Column Looking back over the last 40 years of computing, its difficult to think of how things could have been different. When Steve Jobs took a trip up the Valley in late 1979 to go to Xerox PARC, he found the missing piece of the puzzle that had consumed away at him ever because Woz hacked together the very first Apple I: how to make a computer that everyone might use.
The genius computer system scientists at PARC had actually fixed that issue with WIMP: windows, icons, menus, guideline. Include in a high-resolution display, an os built on components composed in the spiffy object-oriented Smalltalk programming language, plus a high-speed network user interface to connect all of the systems together, and, well, thats practically all of modern computing, even today.
Xerox got pre-IPO shares of Apple; Jobs discovered a path forward– however one that would take years to bring to bear fruit. By July 1981, the 2 companies felt comfy sufficient to ink a collaboration arrangement that looked like a bit of marketing fluff at the time– each assured just to promote the others items– however which rapidly changed the world.