This has to be one of the best articles detailing Apple & Microsoft's OS battles from the early development of the PC operating system to the present that I have read in a long time. Nice job with the research work!
I would often tell my much younger Microsoft fanboy colleagues this story and they would think I didn't know what I was talking about even though I was about 22 years old and working in the tech industry when the PC revolution got started in the late 70's. There is one fact that probably needs to be double checked however and that is the one concerning Microsoft's investment in Apple. I believe the actual amount invested by Microsoft to Apple in 1997 was 150 million dollars. And yes, this had conditions attached as Job's laid out regarding the purchase of Non-voting shares and the cross licensing of items they had been suing each other over. I had developer friends at the Apple developer conference in which Jobs laid out a portion of the hardware and developer roadmap for Apple going forward. I certainly was a game changer on Job's part that took Apple to the very top of the technology world. Bill Gates may have won the battle but in Steve Jobs lifetime he ended up winning the war.
This has to be one of the best articles detailing Apple & Microsoft's OS battles from the early development of the PC operating system to the present that I have read in a long time. Nice job with the research work!
I would often tell my much younger Microsoft fanboy colleagues this story and they would think I didn't know what I was talking about even though I was about 22 years old and working in the tech industry when the PC revolution got started in the late 70's. There is one fact that probably needs to be double checked however and that is the one concerning Microsoft's investment in Apple. I believe the actual amount invested by Microsoft to Apple in 1997 was 150 million dollars. And yes, this had conditions attached as Job's laid out regarding the purchase of Non-voting shares and the cross licensing of items they had been suing each other over. I had developer friends at the Apple developer conference in which Jobs laid out a portion of the hardware and developer roadmap for Apple going forward. I certainly was a game changer on Job's part that took Apple to the very top of the technology world. Bill Gates may have won the battle but in Steve Jobs lifetime he ended up winning the war.
Do you know what atrocious mean? Yeah, why? Because People should be free to WORK on pretty much any product they need to, to make money, to feed, cloth, and shelter themselves.
Someone should not be able to make a "Doll house by Apple" and then say you can't make a "Doll house by Microsoft", anyone should be able to create, make, or build, and then sell and buy FOOD.
Anyone can make a dollhouse, but if you copy the Mattel Barbie dollhouse instead of developing your own, you will be sued, won't you?
Not every copyright/patent issue is quite so simple, which is why the articles are providing concrete examples of what was actually happening and outlining what copyright/patent claims were being argued. Because every case is not the same.
"Patent infringement" can mean anything from an effort to stop the blatant theft of your own work, or it can mean a blatant grab to steal your significant accomplishments with a worthless piece of paper. Generalizing is pointless.
And if you don't care about intellectual property rights, you can throw away the GPL, too. The entire point of the GPL/FOSS movement is to require companies to preserve usage rights of GPL-ed software as open and accessible to everyone. If there are no rights and no enforcement, that "license" is worthless too.
1. Having an idea isn't as important as being able to produce a salable product from it. Xerox PARC (and many others) had great ideas but couldn't produce anything of value from them. Hollywood has tons of visionary ideas (especially Star Trek) but claiming them as prior art negates all the real effort that goes into producing them. I don't care how many ideas Xerox PARC came up with, I only care about the products Xerox and other companies actually were able to produce from those ideas. These are the real inventors and the ones who should have the patents. The other guys are like everyone else in the world who have ideas but can't figure out how to apply them.
Xerox PARC wasn't a bunch of entertainers writing about fictional ideas or made fake mockups of them, Steve Jobs said he saw 3 important things at PARC, the Graphical User Interface, Networking and Object Oriented Programming, these were real working stuff.
"While popular legend says that Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center after seeing the group's advanced technology in 1979, this isn't the case."
The author of this write up seems to forget that it was Jeff Raskin who not only brainstormed the project from the very beginning, but also arranged the two visits to PARC. Jobs was on the second visit -- Raskin brought him along only because Jobs was slow to catch up to Raskin's ideas. According to the link the author cited:
"PREVIOUS TIESBut a number of Apple engineers were already familiar with PARC, its work, or technologies like the mouse. Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there. Finally, there were even some Apple employees whose had learned about the mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Tymshare in the later 1970s."
"Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. "
In another word, Raskin was a PARC insider -- spent some time at PARC as a visiting scientist and familiar with all the computing innovation Apple later copied. He even tried to convince the two Steve's to look at PARC's innovation much earlier, but they were too busy making Apple IIs.
I just don't understand how that contradicts the view that "Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center."
I won't even bother wasting my time reading the rest. Nice try, but won't change the fact that everyone stands on the shoulders of giants or buy into this crazy idea that Apple somehow created everything in isolation or they engineered something technically difficult or impossible.
Xerox PARC wasn't a bunch of entertainers writing about fictional ideas or made fake mockups of them, Steve Jobs said he saw 3 important things at PARC, the Graphical User Interface, Networking and Object Oriented Programming, these were real working stuff.
When Steve talks about his experience at Xerox PARC, he says he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't both to see the rest. He jokingly says in public, "if I'd only stayed another 20 minutes..." Obviously, when it came time to do NeXT, Steve recreated the Xerox Star: an overpriced, way-ahead-of-its-time machine with GUI, Ethernet networking, and object oriented programming. The NeXT suffered a similar fate as the Star and Lisa, despite it's technical advantages and impressive high end specs.
Great article. For a longer version from a different author, a great read is Insanely Great, by Steven Levy. Lots of pictures and descriptions of the various interface innovations that separated Apple from Xerox.
One comment on predictions: I find it amusing to attribute ideas to particular people. Who hasn't thought of a tablet computer or time machine or Starship Enterprises or robots or...... you get the point.
Interesting thing about the tablet....it's simultaneously one of man's oldest and newest creations. Heard that on Adam Carolla podcast.
Blah blah blah...I won't even bother wasting my time reading the rest.
So you formed an opinion without the facts. No surprise.
Fact is Apple traded stock for access and improved on PARC tech. No one said Apple made the OS from scratch and Jobs had the original vision for a mouse. Apple didn't steal anything.
One could add to this history by mentioning the development of the iTunes store and its associated App Store and iBook Store. These are really significant advances in the distribution and marketing of electronic goods which, as far as I know, were pioneered by Apple.
And it is interesting to reflect on the current legal battles inspired by Amazon and the DoJ to thwart the use of the 'Agency model' for the distribution of electronic books. Perhaps history will see Amazon and the DoJ in similar way as Dvorak.
Not just Scully and Gates perpetuated the Xerox PARC myth, but Jobs did himself:
I think though what he wanted to do was give Apple legitimacy by saying it came out of Xerox PARC. Apple had already done a lot of the work independently of PARC, especially in the work of Jef Raskin, Father of the Macintosh:
it is a tad misleading though. There were several firms already making "low cost" mouses(/mice?), eg Logitech. Indeed even Microsoft had a mouse in 1983.
The alternative devices are equally flawed. The Apple Graphics tablet wasn't even made or designed by Apple. It was the KoalaPad, a product that also had variants for Atari, Commodore, TRS80 and IBM. Equally contentious is the scroll wheel, Bang and Olufsen had been using it for years before Apple adopted it as a means of navigating. It is suggested that it was first developed back in 1983 for the Hewlett-Packard 9836 workstation.
In the main the article is entertaining and well written but lacks an accurate historical perspective.
I just don't understand how that contradicts the view that "Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center."
I won't even bother wasting my time reading the rest. Nice try, but won't change the fact that everyone stands on the shoulders of giants or buy into this crazy idea that Apple somehow created everything in isolation or they engineered something technically difficult or impossible. This is nothing more than relentless rabid Apple fanboy propaganda.
If you didn't read the whole thing, how would you know what the guy wrote?
If you can read past the pro-Apple tone of the article, its basically saying: here's what Apple created on top of what they got from Xerox, and it is substantial, contrary to the popularly accepted story that Apple stole EVERYTHING from Xerox. The Jeff Raskin part you added was beside the point. He also wrote that some of the Xerox researchers left Xerox to form what are now giants, 3com, Adobe etc.
Although most versions of this story, Microsoft ends up being the slime bags, well to some degree anyway, the revisionist version would be what Microsoft stole from Apple, Steve stole from somewhere else in the first place, which makes Microsoft stealing justified. Now that is the revisionist version.
So you formed an opinion without the facts. No surprise.
Fact is Apple traded stock for access and improved on PARC tech. No one said Apple made the OS from scratch and Jobs had the original vision for a mouse. Apple didn't steal anything.
Why? I just explained in detail why the author's claim is flawed -- using his own sources. Who said anything about "stealing"? Feeling Guilt much?
The author's claim is that "while popular legend says that Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center after seeing the group's advanced technology in 1979, this isn't the case." But Dilger's primary source, Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley CONTRADICTS everything he just spewed out. The folks who started and influenced Apple's Macintosh project were PARC insiders! So it is necessarily the case that Apple got its Macintosh ideas from PARC -- and Apple improved upon their innovation as some might argue. Raskin's goal from the getgo was to produce a cheap machine with a price tag of $500 based on PARC's innovation. Larry Tesler, the first PARC hire at Apple, also played many significant roles at Apple.
It was also Raskin's decision to use the 1-button mouse -- not the 3-button as PARC did -- and made that decision based on his observation with the Xerox Altos. Steve Jobs on the contrary had little role in the 1-button mouse, but according to Dilger, "... a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks," to Jobs' design spec: "our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks ..." Jobs's design spec? LOL!! The physical design & manufacturing were done exclusively and entirely by Hovey & Kelley, a small industrial design startup, because Apple was too busy. According to the same source Dilger is so fond of:
"Pang: How did your relationship with Apple work? Did you seen them very often when you were working at this stage, did they have to approve things at regular points, or was there was more autonomy?
Yurchenco: There was a lot of autonomy. I can't remember very much review at all from Apple on this. I think what we eventually did was, we delivered prototypes, and if they worked they were happy, but the day-to-day, and the design decisions that were being made-- there was kind of a spec, but I can't remember ever seeing a fully written-out spec at that point. [Pang laughs] Although that's not so-- you laugh, but even today-- Apple was barely more than a startup at that point, and even today we do a lot of projects that don't have any specs, there's just lots of arm-waving and agreements at meetings, and then you argue later what you said, but writing specs takes too long in this industry, you gotta get too many people on board and make too many decisions with not enough data."
This Dilger guy also claims that Xerox licensed out all their patents in the hope that Apple could commercialize their invention because Xerox was so inept, blah, blah. some more BS, blah, blah. In the 70's, Xerox was FORCED to license most of their patents to their direct competitors and curtail their aggressive marketing practice by a DOJ consent decree. You want Xerox's patents? you got them all at almost nothing (not nothing literally, but significantly less than what they were worth). Sure, the Xerox management at that point wasn't all that keen on developing a new product and pushing it to the market at the time, but Xerox still managed to roll out Star in 1981 -- though it was a commercial flop. Apple's Lisa which came out a year later wasn't received all that well either.
Now, not saying everything in this article is all wrong, but there are so many thing being hopelessly inaccurate and built on wish-wash historical accounts of things never happened that it really loses all its credibility. It's more accurate describe this article as a PR propaganda peppered with bits of facts here and there.
Good article. I want to add a few historical points.
1) Apple was let in, but by business people. The Parc people (largely separate and with a different mindset than the business unit) tried their darndest to keep them out. Nobody in Xerox knew what to do with Parc. That's why nearly all the amazing innovations there were developed into products outside of the company.
2) Based on my discussions with Xerox Parc people at conferences, I think this was slightly pro Apple article regarding the Apple GUI development. The Parc innovated in the development of multiple windows and pointers. The Mother of All Demos showed a mouse and hypertext (among other things) as said above, but didn't have icons and windows as we know it today that Parc innovated. The special hardware for graphics set Parc apart too (and made the Star and Alto quite expensive). Additionally, its focus on WYSIWYG was a key innovation. THEN, Jobs took this and made their GUI which was much improved and the article has a good description of why. According to 'legend', Jobs ignored everything when he saw the GUI and nearly slobbered all over it.
3) Direct Manipulation: This is a sliding scale and GUIs are not direct necessarily. Touch interfaces for example, are much more direct than something like a mouse since that is used to the side of something to point on screen. It's for reasons like this that several people have problems with them at first (ex. those on the autism spectrum).
Fantastic article. Amazing that the well paid journalist at publications such as the WSJ/FT/Bloomberg/CNN are incapable of this level of journalistic output.
Comments
I would often tell my much younger Microsoft fanboy colleagues this story and they would think I didn't know what I was talking about even though I was about 22 years old and working in the tech industry when the PC revolution got started in the late 70's. There is one fact that probably needs to be double checked however and that is the one concerning Microsoft's investment in Apple. I believe the actual amount invested by Microsoft to Apple in 1997 was 150 million dollars. And yes, this had conditions attached as Job's laid out regarding the purchase of Non-voting shares and the cross licensing of items they had been suing each other over. I had developer friends at the Apple developer conference in which Jobs laid out a portion of the hardware and developer roadmap for Apple going forward. I certainly was a game changer on Job's part that took Apple to the very top of the technology world. Bill Gates may have won the battle but in Steve Jobs lifetime he ended up winning the war.
In my next life I'll list up with that as my username.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mode1Bravo
This has to be one of the best articles detailing Apple & Microsoft's OS battles from the early development of the PC operating system to the present that I have read in a long time. Nice job with the research work!
I would often tell my much younger Microsoft fanboy colleagues this story and they would think I didn't know what I was talking about even though I was about 22 years old and working in the tech industry when the PC revolution got started in the late 70's. There is one fact that probably needs to be double checked however and that is the one concerning Microsoft's investment in Apple. I believe the actual amount invested by Microsoft to Apple in 1997 was 150 million dollars. And yes, this had conditions attached as Job's laid out regarding the purchase of Non-voting shares and the cross licensing of items they had been suing each other over. I had developer friends at the Apple developer conference in which Jobs laid out a portion of the hardware and developer roadmap for Apple going forward. I certainly was a game changer on Job's part that took Apple to the very top of the technology world. Bill Gates may have won the battle but in Steve Jobs lifetime he ended up winning the war.
Yes you're right: $150 million.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rezwits
Wow, what an article.
But, this is atrocious.
Do you know what atrocious mean? Yeah, why? Because People should be free to WORK on pretty much any product they need to, to make money, to feed, cloth, and shelter themselves.
Someone should not be able to make a "Doll house by Apple" and then say you can't make a "Doll house by Microsoft", anyone should be able to create, make, or build, and then sell and buy FOOD.
Anyone can make a dollhouse, but if you copy the Mattel Barbie dollhouse instead of developing your own, you will be sued, won't you?
Not every copyright/patent issue is quite so simple, which is why the articles are providing concrete examples of what was actually happening and outlining what copyright/patent claims were being argued. Because every case is not the same.
"Patent infringement" can mean anything from an effort to stop the blatant theft of your own work, or it can mean a blatant grab to steal your significant accomplishments with a worthless piece of paper. Generalizing is pointless.
And if you don't care about intellectual property rights, you can throw away the GPL, too. The entire point of the GPL/FOSS movement is to require companies to preserve usage rights of GPL-ed software as open and accessible to everyone. If there are no rights and no enforcement, that "license" is worthless too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rob53
1. Having an idea isn't as important as being able to produce a salable product from it. Xerox PARC (and many others) had great ideas but couldn't produce anything of value from them. Hollywood has tons of visionary ideas (especially Star Trek) but claiming them as prior art negates all the real effort that goes into producing them. I don't care how many ideas Xerox PARC came up with, I only care about the products Xerox and other companies actually were able to produce from those ideas. These are the real inventors and the ones who should have the patents. The other guys are like everyone else in the world who have ideas but can't figure out how to apply them.
Xerox PARC wasn't a bunch of entertainers writing about fictional ideas or made fake mockups of them, Steve Jobs said he saw 3 important things at PARC, the Graphical User Interface, Networking and Object Oriented Programming, these were real working stuff.
Well, this is an interesting garbage revisionism:
"While popular legend says that Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center after seeing the group's advanced technology in 1979, this isn't the case."
The author of this write up seems to forget that it was Jeff Raskin who not only brainstormed the project from the very beginning, but also arranged the two visits to PARC. Jobs was on the second visit -- Raskin brought him along only because Jobs was slow to catch up to Raskin's ideas. According to the link the author cited:
"PREVIOUS TIES But a number of Apple engineers were already familiar with PARC, its work, or technologies like the mouse. Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there. Finally, there were even some Apple employees whose had learned about the mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Tymshare in the later 1970s."
"Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. "
In another word, Raskin was a PARC insider -- spent some time at PARC as a visiting scientist and familiar with all the computing innovation Apple later copied. He even tried to convince the two Steve's to look at PARC's innovation much earlier, but they were too busy making Apple IIs.
I just don't understand how that contradicts the view that "Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center."
I won't even bother wasting my time reading the rest. Nice try, but won't change the fact that everyone stands on the shoulders of giants or buy into this crazy idea that Apple somehow created everything in isolation or they engineered something technically difficult or impossible.
When Steve talks about his experience at Xerox PARC, he says he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't both to see the rest. He jokingly says in public, "if I'd only stayed another 20 minutes..." Obviously, when it came time to do NeXT, Steve recreated the Xerox Star: an overpriced, way-ahead-of-its-time machine with GUI, Ethernet networking, and object oriented programming. The NeXT suffered a similar fate as the Star and Lisa, despite it's technical advantages and impressive high end specs.
Great article. For a longer version from a different author, a great read is Insanely Great, by Steven Levy. Lots of pictures and descriptions of the various interface innovations that separated Apple from Xerox.
One comment on predictions: I find it amusing to attribute ideas to particular people. Who hasn't thought of a tablet computer or time machine or Starship Enterprises or robots or...... you get the point.
Interesting thing about the tablet....it's simultaneously one of man's oldest and newest creations. Heard that on Adam Carolla podcast.
So you formed an opinion without the facts. No surprise.
Fact is Apple traded stock for access and improved on PARC tech. No one said Apple made the OS from scratch and Jobs had the original vision for a mouse. Apple didn't steal anything.
And it is interesting to reflect on the current legal battles inspired by Amazon and the DoJ to thwart the use of the 'Agency model' for the distribution of electronic books. Perhaps history will see Amazon and the DoJ in similar way as Dvorak.
Originally Posted by tooltalk
Well, this is an interesting garbage revisionism:
Any psychologists here? What drives the human mind to be purposefully blind and willfully ignorant? Other than money, of course.
This is nothing more than relentless rabid Apple fanboy propaganda.
Shut up and go away. Do you know what website you're on?
I think though what he wanted to do was give Apple legitimacy by saying it came out of Xerox PARC. Apple had already done a lot of the work independently of PARC, especially in the work of Jef Raskin, Father of the Macintosh:
http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html
http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/brucehorn.html
It was thus Jef Raskin who had been developing a lot of these ideas since the mid 60s, and Jef who primed Steve to 'get it' when he visited Xerox.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii
I love your Mouse Evolution chart.
it is a tad misleading though. There were several firms already making "low cost" mouses(/mice?), eg Logitech. Indeed even Microsoft had a mouse in 1983.
The alternative devices are equally flawed. The Apple Graphics tablet wasn't even made or designed by Apple. It was the KoalaPad, a product that also had variants for Atari, Commodore, TRS80 and IBM. Equally contentious is the scroll wheel, Bang and Olufsen had been using it for years before Apple adopted it as a means of navigating. It is suggested that it was first developed back in 1983 for the Hewlett-Packard 9836 workstation.
In the main the article is entertaining and well written but lacks an accurate historical perspective.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tooltalk
Well, this is an interesting garbage revisionism:
I just don't understand how that contradicts the view that "Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center."
I won't even bother wasting my time reading the rest. Nice try, but won't change the fact that everyone stands on the shoulders of giants or buy into this crazy idea that Apple somehow created everything in isolation or they engineered something technically difficult or impossible. This is nothing more than relentless rabid Apple fanboy propaganda.
If you didn't read the whole thing, how would you know what the guy wrote?
If you can read past the pro-Apple tone of the article, its basically saying: here's what Apple created on top of what they got from Xerox, and it is substantial, contrary to the popularly accepted story that Apple stole EVERYTHING from Xerox. The Jeff Raskin part you added was beside the point. He also wrote that some of the Xerox researchers left Xerox to form what are now giants, 3com, Adobe etc.
Although most versions of this story, Microsoft ends up being the slime bags, well to some degree anyway, the revisionist version would be what Microsoft stole from Apple, Steve stole from somewhere else in the first place, which makes Microsoft stealing justified. Now that is the revisionist version.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jungmark
So you formed an opinion without the facts. No surprise.
Fact is Apple traded stock for access and improved on PARC tech. No one said Apple made the OS from scratch and Jobs had the original vision for a mouse. Apple didn't steal anything.
Why? I just explained in detail why the author's claim is flawed -- using his own sources. Who said anything about "stealing"? Feeling Guilt much?
The author's claim is that "while popular legend says that Apple simply got its Macintosh ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center after seeing the group's advanced technology in 1979, this isn't the case." But Dilger's primary source, Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley CONTRADICTS everything he just spewed out. The folks who started and influenced Apple's Macintosh project were PARC insiders! So it is necessarily the case that Apple got its Macintosh ideas from PARC -- and Apple improved upon their innovation as some might argue. Raskin's goal from the getgo was to produce a cheap machine with a price tag of $500 based on PARC's innovation. Larry Tesler, the first PARC hire at Apple, also played many significant roles at Apple.
It was also Raskin's decision to use the 1-button mouse -- not the 3-button as PARC did -- and made that decision based on his observation with the Xerox Altos. Steve Jobs on the contrary had little role in the 1-button mouse, but according to Dilger, "... a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks," to Jobs' design spec: "our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks ..." Jobs's design spec? LOL!! The physical design & manufacturing were done exclusively and entirely by Hovey & Kelley, a small industrial design startup, because Apple was too busy. According to the same source Dilger is so fond of:
"Pang: How did your relationship with Apple work? Did you seen them very often when you were working at this stage, did they have to approve things at regular points, or was there was more autonomy?
Yurchenco: There was a lot of autonomy. I can't remember very much review at all from Apple on this. I think what we eventually did was, we delivered prototypes, and if they worked they were happy, but the day-to-day, and the design decisions that were being made-- there was kind of a spec, but I can't remember ever seeing a fully written-out spec at that point. [Pang laughs] Although that's not so-- you laugh, but even today-- Apple was barely more than a startup at that point, and even today we do a lot of projects that don't have any specs, there's just lots of arm-waving and agreements at meetings, and then you argue later what you said, but writing specs takes too long in this industry, you gotta get too many people on board and make too many decisions with not enough data."
This Dilger guy also claims that Xerox licensed out all their patents in the hope that Apple could commercialize their invention because Xerox was so inept, blah, blah. some more BS, blah, blah. In the 70's, Xerox was FORCED to license most of their patents to their direct competitors and curtail their aggressive marketing practice by a DOJ consent decree. You want Xerox's patents? you got them all at almost nothing (not nothing literally, but significantly less than what they were worth). Sure, the Xerox management at that point wasn't all that keen on developing a new product and pushing it to the market at the time, but Xerox still managed to roll out Star in 1981 -- though it was a commercial flop. Apple's Lisa which came out a year later wasn't received all that well either.
Now, not saying everything in this article is all wrong, but there are so many thing being hopelessly inaccurate and built on wish-wash historical accounts of things never happened that it really loses all its credibility. It's more accurate describe this article as a PR propaganda peppered with bits of facts here and there.
Good article. I want to add a few historical points.
1) Apple was let in, but by business people. The Parc people (largely separate and with a different mindset than the business unit) tried their darndest to keep them out. Nobody in Xerox knew what to do with Parc. That's why nearly all the amazing innovations there were developed into products outside of the company.
2) Based on my discussions with Xerox Parc people at conferences, I think this was slightly pro Apple article regarding the Apple GUI development. The Parc innovated in the development of multiple windows and pointers. The Mother of All Demos showed a mouse and hypertext (among other things) as said above, but didn't have icons and windows as we know it today that Parc innovated. The special hardware for graphics set Parc apart too (and made the Star and Alto quite expensive). Additionally, its focus on WYSIWYG was a key innovation. THEN, Jobs took this and made their GUI which was much improved and the article has a good description of why. According to 'legend', Jobs ignored everything when he saw the GUI and nearly slobbered all over it.
3) Direct Manipulation: This is a sliding scale and GUIs are not direct necessarily. Touch interfaces for example, are much more direct than something like a mouse since that is used to the side of something to point on screen. It's for reasons like this that several people have problems with them at first (ex. those on the autism spectrum).