steve jobs visit to xerox parc

Can Xerox’s PARC, a Silicon Valley Icon, Find New Life with SRI?

By John Markoff . Photographs by Balazs Gardi. March 26, 2024

Two research labs known for some of the tech industry’s most important innovations have merged in hopes of recapturing their glory days.

It is one of Silicon Valley’s enduring legends.

In 1979, a 24-year old Steve Jobs was permitted to visit Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to view a demonstration of an experimental personal computer called the Alto. Mr. Jobs took away a handful of ideas that would transform the computing world when they became the heart of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers.

Four decades later, PARC has become a footnote in the nation’s technology heartland, even as Silicon Valley’s influence has ballooned. Last April, Xerox quietly donated the lab to SRI International, an independent research laboratory that is a nonprofit organization with an equally storied history that has also fallen from its peak of influence. (The organization shortened its name this year to SRI. It used to be the Stanford Research Institute and was separated from the university in 1970. It changed its name to SRI International in 1977.)

PARC's inventions defined the personal computing revolution, from laser printing to ethernet.

Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center as an R&D division on the edge of Stanford’s campus. The mandate of the laboratory is to create “the office of the future.”

Among the first innovations to come out of PARC is a complete system for laser printing, pictured here in a prototype printer model, the Xerox Dover.

PARC creates the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer. The Alto features the first graphical user interface, making it possible to control the system by pointing and clicking on menus rather than typing cumbersome commands.

A key part of PARC office of the future vision is a network to tie office systems together. The Ethernet standard is developed at PARC and gradually wins wide industry adoption.

In January, SRI began to disclose its plans for PARC, describing a combined nonprofit research organization, called the Future Concepts division, intent on reclaiming some of the original wizardry that was created when the Xerox Corporation set out to build a basic research laboratory to invent the “office of the future” in 1970.

The PARC laboratory, set in the foothills just south of Stanford, is now largely empty, hosting less than 100 researchers, far from a peak of almost 400. For those who remember its glory days, however, it is a reminder of the research done by a diverse group of scientists and engineers who crossed disciplines and collaborated in a spirit similar to other powerful corporate research centers of that era, such as AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

“It’s still magical,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive and executive chairman, who began his career at PARC as a computer scientist and a member of the research team. He remembers, “an amazing cafeteria, the most incredible view from the roof deck of the Bay Area and very large labs on the ground floor that they once used for physics and semiconductor work.”

Today, however, in an era of tightening corporate budgets and more targeted government spending, basic research largely happens at universities. Silicon Valley has adopted a venture capital-based research funding model focused on quickly bringing products to market — often failing just as promptly.

For reasons that range from the more competitive world of computing research to the fact that the communities that surround the laboratory are now among the most expensive places to live in the world, there are many skeptics about the idea of a rejuvenated PARC. And in a technology region now dominated by venture-funded start-ups, some argue that basic research labs like PARC and SRI are passé.

“PARC is dead,” said Bernardo Huberman, a physicist who was a PARC researcher during the 1970s and 1980s and who now heads a research group at CableLabs, a development organization sponsored by the cable television industry. He added that “the value system that made people feel like they were part of something intellectually by working at PARC has disappeared.”

“Now the culture is more mercenary and focused on money rather than knowledge for its own sake,” Mr. Huberman said.

PARC and SRI share a complicated history. During Silicon Valley’s formative years in the 1960s and ’70s, SRI, which is in neighboring Menlo Park, and PARC invented defining concepts that even today continue to shape the computer industry, including advanced chip design, personal computing, laser printing, office networking and what is described as the Internet of Things.

Some of PARC’s computing innovations have their roots in prior research work done in the SRI lab of Douglas Engelbart, the computer scientist who invented the computer mouse and hypertext, the forerunner to the World Wide Web.

Across its 78-year history, SRI’s inventions have evolved from early computer-based check processing systems to the initial version of Siri.

Bank of America contracts with SRI to design a computer-based system to automate the processing of checks. By 1966, the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting can process 750 million checks a year.

A robot called Shakey moves about its environment. A variety of innovations will come from it, including advances in computer vision, voice recognition and an algorithm that would become the basis for modern navigation and mapping programs.

The computer scientist Douglas Engelbart does a live demonstration of the “oN-Line system” his team at SRI has been developing, showcasing the computer mouse and hypertext – later to become the foundational concept underlying the World Wide Web.

Two young programmers, Bill Duvall at SRI in Menlo Park and Charley Kline at UCLA in Los Angeles, test remotely connecting to a computer via a Pentagon-funded experimental computer network known as ARPAnet.

Siri, which will eventually be turned into a commercial product by Apple, begins as part of a Pentagon-funded SRI artificial intelligence research effort known as CALO, which stands for Cognitive Assistant That Learns and Organizes.

David Parekh, SRI’s chief executive, said that although PARC could not compete directly for talent because of the high salaries now routinely offered by tech giants, it would still be possible to attract scientists and engineers interested in the research freedom that the laboratory would provide. The new, combined lab will have about 1,000 researchers.

Mr. Parekh, who is a mechanical engineer whose background is in the aerospace industry and who became SRI’s chief executive in 2021, said PARC would be able to attract both early-career researchers as well as mid-career and senior researchers.

He acknowledged that while the reinvented PARC would not have a single “invent the office of the future” style-vision of the original laboratory, it would attempt to make advances in a variety of fields ranging from material science inventions to offset the effects of climate change to quantum computing.

PARC is credited with the original graphical computing breakthrough known as the WIMP interface, an acronym for Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer, that describes a style of human-computer interaction that was popularized by Macintosh and Windows personal computers.

Mr. Parekh said that the stage was now set for a second leap forward in the way humans interacted with computers. That was foreshadowed in basic research done at SRI in the 2000s that led to the commercial spinoff of SIRI, a speech assistant that Mr. Jobs placed at the heart of the iPhone just before his death in 2011.

Mr. Parekh said he believed that the new research center could make major contributions in research on more trustworthy and explainable artificial intelligence systems. SRI has been a pioneer in A.I. research since the 1960s, and Mr. Parekh said that combining today’s neural net technologies with the traditional symbolic A.I. work would pave the way for powerful systems that have the ability to reason.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he said, is now funding PARC’s research on futuristic human-machine collaboration, intended to make it possible for people and machines to plan and work together on tasks in both digital and physical worlds.

The challenge, said Curtis Carlson, a physicist who was SRI’s chief executive from 1998 to 2014, will be to create a culture that is able to make the connection between invention and innovation, which he described as invention delivered into the marketplace with a viable business model.

PARC’s inventiveness has always been a source of contention. Xerox was accused of “fumbling the future,” by not effectively commercializing the technology it invented to become a major player in the computer industry. Mr. Jobs took away the technology that still defines Apple’s products, and Charles Simonyi, a young PARC software designer who left to work for Microsoft, took the ideas that would become the heart of both Office and Windows.

Xerox executives had always responded that though they did not successfully compete in the computer market, they got a huge return on their investment by commercializing the laser printer technology PARC invented.

But many researchers who were at PARC’s halcyon early days said that its strength was that their research was unconstrained by the need to create a specific product — a notion that seems hard to imagine in today’s product-oriented Silicon Valley.

In the 1970s, PARC was originally thought of as “hippie-ville,” said Jan Vandenbrande, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project manager who is now head of research at PARC. That culture, he said, has changed and evolved since then, but has retained a spirit of “how do you make a difference in the world?” and “how do you democratize certain technologies?”

Johan De Kleer, a scientist who spent almost four decades at PARC before leaving recently to found an A.I. software company, said that PARC could be revived only if Mr. Parekh could find a way to build some “slack” into the system by finding money to support open-ended research projects.

SRI may have found that slack. The research laboratory is located in Menlo Park, Calif., in walking distance to the San Francisco to San Jose commuter rail line on 63 of Silicon Valley’s most valuable acres.

Mr. Parekh is now planning to build a modern research campus and residential community with new SRI buildings and space to attract other high-tech companies. The developer will share revenue from the project with SRI.

“This is our annuity for the future for investing in research,” Mr. Parekh said.

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How Steve Jobs Invented The Computer Mouse By Stealing It From Xerox

By John Brownlee • 6:55 am, May 17, 2011

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Is there a difference between ripping off and inventing? Not when by ripping it off you make it practical, and for all practical persons, Steve Jobs effectively invented the first modern computer mouse in the mid-70s… by stealing it from Xerox.

In the latest episode of NPR’s All Things Considererd , Malcolm Gladwell tells the story about how Steve Jobs first brought the mouse to Apple. It’s a fantastic look inside Steve’s brain, and how he can reduce a complicated concept down to its essence for mass consumption.

According to Gladwell, when Steve Jobs visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the late 1970’s, he was amazed by what he saw: a demonstration of a new three-button computer mouse.

The only problem? It cost $300. Realizing that this would be the perfect interface innovation for his Apple Computer, Jobs took the concept to industrial designer Dean Hovey, who “improved” the mouse by dropping two of its buttons… and, along with them, the mouse’s build price, which sank to just $15.

Obviously, Apple’s decision to favor just a single mouse button has been a contentious one. To this day, it’s one of the first snarky comments Windows users like to ignorantly drop when you say you’re a Mac user. In fact, Apple’s single mouse button aesthetic is commonly leveled as an example as to how Cupertino’s obsession with simple interfaces can be taken too far.

When you actually hear Gladwell explain how the single button mouse came about, though, the genius of the decision really clicks. Not only is a single button mouse an easier interface to introduce to users either new to computers or used to text-only input, but it dropped the build price of the mouse to a level where every consumer could afford to buy one.

And why was it so important for every Apple Computer owner to have a mouse? So Steve Jobs could unveil his other big new product inspired by his Xerox Labs visit: the Macintosh, and its GUI-based OS. Genius.

For more information on Steve Jobs’ historic visit to Xerox in the 70’s, read Malcolm Gladwell’s fantastic article in this week’s New Yorker .

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Tech Time Warp of the Week: Xerox PARC Alto, 1979

The irony is that Steve Jobs could’ve caught the Alto on television.

In late 1979, a 24-year-old Jobs visited Xerox PARC — the research lab where Xerox engineers had built a new-age machine called the Alto — and the myth is that the visit inspired Jobs and his company, Apple Computer, to create the Macintosh. For years, people have ridiculed Xerox for inviting Jobs inside the lab and letting him steal such important ideas.

But the truth is that the Mac wasn’t the Alto knock-off everyone thinks it was, and, well, the Alto wasn’t exactly a secret: Xerox shot a television commercial trumpeting the machine, and chances are, it aired well before Jobs’ visit.

The commercial (below) isn’t the most detailed document of the Alto, and it may even stretch the truth near the end. But more than thirty years on, it provides at least a small window into how the world viewed the Alto’s graphical user interface — and why Steve Jobs got so very excited when he saw it.

Only a minute long, the commercial begins with an average businessman grabbing his morning coffee and heading into his office, where he sits down at an Alto. He then starts talking to the machine — which makes no sense whatsoever. The Alto was an amazing machine: it had a mouse and graphical user interface. It plugged into an Ethernet network. And it could print your spreadsheets on a laser printer. But if you talked it, you just looked silly, especially if — like this guy — you called it “Fred.”

After a bit of smalltalk, Mr. Businessman checks his email and prints it out, and you can see the Alto in action. According to Kathy Jarvis, the current librarian at PARC, this is best video document of the machine we have. “There were real names in the emails he was looking at, and that was really what our email screen looked like,” Jarvis says.

The ad goes a little off the rails at the end, when Fred reminds the businessman that he should buy flowers for his wife. But according to Jarvis, the graphics displayed by the machine are probably the real thing. “It may have been slow to load, but it could draw flowers like that,” she says. “We had animations going in the mid-70s.”

Jarvis says that the commercial was shot in the lobby of Xerox PARC, and that the people milling about at the beginning are actual PARC employees. The orange walls were brought in just for the shoot — and so was the overly talkative businessman.

The ad was meant to whet the world’s appetite for the commercial version of the Alto, the Star, which would arrive a few years later — and fail miserably in the face of competition from the Macintosh.

We can’t be sure it aired on television. But it most likely did. “We believe they all appeared somewhere, but perhaps the Alto commercial was not shown nationwide,” Jarvis says. The video below comes not from PARC, but from the archives of the Computer History Museum , and it was donated to the museum on a VHS video tape marked May 14, 1979, according to History Museum researcher Sarah Lott. Presumably, it was taped from a TV broadcast on that date.

That was about a half decade after the Alto was first built by legendary researchers such as Alan Kay and Bob Metcalf and Chuck Thacker. The machine drew on earlier research from Douglas Engelbart — the inventor of the mouse — but it was a truly seminal machine, laying the foundation for so many of things we now take granted.

But you couldn’t talk to it.

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Paresh Dave

Brian Barrett

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Matthew Hutson

Kate Knibbs

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Steven Levy

CHM Revolution

Exhibition input & output, the parc computer science laboratory (csl).

Lab Director Bob Taylor held periodic informal meetings in this “beanbag” conference room where CSL staff presented new ideas. Members received frank and sometimes brutal feedback from their colleagues.

Left to right: Jim Mitchell, Ed Fiala, Terry Roberts, Vicki Parish, Wesley Clark, and Ed Taft.

Eager to be known as more than a supplier of office copiers, Xerox created the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. PARC’s modest assignment? Create “the Office of the Future.”

George Pake assembled world-class scientists and engineers—“Architects of Information”—into a hothouse of innovation that flourished for decades. PARC developed laser printing, graphical user interfaces, Ethernet, digital video, word processing, multi-beam solid-state lasers, very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI), and more.

Although many PARC ideas never became successful commercial products, some generated billions of dollars in sales for Xerox.

Adele Goldberg: Bean Bags and PARC Culture

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

The atmosphere at Xerox PARC reflected the West Coast hippie-influenced culture of the 1970s. It was worlds apart from Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut.

The Apple Connection

In 1979, Xerox bought a small stake in Apple. Xerox got a stock certificate. Apple got access to Xerox technology.

Apple engineers, and CEO Steve Jobs, visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Alto’s graphical interface and look “under the hood.” That visit reinforced similar work already underway at Apple for its Lisa and Macintosh.

Adele Goldberg at Xerox PARC

Initially, Goldberg refused to give Steve Jobs and his engineers a Smalltalk demonstration, suspecting that Apple would appropriate the technology. Xerox management overruled her. Jobs later said, “it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.”

Dorado Smalltalk screen

Dorado was a higher-performance successor to the Alto. It supported all three Alto programming environments: Smalltalk, Cedar/Mesa, and Interlisp. This “personal computer” had the same 60 nanosecond cycle time as IBM’s 360/91 supercomputer only 11 years earlier!

Apple Lisa 2 screenshot

Although much influenced by the work at Xerox PARC, Apple engineers developed their Lisa computer’s similar graphical user interface from scratch. The commercial failure of the Lisa was a result of its high price and poor performance, not its features.

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Steve Jobs: The Edison of Our Time and the Future of Apple

Steve Jobs, who stepped down as Apple's CEO, defined and guided a tech revolution spanning media and computing. What will be the most lasting legacy of his historic tenure?

The creation myth of Steve Jobs, Apple, and the personal computer began in 1979. The 24-year old entrepreneur visited Xerox PARC, the "innovation arm" of Xerox Corporation and Silicon Valley's leading laboratory of ideas, where he saw engineers designing what would become the modern mouse. At Xerox PARC, the mouse was a bulky thing, an idea in larva stage. But Jobs saw its potential and made it marketable and universal.

Making ideas marketable and universal is what Jobs has done for most of his career. Steve Jobs has been called the Edison of our time. That's even truer than it seems. His genius (not unlike Edison, an infamous thief of other people's best ideas) is the mainstream application of existing ideas, rather than original invention.

-- Apple wasn't the first company to think of the elements that make up the personal computer. Xerox PARC was. But Apple put the pieces together with the right design touches to make the first marketable personal computer.

-- Apple didn't invent the mp3 player. Audio Highway did. But the iPod still dominated the market with more than 300 million units sold to date.

-- Apple didn't invent the online music store. Ivan J. Parron did. But seven years after iTunes launched, it has achieved more than 70 percent market share of legal music downloads and more by selling more than 10 billion songs.

-- Apple didn't invent the first PDA, mobile phone, or smartphone. IBM, Nokia and other companies were there first. But the iPhone redefined what a phone should be.

The lesson from Steve Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC was that being first is overrated. It's better to be the best. If all art is theft, Jobs' genius came from being the smartest chisel, not just the first mallet on the block of marble.

In 20 years, what will be the idea that Steve Jobs and his tenure at the helm of Apple will have left behind? The victory of hardware in the age of software? The digitization of media? The personalization of brand?

You could do worse than settle on the triumph of design. When I spoke with Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at global market research company Millward Brown, about what makes Apple different, he said it came down to unity of vision. Apple's DNA goes way beyond its devices. The hardware is iconic and simple. The retail stores are as antiseptic as car showrooms. The website and the advertisements have the same Helvetica-on-white purity. And it all comes from a chief executive with such legendary astringency, he refused to have more than one button on the iPhone.

What makes Jobs special, even unique, among chief executives is the undiluted execution of his austere vision of simplicity. In an age of clutter, his brand spoke with clarity that everybody knew started with the guy in the black turtleneck.

APRES JOBS, LE DELUGE?

The last test of genius is its longevity. But in thinking about what comes next, it's remarkable to note how young Apple's new celebrity is. The iPod is only ten years old. A child born on the day the iPhone debuted in 2007 wouldn't yet be in kindergarten. A child born on the day the iPad debuted in 2010 might not be walking.

Still, great companies occasionally flat-line. Microsoft had the largest market cap in history in 2000 and its stock hasn't increased over the last ten years. GE's has declined. But Jobs leaves his company surprisingly well positioned. Even as the first or second most valuable company in the world, Apple's price-earnings ratio is normal to low. Its products are too superior, its potential in overseas market too big, and the global mobile tech space too fecund for Apple to face imminent decline.

Predicting what comes next is prophecy. Suffice it to say that having reinvented the personal computer, music business, phone, and personal computer (again), Steve Jobs has demonstrated and re-demonstrated his genius for us. In return, we wish him well.

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When Steve Jobs visited PARC (video)

Hear about Steve Jobs' long-ago trips to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, including the one in which he eyed the company's GUI prototype--which ended up on Mac OS.

At a Churchill Club event in San Jose, Calif., former PARC engineer Larry Tesler talks about Steve Jobs' trips to Xerox's PARC, including the one where Jobs eyed the company's graphical user interface prototype, which ended up making it into the Mac OS. Tesler decided to leave Xerox soon after and started working at Apple.

See also: The story behind Apple's NeXT OS in 1996 (video)

This story originally appeared at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline " PARC scientist recalls Jobs' famous Xerox visits (video) ."

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The Tweaker

By Malcolm Gladwell

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M. , that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:

Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC , after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for others’ ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one.’ And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”

Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”

“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.” “I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.” Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated. When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWAChiatDay. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:

They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same , it’s think different . Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

The point of Meisenzahl and Mokyr’s argument is that this sort of tweaking is essential to progress. James Watt invented the modern steam engine, doubling the efficiency of the engines that had come before. But when the tweakers took over the efficiency of the steam engine swiftly quadrupled . Samuel Crompton was responsible for what Meisenzahl and Mokyr call “arguably the most productive invention” of the industrial revolution. But the key moment, in the history of the mule, came a few years later, when there was a strike of cotton workers. The mill owners were looking for a way to replace the workers with unskilled labor, and needed an automatic mule, which did not need to be controlled by the spinner. Who solved the problem? Not Crompton, an unambitious man who regretted only that public interest would not leave him to his seclusion, so that he might “earn undisturbed the fruits of his ingenuity and perseverance.” It was the tweaker’s tweaker, Richard Roberts, who saved the day, producing a prototype, in 1825, and then an even better solution in 1830. Before long, the number of spindles on a typical mule jumped from four hundred to a thousand. The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.

Jobs’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, had a private jet, and he designed its interior with a great deal of care. One day, Jobs decided that he wanted a private jet, too. He studied what Ellison had done. Then he set about to reproduce his friend’s design in its entirety—the same jet, the same reconfiguration, the same doors between the cabins. Actually, not in its entirety . Ellison’s jet “had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.” Having hired Ellison’s designer, “pretty soon he was driving her crazy.” Of course he was. The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection. “I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”

The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue. As he tells Isaacson:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing was done to him. In his mind, what he did was special. Jobs persuaded the head of Pepsi-Cola, John Sculley, to join Apple as C.E.O., in 1983, by asking him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” When Jobs approached Isaacson to write his biography, Isaacson first thought (“half jokingly”) that Jobs had noticed that his two previous books were on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and that he “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” The architecture of Apple software was always closed. Jobs did not want the iPhone and the iPod and the iPad to be opened up and fiddled with, because in his eyes they were perfect. The greatest tweaker of his generation did not care to be tweaked.

Perhaps this is why Bill Gates—of all Jobs’s contemporaries—gave him fits. Gates resisted the romance of perfectionism. Time and again, Isaacson repeatedly asks Jobs about Gates and Jobs cannot resist the gratuitous dig. “Bill is basically unimaginative,” Jobs tells Isaacson, “and has never invented anything, which I think is why he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

After close to six hundred pages, the reader will recognize this as vintage Jobs: equal parts insightful, vicious, and delusional. It’s true that Gates is now more interested in trying to eradicate malaria than in overseeing the next iteration of Word. But this is not evidence of a lack of imagination. Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.

As his life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. “Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,” Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. “There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,” Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.” The architects wanted the windows to open. Jobs said no. He “had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. ‘That would just allow people to screw things up.’ ” ♦

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By Jill Lepore

By Malcolm Ross

By David Remnick

By Françoise Mouly

Column: Larry Tesler of PARC taught Steve Jobs how a personal computer could work

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Of all the seminal moments in the creation of the personal computer, one stands out: the 1979 demonstration Steve Jobs of Apple got of the secret technology being developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary PARC.

Larry Tesler, who died Sunday at 74, was a key figure — possibly the key figure — in that event.

Tesler played an even greater role in the personal computer revolution than that. Unlike many of his colleagues and certainly his superiors at PARC, he had a vision of the PC as a consumer appliance, not merely a business machine.

They were totally blown away.... Jobs was waving his arms around, saying, ‘Why hasn’t this company brought this to market?’

— Larry Tesler, recalling the demonstration of Xerox PARC technology shown to Steve Jobs in 1979

In 1980, Tesler became one of the first PARC engineers to move to Apple, which was then developing its Lisa personal computer and helping to design the Macintosh, eventually becoming Apple’s chief scientist. There and throughout his career, he was an advocate of keeping the machines’ interface as simple as possible, working to strip away some of the complexities beloved by his fellow engineers.

But his most important contribution to computing history may have been his role in giving Jobs a front-row view into PARC’s technology. I told the story in my 1999 book about PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” basing the account on interviews with Tesler, other PARC participants and members of the Apple team who were present.

As I reported in the book, confusion is epic about the Jobs “show and tell” at PARC, with almost as many variants as there were participants. But a couple of points are important.

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First, Jobs got entry to PARC, normally a very closed institution, because Xerox had bought a piece of his company. Apple was then an up-and-coming private company, the focus of intense bidding by bigger firms looking for a strategic foothold in a new commercial market.

Jobs had agreed to give Xerox a stake in Apple’s “mezzanine” financing round, traditionally the last private round before a public stock offering, on condition that he get a look behind PARC’s doors.

Second, there was not one demonstration but two, both in December 1979. At the first, the PARC demonstrators, wary of allowing outsiders to see their work, out of concern it would be co-opted, gave Jobs and his team a sanitized tour of their technologies — the Alto personal computer, the mouse (imported from the nearby Stanford Research Institute) and a word-processing program known as Bravo, which would later evolve into Microsoft Word.

Jobs left, content with the demo. But when he got back to Apple, some of his colleagues who knew more about PARC told him how much he had missed. Infuriated, he demanded a second, more complete look, and Xerox superiors ordered PARC to deliver it.

The very idea of allowing Jobs through the door had split the PARC team. On one side were those who thought Xerox might yet bring their technologies to market under its own brand, and who consequently saw Apple as a competitor. On the other was a minority, including Tesler, who had given up on Xerox and considered Apple a potential collaborator, possibly the only hope of bringing their work to market.

“I wanted a deal to happen,” he told me.

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Tesler had come to his advocacy of simpler design in part by hanging out with hobbyists at local computer fairs and the Homebrew Computer Club, which met in nearby Menlo Park. Some of his PARC colleagues dismissed them as gadgeteers, but he knew that they also had an interest in making their gadgets work more efficiently and at lower cost, if necessary by hardware and software shortcuts.

He felt an affinity with Apple, which had some of the same concerns. He was also more familiar with Apple than other PARC engineers, having dated a woman who worked for the company.

“I had been to an Apple picnic in 1978, when it had 30 employees,” he recalled. “It was at Marineworld in Redwood City, and the entire staff, with kids, fit around four picnic tables.”

The second Jobs demo began with Jobs ordering his team to give up one of their secrets. “Tell them about the Lisa,” he said.

Lisa was an office computer Apple was designing with a graphical display. As Jobs told his reluctant team, Apple and Xerox were on different paths. “These guys think we’re going to make the Xerox computer, which would cost ten thousand bucks to build. But we all know we want them to help us with the Lisa!”

“What’s Lisa?” one of the PARC team asked.

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Tesler knew that PARC technology would indeed help with the Lisa, especially Smalltalk, an interface developed by a team headed by PARC personal computing visionary Alan Kay.

The full-dress demo given to Jobs and his staff that day was mind-boggling. It included educational applications written by PARC’s outstanding software engineer Adele Goldberg and software development tools devised by Tesler. Diana Merry demonstrated a galley editor, a program with animation capabilities that allowed a user to incorporate text and pictures in a single document — something that had never been seen before in a research prototype much less a commercial device.

The Apple team watched the demonstration unfold with rapt attention. Bill Atkinson, an Apple designer who would leave an indelible mark on the Macintosh, brought out in 1984, paid particular attention.

“He was asking extremely intelligent questions that he couldn’t have thought of just by watching the screen,” Tesler recalled. “It was clear to me that they understood what we had much better than Xerox did.” At the prompting of the Apple staff, the PARC staff began to show capabilities that seemed like magic to Apple, but that PARC had incorporated as routines in its programs.

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“They were totally blown away,” Tesler said of the Apple staff. “Jobs was waving his arms around, saying, ‘Why hasn’t this company brought this to market?’... Meantime, the other guys were trying to ignore the shouting ... and learn as much as they could in the hour they were going to be there.”

The story that Jobs went back to Apple after his second visit to PARC and ordered the Lisa completely redesigned has an element of myth to it. In fact, the Lisa designers were heading toward the same look-and-feel of Smalltalk but hadn’t yet solved some of the technical issues that PARC had in hand.

Atkinson later said that the demo served more to build his confidence than pose solutions to problems such as how to display overlapping windows on the screen. He subsequently solved the problem in his own way, but allowed that seeing it done at PARC “empowered me to invent a way it could be done.”

The most important outcome of the PARC demo may have been spiritual, for it infused the Apple team with the viewpoint of Kay and Tesler about how the personal computer could augment human creativity.

“Lisa must be fun to use,” read a design guideline produced by the Lisa designers shortly after their PARC visit. “It will not be a system that is used by someone ‘because it is part of the job’ or ‘because the boss told them to.’ Special attention must be paid to the friendliness of the user interaction and the subtleties that make using the Lisa rewarding and job-enriching.”

Lisa was a commercial flop when it was brought out in 1983 at a price of $9,995 — as it happened, the price point of a putative Xerox computer that Jobs decried. But many of its user features went into the Macintosh a year later.

By then, Xerox already had brought out the Star, an office computer that incorporated much of PARC’s technology. In technical terms, the Star was a marvel, with a graphical display and point-and-click mouse. But it was conceived on a Xerox corporate scale that exceeded even Jobs’ critique, with a $250,000 price in 1981. That was far more than Xerox’s business customers would ever spend to equip secretaries, who still did all the typing in American offices of the era. The Star failed too.

But PARC’s vision lives on, in today’s personal computers and Macs. Its infusion into the outside world began with those demos for Steve Jobs. Larry Tesler was present at the creation of today’s computing paradigm, and helped make it happen.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik has written for the Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years. His business column appears in print every Sunday and Wednesday, and occasionally on other days. Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. His seventh book, “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America,” was published in 2020. His forthcoming book, “The Golden State,” is a history of California. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/hiltzikm and on Facebook at facebook.com/hiltzik.

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Raw footage: Larry Tesler on Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC

So many myths have attached themselves to Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the winter of 1979 that I’m surprised the YouTube video posted below had only 2,110 visitors before I stumbled across it last week.

It’s an eye-witness account of what has been called the closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth: The demo that introduced Jobs to the bit-mapped screen, the graphical user interface, the pointing device — technologies that Apple popularized and that remain the driving metaphors in today’s PCs, smartphones and tablets.

This six-minute excerpt is part of a 100-minute panel discussion hosted by Paul Freiberger at San Jose’s Churchill Club in November 2011. It’s one of hundreds of tributes to Jobs’ legacy recorded in the weeks after his death, which may explain why I missed it the first time around and why fewer than 40,000 people in the world know about it.

The speaker in this excerpt is Larry Tesler, one of the PARC scientists in the demo room that fateful day, and he tells a good story.

In Tesler’s account, Jobs spends a lot of time pacing the room. On one occasion he brings things to a halt:

“‘Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Just stop this discussion! We need to tell them about the Lisa!”

In another he fairly bursts with incredulous excitement:

“What is going on here? You’re sitting on a gold mine! Why aren’t you doing something with this technology? You could change the world!”

The Tesler excerpt should be required viewing for anyone who still believes Apple stole Xerox’s technology.

Tesler makes it clear it was Xerox that approached Apple, hoping to partner with a company that had proved it could mass market high tech. A deal was struck: Xerox would purchase a $1 million stake in Apple at bargain prices. In exchange, Tesler recalls, “Steve required disclosure about everything ‘cool’ that was going on at Xerox PARC.”

If you have the time and more than a passing interest in Apple’s early history, the full 100-minute video is also worth watching. Among the other speakers are Bill Atkinson, Jean-Louis Gassée, Andy Hertzfeld and Regis McKenna. To Tesler’s right is Deborah Stapleton, who handled PR and investor relations for Pixar.

The Tesler excerpt:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/ferle2Uovks]

The full video:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/N2C2oCsrqcM]

Thanks to Kontra @counternotions for the pointers.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped . Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed .

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What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?

Written by Dave Mark

Alan Kay, responding to this question on Quora:

A good enough answer would be longer than is reasonable for Quora, but I can supply a few comments to highlight just how little attention is paid in the media, histories, and by most people to find out what actually happened. For example, I was present at the visit and demo, and it was the work of my group and myself that Steve saw, yet the Quora question is the first time that anyone has asked me what happened. (Worth pondering that interesting fact!)

Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox PARC to see the Alto system graphical user interface is the stuff of legend. The Mac owes its inspiration and existence to that visit. This is a great story.

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Refurbishing the next machine to come from the original inventor of the mac.

Feature   Vintage systems guru Cameron Kaiser documents stripping down and fixing a Canon Cat – the most revolutionary computer you've never heard of.…

The Old VCR blog – it's short for Old Vintage Computing Research – is recommended reading, and the latest post features a deep dive into one of the most important, radical, and revolutionary – not to mention little-known – computers ever invented: the Canon Cat.

The Cat was designed by the late great Jef Raskin, and there's a theory that he named it because cats famously chase mice… and he didn't like the mouse-centric computer that Steve Jobs turned the Macintosh into, after Jobs took over the project, as we described in our 40th anniversary retrospective. Before Raskin joined Apple, he worked at Xerox PARC, and he's the man who persuaded Jobs to make that legendary visit which resulted in the graphical interfaces of both the Lisa and the Mac.

The Macintosh computer started out as Raskin's personal project and was named after his favorite variety of the fruit. However, what the Mac became was very different, so he left Apple, started his own company, Information Appliance, Inc. and designed a machine truer to his original vision, which was lated brought to market by word-processor manufacturer Canon.

The name Raskin gave his company came from the device he wanted to make: he envisioned an information applicance as small, simple and unthreatening as a toaster – much less complicated and forbidding than a computer. Part of the original idea was that it wouldn't even have a power button: as he noted, appliances such as toasters or landline telephones don't need power switches.

The Cat launched in 1987, the same year as Windows 2.0, OS/1 1.0, and the Macintosh II. Looking back from today, it's hard to imagine how radical the device was back then. Raskin wanted to eliminate many of the ideas, inherited from 1970s-era, text-based computers, which dominated computing then and in many ways still do. The Cat had a graphical display, but no pointing device, and no clunky mainframe computer concepts like "programs", or "files" and "folders". It had no separate "modes" for giving commands: Raskin's passion for modeless operation was shared by another of the Macintosh's parents, Larry Tesler, famed as the inventor of the cut, copy and paste operations.

Using a Cat, you just typed text… but you could edit it, or enter a table of numbers and tell the computer to total or average them. It wasn't just a word processor: its single program was also a spreadsheet. You could highlight some of the text on screen and format it, or tell the device to print just that part, or to send it over to another computer – because the Cat was one of the first computers to have a built-in modem to communicate over the telephone network.

Its software was implemented in the legendarily efficient Forth language (as also used in the far less radical Jupiter Ace home computer), and was designed to be extensible – if it had thrived and grown, owners could have purchased new functionality which would add new abilities to its single, all-encompassing onboard software. Kaiser goes into some detail about how the machine works, its processor and so on, which is fascinating reading for computer antiquarians.

The Cat is well worth exploring, and although Canon is estimated to have sold only 20,000 units or so, the sheer number of tribute sites to the machine, as well as research papers and so on, show that its influence exceeded its commercial success. There is lots of information on both CanonCat.org and CanonCat.net, including a colour brochure [PDF], the reference guide [PDF] and a research paper entitled the Work Processor [PDF]. There's also a free online emulator of the machine. We like these retrospective essays, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac and the Canon Cat and the Mac that Steve Jobs killed.

Raskin's book the Humane Interface: New Directions for designing Interactive Systems is widely recommended for UI designers, and is available on the Internet Archive. Before he succumbed to pancreatic cancer, the same disease that also took Steve Jobs, he designed a Windows editor and tool called Archy. A small offshoot that became FOSS is the Enso Launcher. ®

Dr Cameron Kaiser is also the remarkable mind behind the wonderful Secret Weapons of Commodore, a site we highly recommend if you want to lose a few hours. For some years he also maintained both the TenFourFox web browser, a port of modern Firefox back to PowerPC Mac OS X for those who didn't want to switch to Intel Macs, as well as Classilla, which was the last Classic MacOS web browser in active maintenance.

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Personal Tech

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Refurbishing the next machine to come from the original inventor of the mac.

Feature Vintage systems guru Cameron Kaiser documents stripping down and fixing a Canon Cat – the most revolutionary computer you've never heard of.

A Canon Cat V777 computer. Pic: Grand Warszawski/Shutterstock

The Old VCR blog – it's short for Old Vintage Computing Research – is recommended reading, and the latest post features a deep dive into one of the most important, radical, and revolutionary – not to mention little-known – computers ever invented: the Canon Cat .

The Cat was designed by the late great Jef Raskin , and there's a theory that he named it because cats famously chase mice… and he didn't like the mouse-centric computer that Steve Jobs turned the Macintosh into, after Jobs took over the project, as we described in our 40th anniversary retrospective . Before Raskin joined Apple, he worked at Xerox PARC, and he's the man who persuaded Jobs to make that legendary visit which resulted in the graphical interfaces of both the Lisa and the Mac.

The Macintosh computer started out as Raskin's personal project and was named after his favorite variety of the fruit. However, what the Mac became was very different, so he left Apple, started his own company, Information Appliance, Inc. and designed a machine truer to his original vision, which was later brought to market by word-processor manufacturer Canon.

The name Raskin gave his company came from the device he wanted to make: he envisioned an information applicance as small, simple and unthreatening as a toaster – much less complicated and forbidding than a computer. Part of the original idea was that it wouldn't even have a power button: as he noted, appliances such as toasters or landline telephones don't need power switches.

The Cat launched in 1987, the same year as Windows 2.0, OS/1 1.0, and the Macintosh II. Looking back from today, it's hard to imagine how radical the device was back then. Raskin wanted to eliminate many of the ideas, inherited from 1970s-era, text-based computers, which dominated computing then and in many ways still do. The Cat had a graphical display, but no pointing device, and no clunky mainframe computer concepts like "programs", or "files" and "folders". It had no separate "modes" for giving commands: Raskin's passion for modeless operation was shared by another of the Macintosh's parents, Larry Tesler , famed as the inventor of the cut, copy and paste operations.

Using a Cat, you just typed text… but you could edit it, or enter a table of numbers and tell the computer to total or average them. It wasn't just a word processor: its single program was also a spreadsheet. You could highlight some of the text on screen and format it, or tell the device to print just that part, or to send it over to another computer – because the Cat was one of the first computers to have a built-in modem to communicate over the telephone network.

Its software was implemented in the legendarily efficient Forth language (as also used in the far less radical Jupiter Ace home computer ), and was designed to be extensible – if it had thrived and grown, owners could have purchased new functionality which would add new abilities to its single, all-encompassing onboard software. Kaiser goes into some detail about how the machine works, its processor and so on, which is fascinating reading for computer antiquarians.

The Cat is well worth exploring, and although Canon is estimated to have sold only 20,000 units or so, the sheer number of tribute sites to the machine, as well as research papers and so on, show that its influence exceeded its commercial success. There is lots of information on both CanonCat.org and CanonCat.net , including a colour brochure [PDF], the reference guide [PDF] and a research paper entitled the Work Processor [PDF]. There's also a free online emulator of the machine. We like these retrospective essays, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac and the Canon Cat and the Mac that Steve Jobs killed .

• Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil: That thing you just did? He probably invented it
• The Jupiter Ace: 40 years on
• Desperately seeking ICQ? It may shut down, but Nina could resurrect it
• Bored students can now enjoy Sonic 2 on TI-84 Plus CE calculators, thanks to port

Raskin's book the Humane Interface: New Directions for designing Interactive Systems is widely recommended for UI designers, and is available on the Internet Archive . Before he succumbed to pancreatic cancer, the same disease that also took Steve Jobs, he designed a Windows editor and tool called Archy . A small offshoot that became FOSS is the Enso Launcher . ®

Dr Cameron Kaiser is also the remarkable mind behind the wonderful Secret Weapons of Commodore , a site we highly recommend if you want to lose a few hours. For some years he also maintained both the TenFourFox web browser , a port of modern Firefox back to PowerPC Mac OS X for those who didn't want to switch to Intel Macs, as well as Classilla , which was the last Classic MacOS web browser in active maintenance.

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