Let me know if you find Xerox's marketing disaster documented. I'm curious to see if it foreshadows any of Apple's marketing blunders.
There's a book on it, called Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the Personal Computer. I read it many years ago, but it gives the whole history of Xerox PARC.
Xerox was a major stockholder of Apple, and invited Jobs and Wozniak up to tour the lab. I think the deal was they could walk around and look for an hour, and were given free reign to take away any ideas they wanted (but not code or hardware).
Alan Kay was heavily involved in the stuff going on at PARC, and the machine they saw was running Smalltalk. Jobs has since said that he was exposed to 3 mindblowing innovations there, and of them, the GUI was the least significant, but he was so blown away by that that he didn't appreciate the other two for years. One was O-O programming, and I forget what the other one was.
-Russ |
