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[Don Tillman]

   Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 11:32:55 -0400
   From: Thomas Hudson <thudson at cygnus.com>

   I often wonder what would have happened if Jobs hadn't stole these
   ideas. It doesn't seem like Xerox would have done anything with
   them.  And if Apple hadn't created the Mac, M$ would have never
   ripped them off and created Windows (which may be a good thing).

Not really; remember that other companies were building products based
on Xerox Parc work at the time too.  Apollo, Perq, Symbolics, Lisp
Machines Inc. and others were shipping single-user computers with
windowing systems and mice three years before the Mac was introduced.
These were more power and expensive machines than the original Mac of
course, and not intended for home market.  But they were all busy
reducing their costs, and it would have hit the home market just a
little bit later.  The Mac breakthrough was really one of cost
reduction and presentation to the home market.  And they did that very
well.

   Though, had I been one of the guys at Parc, I'd be pissed at Apple
   AND Xerox.  At Parc, they invented:

   The mouse.  The GUI.  Smalltalk and object-oriented programming.
   Ethernet and networking.

Laser printers, the PostScript language, byte-code, microtasking, the
optical mouse...  The list of Xerox Parc breakthroughs is huge.

But why be pissed at Apple?  I'm pretty sure they developed the Parc
work with Xerox's full aproval.

  -- Don