
The Xerox PARC Visit - shawndumas
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html
======
huxley
One factor many people forget was that Doug Engelbart did "The Mother of All
Demos" back in 1968 to over 1000 computer professionals:

[http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayint...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayintech_1209)

<http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html>

Far more primitive than Alto or the Mac, but the ideas were percolating out
there. SRI's NLS/Augment system definitely inspired the work at PARC (which
didn't open until at least a year after the demo).

Steve Jobs later said that the GUI overshadowed other innovations at PARC
(ones which later drove a lot of the work done at NeXT).

"And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one
I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was
object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that.
The other one they showed me was a networked computer system ... they had over
a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even
see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the
graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my
life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done
a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though
they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and
within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work
like this some day."

Triumph of the Nerds transcript <http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html>

------
wklauss
"Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's
venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed
to show Apple what was going on in its lab."

I think this is kind of the point they make in Steve Jobs bio as well. Xerox
allowed Apple to use some of the concepts in the lab because they were
investors in the company. Also, if I recall correctly, Apple engineers went a
little farther in the window metaphor, allowing, for example, to overlap and
stack windows, something XEROX wasn't able or willing to do.

~~~
rubinelli
I once read an anecdote saying that that Jobs remembered this part wrong: he
told Apple's engineers about the stacking, overlapping windows he _thought_ he
had seen; armed with this piece of misinformation, they went ahead and
"duplicated" that feature.

~~~
shawndumas
Not quite the same thing but here is a corollary...

"Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's
menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing
windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs
couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know
this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager
so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of
windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk
feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was
created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC."
--[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt)

