Neither Steve Ballmer nor Microsoft created the GUI that Microsoft tweaked and copyrighted. Nor did Apple, Commodore, or Atari. Xerox did.
This is from
https://www.quora.com/Was-anyone-at-Xerox-fired-for-not-recognizing-the-potential-of-the-mouse-and-GUI-operating-system-essentially-giving-competitors-a-100-billion-dollar-head-startProfile photo for Roberto Santocho
Roberto Santocho
47+ Years High Tech/Silicon Valley Startups at Consultants (1977–present)Author has 58.7K answers and 39.7M answer views3y
Q: Was anyone at Xerox fired for not recognizing the potential of the mouse and GUI operating system, essentially giving competitors a 100+ billion dollar head start?
A: No, not at all and the truth as to why will surprise you.
Xerox did not invent the GUI
Xerox did not invent the mouse
It did not happen
Doug Engelbart invented the mouse, he has the patent to prove it
Doug Engelbart performed the very first demonstration of the GUI and the mouse before a crowd of engineers in San Francisco so there are thousands of witnesses that saw the demo (known as the Mother of all Demos) in person
Doug Engelbart performed the demonstration before Xerox PARC was founded, so Xerox cannot ever take the credit for anything, because they actually did not invent those things and they were not theorist to use them
In fact Xerox PARC never invented a personal computer either, what they had in their lab (a prototype, not even production unit) that the media talks about ceaselessly was never a personal computer at all, it had two pieces, one that was a graphic processor box and the display, this sat on the user’s desk and is what the media called a “personal computer” but in fact it was only the display unit, the actual computer is the size of a mini-fridge and was rolled around on the floor and situated next to the desk, this is the part that the media doesn't show you because they only want you to know that they scammed you when they lied about Apple
It turns our that Apple really did create the very first personal computer with a mouse and a GUI display, there were none before Apple did it.
This is where the haters jump out from their mother’s basement and start screaming that Apple stole everything fro Xerox.
Apple did not steal anything from Xerox, ever. It never happened.
Here is the story that I have shared before so I will quote myself (keep in mind that I was around Silicon Valley in those days and I personal knew or know many of the people involved, my home is bit a few minutes drive from Xerox,, Apple, Stanford and many of the guys in this factual accounting of what happened)
The Xerox guy that started that story got it all wrong. He told the media about Steve Jobs coming to Xerox and getting exited about their computer and he was wrong. He was not with Steve Jobs, he did not give Steve Jobs the tour and he totally assumed/guessed what happened, which he got completely wrong. When he told the media his story, they never bothered to fact check it, they did not run to Steve Jobs to ask him what he was doing at Xerox (the actual reason might shock you), and they did not interview Doug Engelbart who was the actual person at the center of the story. They simply posted fake news and allowed haters to repeat it for decades.
Bill Gates contributed to the lie and everyone believed the lie. Bill later on admitted to the lie and the media never reported it, Gates said about stealing the Mac GUI: “If they didn't want me to steal it then they should have never given it to me”. Steve Jobs had given Bill Gate the source code to the Macintosh operating system so that Microsoft could write apps for the Mac platform (there was no API in that era, so access to source code was needed to write apps). That is the fact that proves that Bill Gates stole the desktop personal computer GUI from Apple.
What actually happened:
Xerox PARC never ever invented the GUI idea. That is fake-news. Having been involved in the events at that time, in Silicon Valley, I can tell you that the whole myth of Apple stealing anything from Xerox is totally an Urban Legend.
Xerox never owned the computer mouse and Xerox did not invent the GUI and they did not invent the personal computer. These are all urban legends that are still floating around today despite being completely incorrect.
In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published the Spanish poem “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”), a short story that is often considered an inspiration for the concept of hypertext, which is the earliest documented description of what we would now call a GUI and a Web broswer.
The person who invented and patented the computer mouse was Doug Engelbart.
Douglas Engelbart - Wikipedia (Douglas Engelbart - Wikipedia)
Doug worked at SRI (we called it Stanford AI back then) and he was an acquaintance of mine because he used to sit next to me at a monthly educational conference that I (my company) hosted and that he always attended.
Doug never sold a license to Xerox, and Xerox used the computer mouse illegally when they sold three of their prototype machines to several universities.
Steve Jobs (Apple) toured Xerox PARC as a paying customer of Xerox. That means that Apple had a license to all Xerox PARC technology and could use anything they saw there, legally. Xerox PARC was the Think Tank division of Xerox and the job of a Think Tank is to come up with ideas for their customers to take and make their own products with.
Think tank - Wikipedia
Steve saw the computer mouse while on an official tour of Xerox PARC as a customer. The employees at PARC did not know that Steve was a paying customer of Xerox, which is why they started the Urban Legend that he stole technology from them, which was absolutely untrue. During the tour Steve saw the computer mouse and went crazy. He went back to the Apple HQ grabbed his staff and dragged them to Xerox PARC to show them The Mouse.
Urban legend - Wikipedia
What the Xerox PARC staff had no way of knowing (because they had NO right to know) is that Apple already had their prototype computer with a GUI already running, but it ran with a Light Pen which Steve hated. Steve knew the moment hew saw it that the Computer Mouse was exactly what he needed.
Light pen - Wikipedia
Xerox could not supply a license for the mouse because they were using it illegally so Steve went to SRI and paid $100,000 for a lifetime license to the computer mouse. That means that Apple Computer is the only company in history, to this day to actually have a legal license to the computer mouse, all other companies have been using it illegally.
This story came to me in person, face to face, over many months from Doug Engelbart so I know that it is completely accurate.
I also had a long series of communications with Jef Raskin (The Father of the Macintosh) and he was able to verify much of that story.
Jef Raskin - Wikipedia
Jef had written his thesis in the 1960s, many years before Xerox PARC existed, it was called "Quick-Draw Graphics System" and is the basic for the GUI that the Mac is based on, so the user interface for the Mac is older than PARC and could not have been stolen from PARC.
Macintosh: Mac History - QuickDraw : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Jef Raskin was an Apple employee and he was the one that birthed the Macintosh, using the mouse that Steve Jobs had licensed legal from Doug Engelbart/SRI.
Now you know the true story of the computer mouse and how Apple really was the first company to deliver a desktop personal computer with a GUI and a legal mouse, before anyone else. This was the first time that an ordinary human being could walk into a store, buy a personal computer and actually do something productive on it, at home, without having a technical background or having to be a serous hobbyist.
Xerox essentially lied and stole credit for Doug’s technology. They lied about where they got their computer concept from, they actually got it from Doug Engelbart when he performed The Mother of All Demos in 1968. And they stole Doug’s mouse and sold prototypes with computer mice, without ever getting a license from SRI or Doug, in fact Apple is the only company in history to ever have paid for and still legally hold the one and only license for the computer mouse.
Reality Check: Xerox only assembled a handful of Alto prototypes, at a materials cost of $16,000 which they sold to a handful of Universities, as experimental units, for $100,000, so obviously these cannot ever, in any way possible, ever be considered to be “personal computers” because it completely failed to satisfy the very first, and most important, requirement that a normal (average) person could actually reasonably afford.
Xerox PARC was not founded until 1970 so it was impossible for Xerox to have created the GUI since Doug had done a live demonstration of a working GUI on a working computer, two years before Xerox was founded.
The Mother of All Demos - Wikipedia
HappyHacker Alto Playroom 1
Xerox Alto was not a desktop personal computer, it was huge and and required a standalone disk drive/CPU that was on the floor next to the desk
