into mass‑market realities. It’s often held up as a canonical example of how design sensibility and product focus can amplify foundational research.
• It’s a cautionary tale for research labs: great ideas don’t automatically become products; organizational focus and willingness to make hard tradeoffs matter.

Bottom line

Being at PARC that day meant watching a polite collision between exploratory research and merciless product focus. Researchers felt validated that their experiments excited a cultural tastemaker; Jobs left with a clearer roadmap for turning elegant research concepts into consumer products. The visit didn’t involve drama so much as a catalytic realignment of priorities — a moment when the possibilities of graphical computing moved from academic proof to a mission for design and commercialization.

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I was not a member of PARC; I joined Xerox Office Systems Division in July of 1984. the so-called “Development Arm” of Xerox PARC. We were frustrated. Apple had announced the MacIntosh in Jan 1984. Xerox didn’t seem to be able or know how to sell the technology we were making. I can tell you some reasons why.

1. Xerox built computers for 10 years in the future, wrote the software, got done too early, and tried to sell them, 5 years too soon. So they were horribly expensive. Xerox document systems were $11,000 word processors but a secretary earned only $10,000 salary per year and an electric typewriter was only $800, so the Xerox System was too pricey!
2. Apple found this out the hard way - with LISA. That system was $9,995 and nobody wanted one! Apple struggled to cut the price! Xerox’s systems were highly bloated (a minimum usable system was 29M disk and 512KB of RAM) compared to MacIntosh (400K floppy disk and 128KB of RAM). And the Xerox 8010 workstation was a huge mistake. The microcoded machine ran LISP, Smalltalk, and MESA, but not at the same time you had to change the microcode to change to a different language!
3. When Apple announced the MacIntosh, Xerox OSD employees were fed up! They secretly collected money to run a full-page advertisement congratulating Apple for creating the MacIntosh, in the New York Times a month later. This was incredibly embarrassing to Xerox management!
4. Xerox to some extent was too arrogant about their mission. The Xerox 8010 workstation / Dandelion processor could run PARC’s VLSI software and VLSI virtual-memory workstations were selling for $80,000 - $100,000. But Xerox was not going to be putting marks on silicon - marks on paper, darn it! It turned out they were wrong and paper disappeared in 2000. If Xerox had been more flexible, they might have been a successful VLSI workstation maker.
5. I put this point to Lynn Conway who worked at Xerox PARC in the golden era. She and Carver Meade wrote the pioneering book “Introduction to VLSI Systems” in 1979 inventing the concept of design rules. She agreed that perhaps it was a mistake to insist on making ONLY document systems, perhaps they could have become a VLSI workstation maker.
6. And Apple made MANY improvements to Xerox tech. I will list 4 of them.
1. Xerox Doodle was a really crappy paint program and nobody paid any attention to it - it was not allowed in the product! Apple wrote a much better version “MacPaint” adding textures and lasso and some slick marketing to make it look like loads of fun!
2. Pull-down menus and a menu bar were major simplifications that NOBODY else had. Xerox used 2-button mouses and pressing both buttons at once (“chording”) simulated a 3-button mouse. When you pressed a button you never knew what pop-up thingie might appear! Drop-down menus were a huge improvement in self-documenting user interfaces!
3. Apple’s invented the resource fork’ed file, to save memory. They would glue a program binary together with the user interface elements (text strings, dialogue menus, pictures, etc.) and by dropping just 1 single file into a folder you had EVERYTHING no need for an INSTALLER! Using ResEdit anyone could modify the text & pictures & menus to adapt the program for other countries. What started as a poor-man’s virtual memory system became a MAJOR advantage in installers and internationalization!
4. Apple invented the Quickdraw picture language. Xerox didn’t. There was no Interpress picture language. Apple did it before Adobe’s Display Postscript (1984). So the Apple MacIntosh could copy pictures BETWEEN PROGRAMS on the clipboard and NOBODY else could do that effectively for almost a decade!
7. I left Xerox in 1986. In the end, Xerox computers were outdated and the world had moved on. They were 1970’s tech. Everyone in the 1980s was using off-the-shelf microprocessors. In 1987 I bought a Macintosh II with a 640x480 color display, 1MB RAM, and an 80MB 5″ hard disk, for $5900. It was half the cost of a Xerox computer - faster - color - with VM and floating point - and with Microsoft Word 3.0, written by Xerox’s Charles Simonyi, inventor of Xerox’s WYSWYG Bravo editor, much better!

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They never gave Apple anything. The short story is just plain wrong. Sure Xerox PARC people objected to allowing Steve in there, they kind of knew that Apple was likely to do things with it, but keep in mind that Xerox management basically allowed anyone to come in there and have a look and get presentations.

But with Apple, Xerox did a deal with Apple because Apple had much better production lines than Xerox did and Apple manufactured components for them, and Apple did license their stuff as far as it went.

What Xerox Star was and worked and their GUI is dramatically different from MacOS.

Also, Xerox wasn’t going anywhere with any of this. They pretty much only had single company who used their products, Xerox PARC themselves. Their machines cost $20,000 in 1981.

Xerox wasn’t interested in the laser printer they made, so the technology went to other company.

3Com founder Bob Metcalfe walked out of Parc with networking, he himself made.

Xerox PARC never got money for this, or anything else really to speak of.

The whole idea that Apple showed up one day, asked to see everything and then walked away is just not true.

People at PARC left PARC to join Apple because Apple was actually doing anything with the technology. Larry Tessler is probably the best known, he invented Copy Paste which is probably one of the least important things he did.

No, I don’t think Xerox PARC owner, Xerox ever regret allowing Apple to come and visit

He was much like anyone else you'd meet. Standing one day out in front of Computer Attic at the time, 382 University Ave in Palo Alto, around the corner comes Steve bouncing along as he did when walking, I see him, he sees me and says "Hey", I say "Hey" and he walks past. Next day, around the same time, I was standing outside on a break, he comes around the corner, this time it's "Hey, how's it going?", "Good" I replied, "cool" said he and on he went.

The following day, I had just finished a sale, walked out the door, and there was Steve. "Hey, what's up?" he says to me, "Just taking a break, how about you?" Out for a walk was his reply and then it happened, "by the way my name is St...", I cut him off with "I know who you are Steve Jobs!" "Who are you, and what do you do here?" "Michael Murdock is my name and I sell Macintosh computers".

"Oh those are nice, but wait till you see what we're working on NeXT"...and we continued conversing about things, eventually became friends, and a couple of years later, I went to work for Pixar and was there from 1991 - 1997 leaving after my picture hit the front page of the San Jose Mercury News in an article about the next CEO of Apple. I was the guy in the beard wearing a tux at the time and looking a bit like Larry Ellison. While at Pixar, I was honored to have worked with many amazing people and have a credit line of "macintosh systems engineer" in the original Toy Story movie.

NeXT went on to be purchased by Apple for a figure that I had placed onto a Pixar Christmas card sent to Gil Amelio that said simply "$450 million is not too much to pay for a Happy Apple Family". Whether or not Gil read the card...one will never know, but it was interesting how shortly after that card was sent, the purchase of NeXT took place, and the series of events took place which put Steve back into the CEO chair.

Steve went on to run things at Apple, and many great things took place. A couple of years passed and we mended our hiccup due to my challenging him publicly and calling into question his genius as not many others had at the time, and so openly.

He reached out to me a couple of years before his passing, in a private conversation we shared, Steve actually thanked me for leaving Pixar and going on my path to challenge him for CEO of Apple when I did. He said to me that "you should know, that if you'd not pushed me to go back when you did, much of what's happened since then would never have happened, including the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and some other products which will eventually come to being".

"I always wondered if that had done any good as it cost me dearly monetarily, and reputation-wise" I said. "It's done a lot of good, I can assure you, and I am very thankful for your involvement" he told me.

That for me was a pivotal conversation, and one of the last ones we had before he died. What was cool about it was both he and I know that I'd not done it for the money. In fact, I'd asked for less than any previous CEO had. It was about Apple, and ensuring that customers had the best products, the best customer experiences, and a brand that they could always trust to deliver.

I'm grateful for having known Steve for as long as I did (24 years), and for the times we shared even the simplest of conversations, but also for the deep spiritual connection we shared while he was here, and after he died. (Yes, his spirit has come to visit and talk and share, and he's still amazing).

Sometimes in this life we take things for granted. I never took my knowing of Steve for granted, and I am thankful that I stepped onto that sidewalk in Palo Alto many years ago and that the conversation which happened that day did. If it hadn't...well who knows what would have happened and when, but according to him, what of what did would not have and that's good enough for me.

Some call their interactions with Steve rough, that he was a real bastard and mean, and mean spirited. I even called him mean spirited at one point. However, for the most part, he was one who was gentle to be around, open, always asking questions, thinking and then responding when questioned in a friendly fashion. Just like anyone else you meet...how do you wish to be treated by them? Create the result you want by approaching a situation with an open mind and an open heart and then simply enjoy the result you've created with that energy.

I wish you peace beyond all understanding.

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Here is a different way things could have gone …

The three largest intertwined visions of the computer future we were committed to, all burst into view in 1962: Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect”, and Licklider’s “Man-machine Symbiosis” and “Intergalactic Network” via ARPA funding.

This was all the same community. Sutherland was funded by MIT/SAGE, Englebart’s was a proposal to the Air Force (later taken up by NASA, and then ARPA), and Licklider was asked in 1962 to use ARPA funds to do something about the future of interactive computing.

By the time Parc was set up in 1970 — and stocked with young researchers from the ARPA community — it was getting to be time for another pass at both interactive computing and the the “Intergalactic Net” — partly because ARPA funding had been curtailed via the politics of the Viet Nam war, and partly because an inflection point in ongoing VLSI was just about to happen.

The basic sentiment at Parc was that we wanted to do “Engelbart, Sutherland, and Licklider for everyone, including children”. A number of systems considerations, especially UI ones, suggested that the larger schemes thought about for the Internetworking of all should also be employed at the personal level (and that this choice would be better and better as Moore’s Law moved along).

The decision at Parc was to build “time machines” that would start appearing in 1973, but would be in the form of networked personal computers of the 80s ca 1986–88 or so. This would provide a platform to realistically solve many systems, apps, UIs, graphics, and other problems that would pay off handsomely down the road. About 2000 of these machines were eventually built.

The catch was that it would be very difficult to do either “Sutherland” or “Engelbart” with these machines. For example, Sketchpad was programmed in terms of “executable solvable requirements” (which is just what the future demanded) but it would take years and more powerful machines than were feasible in the 70s to do this.

And, one of many important features of Engelbart’s system was that any content could be completely shared real-time between any number of users, and all of them could touch and manipulate. This was built into the bottommost layer of the system and was a wonderful thing. Just how to do this gracefully on a distributed system was still an as yet to be invented scheme.

These considerations upset Engelbart to the point of causing a schism in his lab at SRI. One group stuck with him and implemented their next system on a mainframe time sharing system (as the previous one had been) and this gave them what they were used to for a few more years.

The other group — which could see that the problems had to be solved in a distributed way — mostly wound up at Parc. And the first versions of the distributed system were quite a bit weaker in many ways than the mainframe version, but stronger in a few important future directions.

“All other things being equal” (but they aren’t), Parc would eventually have produced a qualitative leap along the directions of Engelbart’s “Augmentation” (that’s what we wanted).

The silicon inflection point that allowed us to make our time machines also allowed simple inexpensive “8 bit micro” computers to touch the consumer and low end business markets. This started a wave in the late 70s that had pretty much nothing to do with “how computers should be used in society”. The people who made them and the people who wanted them had completely different motivations — and most especially completely different contexts and understandings about “computers for people”.

This created a “societal normal” about every part of computing that was both low, but also touched a very large unsophisticated market place.

A deep point is that the Parc and Engelbart approaches required more computing power than people were willing to pay for if they didn’t understand what it was for. The weakness of the 8-bit and early 16-bit micros (and lack of microcoding) took programming back about 15 years into rather low level approaches. New programmers starting learning C etc instead of the much higher level languages that were needed. When Intel et al started to make processors that were aimed at C rather than the high level languages, the game was pretty much over.

If you look at this from the “ARPA Dream” perspective, almost nothing from ARPA made it out except for things for which there was no competition. For example, the Ethernet was manifestly better than other attempts at local area networking. The Internet was manifestly better (and pretty much unique). Apple liked the UI work at Parc but — as Steve later said — missed pretty much everything else.

The Parc work at the end of the 70s lacked a lot of prime needed features that Engelbart had already done. It is doubtful that Apple would have picked these up if they had been there. Microsoft was much less idealistic than Apple and just as unsophisticated.

Different readers will have different reactions to this account.

For my part, after I left Parc in 1980 and first went to Atari and then to Apple, I was shocked at the naivete and general lack of knowledge and understanding of what computing was and could be all about — and especially the lack of any curiosity about possibly great ideas from the past.*

The present that happened was not about great ideas, but about generally unsophisticated individuals wanting to do things that made them feel better about themselves and that they could sell to other unsophisticates (that is not a basis that is going to give rise to great ideas).

Sic transit gloria mundi

* note that Tim Berners-Lee did not know about Engelbart when he patched together what was to become the WWW. He has apologized for this since. But the fact that a computer person did not know prime history is as usual as it would be unusual for a physicist not to know about Newton and what he did. This is the difference between a “pop culture”, and a “developed culture”. And it has hurt computing terribly, almost to the death of its best ideas.

Which visit are you talking about: the time he went into PARC in 1979 to view technology demos by Xerox PARC researchers and stole† the idea for a hand-controlled mouse to interact with objects on a computer screen?

Above: one early iteration of the Xerox PARC ‘roller mouse’, developed in 1978. A version of this prototype was shown to Steve Jobs during his 1979 visit to PARC, when the mouse and several other breakthrough concept technologies were demonstrated for Jobs.

Or the time Jobs visited PARC with members of his LISA design team in 1981 and stole†† the idea for a Graphic User Interface, down to the desktop motif and the use of icons as mechanisms to interact with documents and applications?

Above: An early working prototype of Xerox PARC’s Graphical User Interface (GUI), which was revolutionary in the age when green-text command-line style interfaces like that used in DOS was ubiquitous at the time. Xerox built their own PC line that utilized the GUI, but it was terribly marketed and was considered a major failure within Xerox and by the industry in general.

According to Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, Xerox PARC researcher Adele Goldberg showed Jobs the Xerox GUI, but she was angry that Xerox was allowing Jobs to see ‘everything.’ She understood that Xerox had “grabbed defeat from the jaws of success” according to Jobs, by giving him access to their R&D work in exchange for shares in Apple.

Without Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, the Macintosh, and Lisa would not have had the GUI, and Bill Gates might not have subsequently revolutionized computers with Windows.

Malcom Gladwell published a great article in New Yorker outlining the famous story of the Xerox mouse and personal computer. The story begins in 1979 when the 24 year old Steve Jobs made a deal with Xerox:

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars'—[Apple’s] highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would 'open its kimono.'

A lot of haggling ensued based on what he was allowed to see and what was to be kept in secret from him. Many at Xerox thought this was a completely ludicrous deal. In the end, Xerox went ahead with it. Jobs was given a couple of tours at the end of which he ended up standing in front of the Xerox Alto, PARC's personal computer:

An engineer named Larry Tesler conducted the demonstration. He moved the cursor across the screen with the aid of a "mouse." Directing a conventional computer, in those days, meant typing in a command on the keyboard. Tesler just clicked on one of the icons on the screen. He opened and closed "windows," deftly moving from one task to another. He wrote on an elegant word-processing program, and exchanged e-mails with other people at PARC, on the world's first Ethernet network.

Jobs had come with one of his software engineers, Bill Atkinson, and Atkinson moved in as close as he could, his nose almost touching the screen.

Jobs got a 'little bit' excited watching this presentation. He could not believe that Xerox wasn't doing much with this technology:

Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time," Tesler recalled. "He was very excited. Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, 'Why aren't you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!'

• Malcolm Gladwell’s article about Apple, Steve Jobs and Xerox PARC: https://www.gladwell.com/2011/2011_05_16_a_creationmyth.html

FOOTNOTES:

† Yes, Steve Jobs executed an agreement with Xerox brass (100,000 pre-IPO shares of Apple for $1 million) to license any technology in development by Xerox PARC prior to his visits, but nobody at Xerox HQ told anyone at PARC about the agreement. As Xerox PARC CEO Mark Bernstein pointed out in a 2010 interview with ZDNet:

“That view that Xerox/PARC didn't capitalize enough on its breakthroughs is common. I’m often asked whether PARC would let Steve Jobs in the building since a lot of those PARC ideas built Apple.

"It would be great to have Steve come over…I'd just have to be careful about what I showed him."

†† Xerox PARC CEO Mark Bernstein continued later in the ZDNet interview:

“To set the record straight, Jobs was invited to PARC. It's not like Jobs snuck in the building and ran off with a graphical user interface. Apple engineers visited PARC in 1979 and then incorporated PARC's approach to a user interface. PARC got private shares of Apple in exchange for the demo.

“But it would have been better for the folks who actually invented the technologies to have had a ‘heads-up’ that Jobs was essentially on a shopping trip at PARC, rather than a friendly visit, which is how the demos were understood within the PARC team.”

a) Apple paid Xerox with 100,000 PRE-IPO shares of Apple to license anything they saw in the demo/tour.

b) Xerox could not figure out to monetize the ‘research’ they had but also figured if these two hippies out in CA came out with anything, they could do it better - after all, they were a TOP 25 Fortune 500 company, Apple was a hobbyist gadget seller then (home PC’s? Who would buy that?).

c) The proof is that Apple went public in 1980 (the Apple II was a hit but not much GUI OS and no mouse at that time). The Mac with both did not come out until 1984. But Xerox did not really do much with their technology in those 4 years and basically NEVR did (yes, they demoed a few PC like devices but nothing ever went very far). They simply were not capable of converting these technologies to monetize them - either afraid to hurt their lucrative copying market or just unable to (no entrepreneurs left at the company). Or look at it this way. THey should have OWNED the printing market - at least for the 1st 10–20 year of the home PC (who wouldn’t buy a Xerox branded printer if they could afford it from 1976 to 1990?? It was THE BRAND in printing but they failed there also).

d) The narrative that Apple “stole/borrowed” Xerox tech was a story sold by Micrsoft/Bill Gates as not to give credit to Apple for coalescing all this raw technology to the market first).

It was like being friends with everyone else in your life. Some of them are good, others are bad. Some people the shittiest experience of their life being "friends" with him. However, many of those people have an axe to grind now that he's dead and seek to do nothing but bash him.

For those of us with no axe to grind, he was easy to speak with, fun to hang out with and was quite a jokester. He was also one who asked a lot of questions as he was constantly in learning mode and was the first to admit his humanity and lack of knowledge in some things. (mind blowing for some to know that).

He was also one to dig into his pocket and help you out when you needed it, whether or not you ever asked for it. Personally one day when I needed some help due to a personal matter, he'd overheard that, walked by me, tapped me on the back and when I turned, he'd folded up $2,000 in $100 bills and handed them to me saying "Hope this helps out a bit". I was a bit stunned and said "Thanks". He smiled and walked off to a meeting.

Later on I went to pay him back and he said to me "Absolutely not necessary". You won't find that in any book about him, nor any movie about him. Why? Because they don't source out people who laud Steve. The find those who bitch bitch bitch about things, but those who didn't have the balls to leave from working with him because they felt they had no place to go. They never left because they wanted to stick around and see if and when he'd make it so they could ride those coattails as far as they could.

Personally, I say screw those people. Real friends don't do crap like that.