- It's kind of funny. I've been working on a write of Xerox history following my article on SRI/ARC at ARF. And I've been working on this question.
- There were two visits.
- Xerox held a stake in Apple in exchange for the visit.
- People from SRI and from Xerox were already at Apple.
- To whatever extent Apple "stole" from Xerox, Xerox had already "stolen" from ARC.
- The Apple projects were underway prior to these visits.
- The primary effect (as far as I can tell) was in convincing all the executives at Apple of the value of the GUI.
The key take away from this bit is honestly that employers should work harder to keep talent. Companies need the talent more than the talent needs the company. Over and over, my research into tech history shows that great talent can flourish at any number of companies, and there are far more great business managers, accountants, and marketers than there are extremely good and visionary engineers.
I do not mean to downplay the impact of great executives. They are important. The talented and visionary engineers are just more rare.
- Thanks for posting this! It was one of the most fun to write of all the articles I’ve done.
- The V20 is my favorite classic CPU. Particularly, NEC's strategy was wonderful: maintain perfect compatibility with the 8088 and still bring more capability, higher speed, and maintain cool operation. Then, they executed on that strategy well.
- Also, see my write up here: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses
- I am fairly certain that the limit on the IIgs was actually the quality and availability of the CPU. WDC had serious yield issues, and this even affected accelerator availability for the Apple IIgs which were less plentiful than the machine itself (obviously). Hence, Woz said 8MHz at the start but this didn’t materialize. Part of this is due to the CPU design not working on smaller nodes that WDC had hoped would lead to the increased clocks. Ultimately, it was second sources and redesigns that helped the chip make its way into the SNES and other machines.
- That price tho…
- You might prefer my archive then:
- Thanks for this, it’s great. Much more accessible than my own archive, which is in a box, in the loft, in my mums house 4500 miles away in the UK!
- Your archive is amazing. So very nice
When I clicked the https link it redirects down to http and port 81. If I remove the 81 port sore indication it unlocks the magic.
- Well, have some more: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-network-is-the-computer
- I know it’s fashionable to hate on BillG these days, but the guy was an excellent software engineer and a shrewd (if at times unethical) business man. The two greatest achievements of his, imho, were mentioned and they made me smile: 8080/Altair BASIC and the Model 100 software system. Just outstanding.
- I get what is being said, but some like Perifractic owning Commodore gives me more hope. I just hope he exercises good judgement on who and what can use the trademark.
- More
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 than the one Apple was eventually given. 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.)
That's my takeaway as well. Larry Tesler says as much somewhere.
I'm not sure about the talent thing. The overall vision for the Mac as a shipping product came from Steve Jobs, who was never really an engineer. The original Mac team members have been very clear on this point. The engineers, however talented and visionary, necessarily had smaller scope (which is why they were engineers and not executives).