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This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in exchange for $1M worth of pre-IP

This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no theft. Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong). The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought they saw realtime overlapping windows when they didn’t. [0] So it’s possible Xerox was inspired by Apple with the Star, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Bill Gates totally outs himself as someone who would steal shamelessly. [0]: https://folklore.org/On_Xerox%2C_Apple_and_Progress.html https://folklore.org/On_Xerox%2C_Apple_and_Progress.html

Hitton 2y ago
Meanwhile Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
- lolinder 2y ago
  Clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jeZ7m0ycw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jeZ7m0ycw
  - albumen 2y ago
    top comment: "The credit should be given to poet T S Eliot (1920): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” and its reply: "So really it has nothing to do with stealing whatsoever"
iczero 2y ago
> There was no theft. I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all their designs. Was that explicitly stated?
- cortesoft 2y ago
  Why would they give away 1m in stock just to look?
  - iczero 2y ago
    Was it only for the tour? Was it actually $1M, or did it later increase in value? Did Xerox value a strategic relationship? "A whole load of ideas" seems worth more than $1M to me, especially if you're Xerox back then.
  - lupire 2y ago
    They didn't. They got paid $1M!
  - lolinder 2y ago
    OP misrepresented what happened (intentionally or otherwise). They didn't give away $1M in stock, they granted Xerox the right to buy $1M in stock.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Same difference. At some point you're just arguing about what the number was. I don't care about the broader argument, but the right to buy $1MM of private shares is, in fact, real consideration.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Is it real consideration that anyone could consider to be worth "all the IP that you happen to be able to see while on this tour", or is it real consideration that Xerox thought was worth "an opportunity to see how we run the best tech lab of our generation"? Don't forget that Apple presumably got paid $1M dollars out of the deal in addition to the tour. I'm having a hard time seeing the argument that the right to pay Apple for some of their shares in 1979 was perceived as being worth any of Xerox PARC's IP, much less "as much as you can carry in your head". (None of which is to say that Apple was wrong to copy what they could, morally or legally. I just find the argument that these shares are evidence that it was an above-board trade that Xerox was on board with to be very weird.)
pulse7 2y ago
Steve Jobs himself told what he saw at Xerox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw
- gen220 2y ago
  He's famous, so his view is the one that's most commonly regurgitated, but that doesn't make it the most correct one. Steve's point of view is one point of view, in a story that involved ~10 people. When you hear the story from each person's point of view and union them, the subtly-incorrect aspects of his perspective become pretty glaring.
  - solarmist 2y ago
    Has someone done that? Sounds like a interesting read/watch.
lupire 2y ago
The price Apple charged for that stock was more than Apple's IPO price, AIUI. It wasn't a giveaway.
lolinder 2y ago
Your version makes it sound like Apple gave Xerox $1M in stock in exchange for the visit. Most sources I can find don't mention the stock at all, but the one that does [0] makes it pretty clear that the offer was to let Xerox buy stock from Apple pre-IPO in exchange for the tour, which is a very different story: > Jobs's company stood on the precipice of a public offering guaranteed to make him and any investors wealthy, and the tech guru's impending good fortune enticed the suits at Xerox to make him an offer he couldn't refuse: Let us buy shares in your company, and we'll give you a peek inside the greatest minds in your field. [0] https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-apple-steve-jobs-xerox-437972 https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-apple-steve-jobs-xer...
- turnsout 2y ago
  You're right—bad phrasing on my part
- gen220 2y ago
  There was no explicit trade of stock for tour. The investment by Xerox in Apple happened before such a tour, for entirely separate reasons. There was another Apple exec who was managing pre-IPO external investor interest. There isn't a recorded reason for why Apple chose Xerox (among other investors), if I remember correctly. However, Steve did leverage the fact that Xerox was an investor to bully the on-site engineers into providing him with the "executive" demo, after receiving the run-of-the-mill public demo and learning that a higher-tier demo existed. It involved a phone call to east coast Xerox Corporate, who instructed the on-site engineers to provide the full demo. The PARC lab director was OOO that day, and later said in an interview that he would have stonewalled Job's request. Another fun fact, Xerox sold (the majority of?) their stake in Apple almost immediately for a quick turnaround profit post-IPO. Obviously there's no recorded reason for that trade, but my impression is that they didn't think Apple had what it takes to build a proper OS (they envied their ability to cheaply assemble hardware, but viewed their software suite/R&D as a big moat). Edit: also, Apple engineers were already mid-working on replicating PARC tech at the time of the (not-so-) "fateful" demo. It was behind schedule and not-demoable, and Steve was getting frustrated with these facts. They encouraged Steve to visit PARC to get a preview/demo of what they were building, to ground him to their works' value. There were already a handful of ex-PARC people at Apple for a while, at this point, and PARC's work stems from "The Mother of All Demos" given decades ago. The Alto was unique in its early implementation, but not in its ideas.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Thank you for that. I was going to post something similar. What the Apple engineers did was take obvious inspiration from what they saw at PARC but then ended up going in a different direction when they actually had to both implement it and make it workable as an OS. The overlapping windows is the most oft-cited innovation they came up with but there were many other perhaps more subtle ones. The impression I have though is then that Gates basically copied Apple engineering, not PARC.

Hitton 2y ago

Meanwhile Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

lolinder 2y ago
Clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jeZ7m0ycw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jeZ7m0ycw
- albumen 2y ago
  top comment: "The credit should be given to poet T S Eliot (1920): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” and its reply: "So really it has nothing to do with stealing whatsoever"

iczero 2y ago

> There was no theft. I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all their designs. Was that explicitly stated?

cortesoft 2y ago
Why would they give away 1m in stock just to look?
- iczero 2y ago
  Was it only for the tour? Was it actually $1M, or did it later increase in value? Did Xerox value a strategic relationship? "A whole load of ideas" seems worth more than $1M to me, especially if you're Xerox back then.
- lupire 2y ago
  They didn't. They got paid $1M!
- lolinder 2y ago
  OP misrepresented what happened (intentionally or otherwise). They didn't give away $1M in stock, they granted Xerox the right to buy $1M in stock.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Same difference. At some point you're just arguing about what the number was. I don't care about the broader argument, but the right to buy $1MM of private shares is, in fact, real consideration.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Is it real consideration that anyone could consider to be worth "all the IP that you happen to be able to see while on this tour", or is it real consideration that Xerox thought was worth "an opportunity to see how we run the best tech lab of our generation"? Don't forget that Apple presumably got paid $1M dollars out of the deal in addition to the tour. I'm having a hard time seeing the argument that the right to pay Apple for some of their shares in 1979 was perceived as being worth any of Xerox PARC's IP, much less "as much as you can carry in your head". (None of which is to say that Apple was wrong to copy what they could, morally or legally. I just find the argument that these shares are evidence that it was an above-board trade that Xerox was on board with to be very weird.)

pulse7 2y ago

Steve Jobs himself told what he saw at Xerox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw

gen220 2y ago
He's famous, so his view is the one that's most commonly regurgitated, but that doesn't make it the most correct one. Steve's point of view is one point of view, in a story that involved ~10 people. When you hear the story from each person's point of view and union them, the subtly-incorrect aspects of his perspective become pretty glaring.
- solarmist 2y ago
  Has someone done that? Sounds like a interesting read/watch.

lupire 2y ago

The price Apple charged for that stock was more than Apple's IPO price, AIUI. It wasn't a giveaway.

lolinder 2y ago

Your version makes it sound like Apple gave Xerox $1M in stock in exchange for the visit. Most sources I can find don't mention the stock at all, but the one that does [0] makes it pretty clear that the offer was to let Xerox buy stock from Apple pre-IPO in exchange for the tour, which is a very different story: > Jobs's company stood on the precipice of a public offering guaranteed to make him and any investors wealthy, and the tech guru's impending good fortune enticed the suits at Xerox to make him an offer he couldn't refuse: Let us buy shares in your company, and we'll give you a peek inside the greatest minds in your field. [0] https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-apple-steve-jobs-xerox-437972 https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-apple-steve-jobs-xer...

turnsout 2y ago
You're right—bad phrasing on my part
gen220 2y ago
There was no explicit trade of stock for tour. The investment by Xerox in Apple happened before such a tour, for entirely separate reasons. There was another Apple exec who was managing pre-IPO external investor interest. There isn't a recorded reason for why Apple chose Xerox (among other investors), if I remember correctly. However, Steve did leverage the fact that Xerox was an investor to bully the on-site engineers into providing him with the "executive" demo, after receiving the run-of-the-mill public demo and learning that a higher-tier demo existed. It involved a phone call to east coast Xerox Corporate, who instructed the on-site engineers to provide the full demo. The PARC lab director was OOO that day, and later said in an interview that he would have stonewalled Job's request. Another fun fact, Xerox sold (the majority of?) their stake in Apple almost immediately for a quick turnaround profit post-IPO. Obviously there's no recorded reason for that trade, but my impression is that they didn't think Apple had what it takes to build a proper OS (they envied their ability to cheaply assemble hardware, but viewed their software suite/R&D as a big moat). Edit: also, Apple engineers were already mid-working on replicating PARC tech at the time of the (not-so-) "fateful" demo. It was behind schedule and not-demoable, and Steve was getting frustrated with these facts. They encouraged Steve to visit PARC to get a preview/demo of what they were building, to ground him to their works' value. There were already a handful of ex-PARC people at Apple for a while, at this point, and PARC's work stems from "The Mother of All Demos" given decades ago. The Alto was unique in its early implementation, but not in its ideas.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Thank you for that. I was going to post something similar. What the Apple engineers did was take obvious inspiration from what they saw at PARC but then ended up going in a different direction when they actually had to both implement it and make it workable as an OS. The overlapping windows is the most oft-cited innovation they came up with but there were many other perhaps more subtle ones. The impression I have though is then that Gates basically copied Apple engineering, not PARC.