“The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”
Walter Isaacson tells the story in the Innovators
The machine they designed was named the Xerox Alto. It had a bitmapped display, which meant that each pixel on the screen could be turned on or off to help render a graphic, a letter, a paintbrush swipe, or whatever. “We chose to provide a full bitmap, in which each screen pixel was represented by a bit of main storage,” Thacker explained. That put a lot of demands on the memory, but the guiding principle was that Moore’s Law would continue to rule and that memory would get cheaper in an exponential way.
The user’s interaction with the display was controlled by a keyboard and mouse, as Engelbart had designed.
By keeping children (of all ages) in mind, Kay and his colleagues advanced Engelbart’s concepts by showing that they could be implemented in a manner that was simple, friendly, and intuitive to use.
Kay made things easier, and in so doing showed why the ideal of simplicity—making products that humans find convivial and easy to use—was central to the innovations that made computers personal.
Xerox sent Alto systems to research centers around the country, spreading the innovations dreamed up by PARC engineers. There was even a precursor to the Internet Protocols, the PARC Universal Packet, that allowed different packet-switched networks to interconnect. “Most of the tech that makes the Internet possible was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s,” Taylor later claimed.
As things turned out, however, although Xerox PARC pointed the way to the land of personal computers—devices you could call your own—the Xerox Corporation did not lead the migration. It made two thousand Altos, mainly for use in Xerox offices or affiliated institutions, but it didn’t market the Alto as a consumer product. “The company wasn’t equipped to handle an innovation,” Kay recalled. “It would have meant completely new packaging, all new manuals, handling updates, training staff, localizing to different countries.”
Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, “The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”
Isaacson goes on to tell the story of Jobs visiting Xerox PARC and seeing the Alto and copying the design.
Jobs had already seen the future and was embarked on inventing it. On visits to Xerox PARC, he was shown many of the ideas that Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, and their colleagues had developed, most notably the graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced GOO-ee), which featured a desktop metaphor with windows, icons, and a mouse that served as a pointer. The creativity of the Xerox PARC team combined with the design and marketing genius of Jobs would make the GUI the next great leap in facilitating the human-machine interaction that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had envisioned.
Jobs’s two main visits with his team to Xerox PARC were in December 1979. Jef Raskin, an Apple engineer who was designing a friendly computer that would eventually become the Macintosh, had already seen what Xerox was doing and wanted to convince Jobs to look into it. One problem was that Jobs found Raskin insufferable—the technical terminology he used for Raskin was “a shithead who sucks”—but eventually Jobs made the pilgrimage. He had worked out a deal with Xerox that allowed the Apple folks to study the technology in return for allowing Xerox to make a million-dollar investment in Apple.
Jobs was certainly not the first outsider to see what Xerox PARC had wrought. Its researchers had given hundreds of demonstrations to visitors, and they had already distributed more than a thousand Xerox Altos, the expensive computer developed by Lampson, Thacker, and Kay that used a graphical user interface and other PARC innovations. But Jobs was the first to become obsessed with the idea of incorporating PARC’s interface ideas into a simple, inexpensive, personal computer. Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.
On Jobs’s first visit, the Xerox PARC engineers, led by Adele Goldberg, who worked with Alan Kay, were reserved. They did not show Jobs much. But he threw a tantrum—“Let’s stop this bullshit!” he kept shouting—and finally was given, at the behest of Xerox’s top management, a fuller show. Jobs bounced around the room as his engineers studied each pixel on the screen. “You’re sitting on a goldmine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”
There were three major innovations on display. The first was Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe for creating local area networks. Like Gates and other pioneers of personal computers, Jobs was not very interested—certainly not as interested as he should have been—in networking technology. He was focused on the ability of computers to empower individuals rather than to facilitate collaboration. The second innovation was object-oriented programming. That, likewise, did not grab Jobs, who was not a programmer.
What caught his attention was the graphical user interface featuring a desktop metaphor that was as intuitive and friendly as a neighborhood playground. It had cute icons for documents and folders and other things you might want, including a trash can, and a mouse-controlled cursor that made them easy to click. Not only did Jobs love it, but he could see ways to improve it, make it simpler and more elegant.
The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC. Until then, most computers, including the Apple II, would merely generate numerals or letters on the screen, usually in a ghastly green against a black background. Bitmapping allowed each and every pixel on the screen to be controlled by the computer—turned off or on and in any color. That permitted all sorts of wonderful displays, fonts, designs, and graphics. With his feel for design, familiarity with fonts, and love of calligraphy, Jobs was blown away by bitmapping. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” he recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”
As Jobs drove back to Apple’s office in Cupertino, at a speed that would have awed even Gates, he told his colleague Bill Atkinson that they had to incorporate—and improve upon—Xerox’s graphical interface in future Apple computers, such as the forthcoming Lisa and Macintosh. “This is it!” he shouted. “We’ve got to do it!” It was a way to bring computers to the people.108
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