One factor many people forget was that Doug Engelbart did "The Mother of All Demos" back in 1968 to over 1000 computer professionals: http://www.wired.com/scie

One factor many people forget was that Doug Engelbart did "The Mother of All Demos" back in 1968 to over 1000 computer professionals: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayintech_1209 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayint... http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html Far more primitive than Alto or the Mac, but the ideas were percolating out there. SRI's NLS/Augment system definitely inspired the work at PARC (which didn't open until at least a year after the demo). Steve Jobs later said that the GUI overshadowed other innovations at PARC (ones which later drove a lot of the work done at NeXT). "And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system ... they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day." Triumph of the Nerds transcript http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html