A buddy of mine and I were having a discussion today about the evolution of the GUI. It's pretty much standard knowledge that Xerox was first out of the gate with it, had it for a few years, but wasn't going anywhere with it. Apple, by Steve Jobs' own admission stole the concept from them and released the McIntosh and Lisa. Wasn't long and Microsoft stole the concept and released Windows. - the rest is history.

The debate we had though was what if Apple had never had that meeting with Xerox and Xerox never brought GUI & mouse to market. Do you think another company would have thought of it by now or would we all still be running text based interfaces? Buddy is pretty well convinced that nothing much would be different today and another company would have developed a GUI within a year or two. I maintain that yes, we'd have GUI by now, but implemented differently than we are accustomed to. Thoughts?