Bill Gates was absolutely destroyed, on so many levels, in an AMA, today.
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Jobs PAID to see the demo at PARC - and it wasn't his idea, the real inventor of the Mac, Jef Raskin, was trying to show Jobs that the Mac and the GUI was something he should get behind. Gates never saw it, as far as I recall - but a lot of companies saw the Alto dog and pony show before the higher ups at Xerox slammed the door, because of what they were giving away. Gates later ripped off Apple because Jobs stupidly gave Gates two prototype Macs with source code so MS could have apps ready for the debut, with a verbal promise not to steal anything - which Gates promptly did. Also, a point left out of the urban legends around the infamous meeting of Apple and the PARC guys is that the Apple GUI was almost done by the time they saw the demo at PARC. It was a proof of concept show for Jobs, who wasn't all-in on the Mac at that point. The PARC and Apple guys all knew each other, they knew they were both working on GUIs, and the mouse concept came from someone they all knew at Stanford. I have a lot of inside baseball on all that. My dad worked with the PARC guys involved with all of that, and knew the guys who did the dog and pony show for Jobs and the Apple devs with him. There's a really good book about PARC, and the events there, I think it's called "Wizards Of Menlo Park", something like that, that lined up almost perfectly with everything I was told and heard. PARC was an amazing lab, that produced tech that the idiots in the Xerox leadership just gave away. The other major fuck up was this PARC guy who invented this printer language called Postscript. The braintrust at Xerox said "what are we supposed to do with this, we make copiers?", so the guy left PARC and started...Adobe.
Is it maybe Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age?
I think there's another book that I don't remember the name of now. I may have gotten all my info about PARC from chapters in other books about Compaq, Atari, etc. though.
Yeah, it was crazy how much stuff PARC came up with that other companies ended up developing.
An interesting book about Xerography an it's creation is Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg--Chester Carlson and the Birth of Xerox
That's the book, thanks. I lost my copy in a move, wouldn't mind reading it again.
Yeah, there's another book, one of the Apple ones, that goes into Raskin's story and the whole PARC thing, another one I lost.
Postscript wasn’t much of an invention though since it’s essentially just FORTH. The big idea was to use an actual Turing complete language for page description. But it was a bit much for the first laser printers. I mean I can see why xerox might have ditched that idea for printers due to the hardware resource requirements.
Xerox was warring among themselves, from all accounts, including my dad's persecutive working with them. One side of the executive suite wanted to expand into a tech company and do more than copiers, the other half were the "The owner wanted copiers, and that's all we do" side.
Granted, there's no guarantee Postcript would have emerged if Xerox had developed it. It's the same thing as when Wozniak was told by Hewlett Packard to go ahead and make the Apple 1, when they could have owned it.
Lots of blunders of that magnitude were made in that era, few had the vision of where it was all headed.
Yea, even if they had decided to expand their products they could have picked the wrong things to develop. It seems like desktop publishing stuff of some sort should have been a no brainer though. I mean the copiers are to publish stuff in more limited runs than is cost effective for offset printing. Now these days fancy laser printer/copiers have essentially replaced small offset presses. Even if the quality isn’t quite as good it’s close enough. Heck, now they even have high speed ink jet printers replacing larger offset presses for some stuff.
The irony is that Xerox licensed Postscript back from Adobe for their laserwriters, and they made the guts of the color laser printer guts that Apple sold - so the market was there, eventually. They entered the printer market eventually, after the DTP revolution got underway with the Mac, their cheap laser printer, and Pagemaker.
But yeah. Xerox supporting the entire publishing industry the way Adobe did - wasn't gonna happen. Postscript raised the tide for a lot of industries, like fonts, DTP, pro press, etc.
Oh, but thou shalt not steal from him, as his Open Letter to Hobbyists and his lobbying to Congress assured... He's such an ass.
Here's another interesting article I came across. It kind of tells the story from Jobs point of view, but I'm pretty sure he's known for changing history to take all the credit and make himself look better.