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"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

by wklauss 14y ago

"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.

shawndumas 14y ago
More details here --> http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... FTA "This essay was written by Bruce in 1996, and is reprinted here with his permission. Bruce was one of the main designers of the Macintosh software, and he worked at Xerox for years before that, so he's uniquely qualified to discuss their relationship."
rubinelli 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
bostonpete 14y ago
> Xerox allowed Apple to use some of the concepts in the lab because they were investors in the company. I'm not sure "allowed" is the right word here. Didn't they sue Apple over this a few years later...? I guess you could say the period before they filed suit, they were allowing it. (?)

by wklauss 14y ago

shawndumas 14y ago

More details here --> http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... FTA "This essay was written by Bruce in 1996, and is reprinted here with his permission. Bruce was one of the main designers of the Macintosh software, and he worked at Xerox for years before that, so he's uniquely qualified to discuss their relationship."

rubinelli 14y ago

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 14y ago
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&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

bostonpete 14y ago

> Xerox allowed Apple to use some of the concepts in the lab because they were investors in the company. I'm not sure "allowed" is the right word here. Didn't they sue Apple over this a few years later...? I guess you could say the period before they filed suit, they were allowing it. (?)