Inspired by ‘the visit’ to Xerox PARC

In 1979 Xerox granted Steve Jobs and colleagues from Apple a visit to PARC in exchange for several million dollars in Apple stock. During the course of several visits, engineers and Apple executives saw demos of Alto technology (complete with windows, icons, graphical user interface, and mouse) which were later adopted by Apple for its Lisa and Macintosh computers. Needless to say, the PARC engineers were less than thrilled, as they saw their own company give away technology they had worked on for many years. For some it was a betrayal which meant that Xerox had no intention of bringing their inventions to market anytime soon as expressed in the following song from XEROX PARC (the musical) – a duet between Adele Goldberg (then manager of the Learning Research Group @ PARC) and Steve Jobs.

There are many versions of this story that achieved the status of myth in Apple lore, as well as reasons Xerox failed to commercialize the computer technology at PARC (ie: the geographic distance between PARC & Xerox headquarters, etc., etc.) but here is my own take:
Personnel at PARC had created technology ahead of its time. Certainly, the cost of computer chips at the time made commercialization prohibitively expensive. But Moore’s law dictated that the cost of those chips would go down. In the meantime, Apple, whose core product was computers went out on the limb and spent the extra money to get the Lisa & MacIntosh out to market. Xerox, whose main product was copiers manufactured in the USA, was not able to compete with a company that outsourced its manufacturing abroad. – T.C.

For another version of the same story, see the following link.