I do think the article writer's conclusion was a bit misleading. Yes, Apple did integrate much of the Alto's UI into the Mac, but Xerox, as a parent company, h

I do think the article writer's conclusion was a bit misleading. Yes, Apple did integrate much of the Alto's UI into the Mac, but Xerox, as a parent company, had little idea what to do with the technology (being myopically focused on paper copiers at the time) and hadn't pushed the PARC project forward much over that decade. If Apple hadn't bought (read: gave shares) access to that hardware, the arrival of the GUI probably would have been 5-10 years later than it ended up being. (And to this day, many in our profession still seem to cling to the command line way too much in development circles... Was I the only Mac user to feel a little betrayed when OS X shipped with a shell?)