Following on from my last post about Xerox’s aversion to monkeys.. I offer this gem for your delectation and edification. It is worth remembering that before the Mac… Apple created the Lisa. This was the breakthrough forerunner to the Macintosh, incorporating what were considered at that time to be remarkably advanced features for a desktop computer, particularly when compared to the recently introduced IBM PC. Things we now take for granted, such as a graphical user interface (GUI), windows and the mouse came as standard on the Lisa. Albeit, for an outrageously expensive price ($10,000 in 1983 dollars!)
What many people don’t realize is that all these things, and many more, had been invented years earlier at the Xerox Corporation’s, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1973, ten years before the Lisa, scientists at PARC didn’t just create the world’s first personal computer, the Alto, they also designed and built a complete system of hardware and software which totally altered the nature of computing as it was known at the time. This included the world’s first user interface that presented clickable, drag & drop icons operating within windows. They refined and made practical the mouse, the first word processor suitable for everyday use, scaleable type, the local-area-network (LAN), an object-oriented programming language, and the laser printer.
And yet, not a single one of these breakthroughs was ever brought to market by Xerox. Primarily because the company’s dumb arsed Senior Management was too stupid to realize what a goldmine they had on their hands, and they were more interested in protecting their leadership in the copier market, which for years had been a huge cash cow for the company. Much later, when I freelanced on the Xerox account for Young & Rubicam, I didn’t take me long to realize that the management of Xerox hadn’t learned anything new over the intervening years. They were still incredibly stupid. Which is certainly something you could never accuse Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs (left), of being.
For instance, in late 1979, when Xerox contacted Jobs about a possible Xerox/Apple deal. Crafty Steve, who’d been hearing the buzz for years about all the wonderful stuff being created at PARC, demanded a tour of the research center. Xerox agreed, and that, as anyone who knew Jobs will tell you, was like inviting the fox into the henhouse. The tour was conducted by Larry Tessler, one of PARC’s senior scientists. He tells of how Steve immediately grasped the importance of what he was being shown, and asked when Xerox intended to market all this great stuff. When Tessler told him the company had no plans to do anything with it, Steve was speechless (but no doubt already turning over in his snake pit of a mind the best way to take advantage of this remarkable, once in a lifetime, fucking, unbelievable, here are the keys to Fort Knox opportunity).
Unsurprisingly, nothing came of the Xerox/Apple deal discussions, but within months Tessler and many other senior researchers at PARC had been poached by Jobs from Xerox to join Apple, where they immediately commenced work on the Lisa project, which eventually turned into the Mac! The rest is history!
My Lisa ad…
