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The Xerox PARC Visit
- mimixco 8y agoI'm not sure what the point of this story is. Is it to discredit the work done by Engelbart and his team, some of whom later moved to Xerox? Is it to suggest that Apple themselves invented those UI concepts? Alto failed commercially not because Xerox didn't understand what they had built or kept it secret. It failed because Xerox was run by "tonerheads," as Jobs called them in a video interview -- people who made their money on copiers and couldn't envision a future beyond that. It also failed because Xerox built something for secretaries rather than programmers, as Ted Nelson has pointed out. The history of graphical user interfaces and UIs in general is well known and this revisionist version of it isn't contributing anything to the discussion.