> The Apple projects were underway prior to these visits.
Some interesting Polaroid screenshots are found in "Busy Being Born" by Andy Hertzfeld [1], showing windows and a pointer interface for the Lisa, probably predating the PARC visit.
Andy Hertzfeld:
> (…) a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill [Atkinson] had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure.
PS/Edit: It may be of interest to note that it wasn't a secret, at all, what was going on at PARC. At this point, hundreds of visitors had been given the tour, and some (or most?) had been given an even more extensive one. It would have been trivial for folks at Apple to have a cursory knowledge of the ongoing GUI developments, even, when they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, yet. And they were by no means the only ones: when the Lisa was eventually introduced, it was just one of 3 commercial systems with a GUI introduced that year. (The PERQ 2 / ICL 8222 being one of the more prominent examples.)
Some interesting Polaroid screenshots are found in "Busy Being Born" by Andy Hertzfeld [1], showing windows and a pointer interface for the Lisa, probably predating the PARC visit.
Andy Hertzfeld:
> (…) a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill [Atkinson] had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
PS/Edit: It may be of interest to note that it wasn't a secret, at all, what was going on at PARC. At this point, hundreds of visitors had been given the tour, and some (or most?) had been given an even more extensive one. It would have been trivial for folks at Apple to have a cursory knowledge of the ongoing GUI developments, even, when they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, yet. And they were by no means the only ones: when the Lisa was eventually introduced, it was just one of 3 commercial systems with a GUI introduced that year. (The PERQ 2 / ICL 8222 being one of the more prominent examples.)