As a former cube-dweller of Silly Valley, I have this to say to all the folks who maintain that Jobs "ripped off" Xerox technology for the Mac:

If you had to depend upon Xerox to deliver the technology they invented to the public.... you'd still be waiting.

My wife worked for 'rox at the "company" they formed to "commercialize" the PARC technology. Let's just say that my experiences in walking their halls when I would visit her whilst we were dating left me with the distinct impression that if we had to wait for Xerox to commercialize one or more of the following:

1. Ethernet. Yes, Xerox invented Ethernet. It used a thick piece of coax cable, like RG-8, only better. Tranceivers were bolted onto the cable, and terminated in very expensive connectors. Oh, and the initial version of Xerox ethernet ran at 3Mbps.

2. Laser printers. They used a page description language called "Interpress." Postscript was offered to Xerox management by their employees... and management turned them down. So these employees went off to form a company you might have heard of: Adobe.

3. GUI's and WYSIWYG mouse-driven interfaces, ala the Mac. These started on the "D-machine" workstations. I'll bet that 99.999% of you have never, ever heard of the "D-machine" series of workstations (Dolphin, Dorado, Dandelion), much less ever laid hands on one. They were a neat system for their day - four AMD 2901 bit-slice chips to make a custom instruction set, an ethernet interface, a mouse, bit-mapped display, etc. Years and years ahead of their time. Programmed in a language called Mesa, which I'll bet that 100% of you have never seen. I got to learn it to help my wife (then girlfriend) debug a X.25 interface problem with a Wang VS system. Boy, that was fun. Xerox couldn't even find the source code for their X.25/LAPB library. Heh. Did I mention how much fun it was to tell 'rox management "Well, you have an error in your LAPB implementation... so you might want to find that source code unless you want to re-write it?"

Yea. Fun.

The closest thing you can see to Mesa is the rip-off that Nick Wirth did called "Modula-2." Yes, even academics lifted ideas off Xerox.

4. Client/server computing. The Xerox network suite had all manner of things we take for granted today. Time sync, network file systems, (prior to Sun developing NFS, which was cribbed from 'rox as well as the XDP protocol to solve "endian" problems on networks), print protocols, network object discovery protocols. What made the Mac so far ahead of it's time was that they ripped off just enough of these ideas, put them into the ROM, slapped a "fast enough" LAN interface that was cheap, cheap, cheap compared to Ethernet at the time (called "LocalTalk") and originated the first workgroup computing. Suddenly, a group of Macs could share one Laserwriter printer. PC's couldn't even dream of that at the time the Macs were released.

5. File sharing and file servers.

6. Remote procedure call protocols - Sun lifted this bit of technology off 'rox, and peddled it as NFS/RPC/XDR protocols. Xerox did it first.

7. LAN routing/bridging. The 'rox employees who did networking took this and Ethernet off and formed '3Com' - now that you know that the original Ethernet was 3Mbps, you understand where the name '3Com' came from, yes?

8. Network address mapping prior to ARP, which was lifted by DEC for DECnet. Today everyone assumes that the only way to bind a Ethernet address to an higher-level network address is ARP. Nope, not so. XNS and DECnet (phase II, III and IV) used the same idea of mapping the lower order 24 bits of the MAC address into the level-3 address.

...you'd still be waiting nearly 20 years later. Xerox still hasn't successfully brought any of their PARC technology to the market. Why? Because their management is in CT, their copiers are made in Rochester NY and their computer geeks are in Palo Alto, CA. Xerox management doesn't know jack about computers. They never did. They never will. They keep making money on copiers, and while they invented laser dot-mapped printers, they couldn't figure out how to commercialize even that, which was a close cousin to their copier business. The management of Xerox had the entire future of the computer industry in their hands in the early 80's and they let is all slip away. All of it. Everything you use today - from bit-mapped GUI interfaces to networked workstations/workgroups/printers to object-oriented programming languages - all of it was first invented at Xerox in the mid-to-late 70's, with the exception of the mouse, which was invented at Evans and Sutherland in the early 70's.


Everyone who gets their panties in a wad about "Apple ripped off Xerox" should understand this: Everyone in the industry lifted ideas from Xerox. Everyone. Why? Because they had brilliant ideas... and it was obvious to everyone in the industry that Xerox was going to a) do nothing with it, b) never patent it, c) never defend it. Xerox management never, ever knew what to do with the monster minds at PARC. As an example: At PARC, I met a guy working on fonts for Xerox who would speak/read/write 18 languages. And not just European languages - I'm talking everything from Russian to Tamil, with lots of south Asian languages, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese (two major dialects), etc. No college degree, just a monster of a mind for languages... who could then turn that knowledge into a software font system that worked. For those who don't know some of these esoteric language systems - think of a font system that has to go back and change characters you've already typed because they're modified by letters or characters that come later.

What did Xerox do with this guy who could speak/read/write all these languages?

They pissed him off... so he went where? To Apple. 

Did Jobs lift ideas out of Xerox? Yep. Thank goodness he did, or we'd still be plunking away on 80x24 text interfaces on a VT-100 emulation. Boy, those were the days...