What Did Apple "Steal?"

In defense of Apple, and to clear the air.

Among Windozers, there is an annoying anti-Apple slander that's been going around for years: That Apple "stole" the Macintosh GUI from Xerox PARC after Steve Jobs & Co. visited Xerox one warm sunny day.

During this visit - the so-called 'Daylight Raid' - Steve Jobs and what would become the Lisa development team saw Object-Oriented Programming, an Ethernet LAN and the SmallTalk GUI.

Xerox showed their Apple visitors these treasures with the clear understanding that Jobs might take the ideas back to Apple. Some PARCers later went to work for Apple to help develop them. Xerox received some Apple stock in trade for the visit. Every part of it was above-board. Not even the loosest definition of corporate espionage applies here.

And, let's remember, Xerox's management could have capitalized on PARC's work, and built computers based on the SmallTalk GUI, at any point - even before there was an Apple Computer Company. Xerox chose not to, for various reasons. But Apple didn't stop them from doing anything.

(In an interview from the PBS show Triumph of the Nerds, former PARC member and Apple Chief Scientist Larry Tesler observed: "After looking at it for 5 minutes, he (Steve Jobs) understood more about our technology, and what it could do, than the Xerox executives who had been looking at it for 5 years.")

Even so, they say success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Apple did not simply port SmallTalk to the Motorola 68000. A huge amount of work went into modifying and improving Xerox's work into something friendlier and more efficient for end users.

Unlike the Xerox computers, Apple's Lisa and Mac were not "lab machines" existing solely for computer scientists to experiment with. There is a world of difference between a computer which is a design project for techies to kick around (which the Xerox Alto was) and one which is a finished, retail consumer product that regular folks will use (which the Mac was). Those two things are - if you'll pardon the expression - apples and oranges.

(I'd go so far as to say that anyone who thought the Lisa/Macs were only incrementally improved Altos had obviously never actually used an Alto.)

If I see a car and am inspired to build my own, I still have to build a car. No easy thing. Just because I'm not re-inventing the idea of "steering" or "engine" or "brake pedal" doesn't make it any easier.

Part of the blame for this undying "Apple stole the GUI" nonsense rests with, alas, Apple itself. In the early days, it suited Apple's self-image and PR mythology to contrast Jobs and his young, smart Apple gang with old, slow, stooopid big tech outfits like Xerox. The story of "hip" Apple putting one over on decidedly-uncool Xerox must have been too delicious to resist, however much they knew it was hogwash.

The truth is that Steve Jobs' visit to PARC was not the world-changing epiphany the Official Jobs Hagiography would have you think. According to Michael Malone's book Infinite Loop, Jobs was actually set up to have his Lightbulb Moment by Apple techies. Many key Lisa/Mac concepts (incl. the GUI) were well underway before that fateful visit. Ideas about evolving the computer display and user interface beyond ASCII and command lines were in wide discussion all throughout this period. Xerox did not 'own' them, and a lot of people at Apple (and elsewhere) were keenly interested. What remained was to get Jobs on board.

Finally, it's worth mentioning again that nothing Apple did prevented Xerox from capitalizing on PARC's work. For various reasons, Xerox dropped the ball - although exactly why is hotly debated.

You can hardly blame Apple for seeing a good idea and running with it anymore than you can blame Nintendo for believing that people DID want to play home video games, just not the mountain of crap surrounding Atari's VCS, and going ahead with the release of the NES after the Video Game Crash of 83-84.