In the scheme of things, a relatively minor correction: the Lisa was an Apple product, a precursor of the Macintosh.
I can also attest to seeing the Xerox Alto at PARC, circa 1973, a personal computer that had a windows GUI, and mouse device.
Incidentally, Alan Kay was at PARC then, and had a cardboard mockup of a notebook-size personal computer he called a Dynabook, which he predicted could eventually be built to run Smalltalk.
Time plays tricks with our memories - perhaps you visited Engelbart's lab in 1969, not '79? This would be consistent with his "Mother of All Demo's" in 1968.
> From: phayes@xxxxxxx
> Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 22:54:23 -0500
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] SME (subject matter experts) and Ontology developement - principle? - Ethics?
>
> Another timepoint: when I first went to Rochester in 1981, the CS lab there was already using a Xerox product, the Lisa, which had the Xerox mouse/windows GUI on a bitmapped screen and a sophisticated OS with built-in wordprocessing, graphics, native networking and various other 'modern' apps. I am pretty sure this was the first commercially available such computer, several years before the Macintosh, although it was not by any means a desktop machine. And while it is true that all of this was pioneered and invented by Engelbart (whose lab I also visited, briefly, in 1979, where I saw the mouse as well as the 5-finger keypad, a trackerball, a knee-operated screen pointer - fortunately still-born - and a 3-d display built using a flexible concave mirror), in Engelbart's lab these were all home-made prototypes, not commercial products. Xerox PARC made them real and put them all together into a commercially viable product. Part of the Jobs story is that the PARC developers were
> far more excited than Xerox HQ were about all this computer stuff, felt extremely frustrated that the parent company seemed to not realize what they had been given, and were delighted to be re-employed by Jobs, who clearly did. Xerox may hold the record for dropping the ball on important new ideas developed in their own laboratory: when I was there, years later, the company had basically invented social email, supported by a world-wide intranet, until its use for 'non-company business' was abruptly shut down by a boneheaded Xerox executive. I personally fought in that losing battle against managerial stupidity. Not only could Xerox have owned the PC, it could also have owned the Web.
>
> Pat Hayes
>
> On Mar 19, 2015, at 4:30 PM, Bruce Nordman <bnordman@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Hi all--
> > I spent a month in 1976 at PARC and saw all these things
> > then, plus a few others - laser printer, and eye-tracking
> > with lasers. By '79 it was old news.......... :)
> > --Bruce
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Peter Yim <peter.yim@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > [TJ] I believe that Steve Jobs picked up the idea for using mice as
> > > pointing devices from the Xerox PARC people, when he was taking
> > > a public tour of the place.
> >
> > [ppy] (just to straighten out the history and how this important piece
> > of computing history evolved) The story, as I understand it, goes like
> > this ...
> >
> > Steve Jobs was actually given a "private tour" in 1979 of the Xerox
> > PARC (as part of his deal to allow Xerox to invest into Apple) when he
> > was shown (i) the mouse/windows UI, (ii) network computing, and (iii)
> > object oriented programming (for which he later acknowledged that he
> > got so excited with the first, that he only subsequently grasped the
> > significance of the latter two later.) He did get to commercialized
> > all three in his life time. ... Anyhow, the first two items weren't
> > first developed at the Xerox PARC, but at the Augmentation Research
> > Center (ARC) directed by Doug Engelbart, at the Stanford Research
> > Institute (known nowadays as SRI International) and were publicly
> > demonstrated in 1968[1]. As many as 27 of the ex- ARC researchers and
> > staff ended up being employed at the Xerox PARC and extending their
> > work there, significantly enabled the technology transfer process.
> >
> > Ref.:
> > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
> > [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface
> > [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
> >
> > Regards. =ppy
> > --
> >
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> > --
> > Bruce Nordman
> > Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
> > nordman.lbl.gov
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