r/interesting • u/tyrion2024 • 19d ago
MISC. After Steve Jobs learned about Windows (which used a mouse & a GUI), he accused Bill Gates of stealing Apple's idea. Gates replied "Well Steve...I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox & I broke into his house to steal the TV set & found out that you had already stolen it."
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/bill-gates-steve-jobs-friends-feud-a7627431.html1.4k
u/tyrion2024 19d ago
Early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld's description of Jobs confronting Gates...
I gradually began to notice that Neil (who worked for Microsoft) would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn't really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.
Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.
In November 1983, we heard that Microsoft made a surprising announcement at Comdex, the industry's premier trade show, held twice a year in Las Vegas. Microsoft announced a new, mouse-based system graphical user interface environment called Windows, competing directly with an earlier environment announced by Personal Software called "Vision". They also announced a mouse-based option for Microsoft Word. When Steve Jobs found out about Windows, he went ballistic.
"Get Gates down here immediately", he fumed to Mike Boich, Mac's original evangelist who was in charge of our relationships with third party developers. "He needs to explain this, and it better be good. I want him in this room by tomorrow afternoon, or else!"
And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, 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."
Unfortunately, it turned out that while the agreement that Microsoft signed in 1981 stipulated that they not ship mouse-based software until a year after the Mac introduction, that ended up being defined in the contract as September 1983, since in late 1981 we thought that the Mac would ship in the fall of 1982, and we foolishly didn't let the ship date float in the contract. So Microsoft was within their rights to announce Windows when they did. Apple still needed Microsoft's apps for the Macintosh, so Steve really couldn't cut them off.
The Macintosh wasn't released until 1984; Windows 1.0 released the following year.
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u/mfairview 19d ago
would love the same break down of msft/ibm convo about dos
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u/New-Anybody-6206 19d ago
The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley perfectly portrays both of these situations just like they happened.
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u/MelangeBot 19d ago edited 19d ago
I love how they sold IBM an operating system they did not have BEFORE they managed to find one already existing and just bought it. The originally guy that made the clone (clone of CP/M), make fuck all (like 50k or something). And they made millions and millions of dollarsion licensing fees after convincing IMB to ship their desktops with it. They made millions of doing fuck all! Sure they did ship it with qbasic and they started maintaining and further working out MSDOS and generaly speaking their first program where all very usefull. But the audacity to lie you have something and then lie to somebody so you can buy it from them and play a middleman while making milllions. Bill Gates was a hell of a cut throat business man I can tell you that.
Now let's talk about that clone of CP/M they bought. That guy also did fuck all. The real genius was Gary Kildall who did so much for computing he should be worth 50 billion dollars. (he is dead now, died at 50 in the 90s)
The entire story of computing is filled to the fucking brim with examples of this. Some genius nerd doing 95% of the work out of pure authism and passion dying poor or well at least not rich and an entire chain of sharks that made all the money on his hard work. Still the nerd died loved.
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u/Sea-Poem-2365 19d ago
authism
I'm taking this as a portmanteau of autism and enthusiasm
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u/openlightYQ 18d ago
I’m taking “dollarsion fees”, meaning fees earned for no reason by doing fuck all.
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u/Tupcek 19d ago
first, Bill Gates mom held a very good position in IBM, so she could easily arrange a meeting for his son. It is also almost certain Bill knew how the company thinks and thus could target their needs easily.
second, IBM didn’t really care, as they thought money is in hardware, not software. So if they could lower upfront costs, that’s big win. They also thought hardware would sell, so they can ship future models with whatever software will be cheapest at the time. Little did they knew how IBM clones will make hardware commodity, while software will be key differentiator and since they willingly gave up control of software, they opened gates for everybody else→ More replies (2)17
u/Professional_Age8671 18d ago
His mom didn't work for IBM. She was a baller who was on an executive board with the CEO of IBM. She and her husband were business TITANS in Seattle. They are way more impressive than Bill.
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u/rob132 18d ago
Yep. You can think Bill Gates dad for having a Starbucks on every corner.
"After hearing the facts and verifying that Schultz was being dealt with dishonorably, the 6-foot-7 Gates Sr. walked Schultz across the street directly into the rival investor’s office.
Gates confronted the investor face-to-face, telling him that stealing the young entrepreneur's dream was unethical, unacceptable, and would not stand in the Seattle business community.
Gates’ stature and reputational leverage forced the investor to immediately back down and withdraw the competing bid. "
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u/BitingSatyr 18d ago
>She and her husband were business TITANS in Seattle. They are way more impressive than Bill.
No, actually, being the founder of one of the world’s most valuable companies and for many years the world’s richest man is more impressive than that. What the fuck is wrong with Redditors, they have this compulsive need to diminish and downplay any possible accomplishment of people they don’t like, even when it’s obviously ridiculous and stupid.
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u/Professional_Age8671 17d ago
The guy was amazing. He worked endlessly for 20 years. He made the right choice much of the time and he bet big. A lot of people have done that. He started with tens of millions and rode a wave that hundreds of entrepreneurs helped generate. He just happened to be the big winner. His mom, on the other hand, had to ride against a wave of patriarchy to end up on the same board as the CEO of IBM. She is more impressive. His dad was responsible for Schultz getting Starbucks but wouldn't let anyone report on it until after his death. He is more impressive.
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u/way2lazy2care 14d ago
It was a charity board for the United Way. She's super impressive, but a woman being on the executive board of a charity wasn't some totally foreign thing. Similarly a local power lawyer helping a local business investor buy another local mid sized business is not the impressive part of the Starbucks story. That's not even the most impressive thing Gates sr did. That's the most him-just-doing-his-job thing that he did. Like you should talk to a couple local corporate lawyers if you want to be impressed.
They're both cool impressive people, but they aren't even in the same league.
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u/CrasVox 18d ago
The guy that made 86-DOS which ended up becoming MS-DOS was Tim Patterson and he was hired by Microsoft to do port and stayed on for years. They bought his prototype version of DOS for like 25 grand or something from his previous employer and they probably weren't gonna do anything with it anyway. Tho they did say they were not told by Microsoft why they wanted DOS to begin with
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u/TroyMatthewJ 18d ago
Gary died at 52 and a very rich man not Gates rich but buddy owned and flew his own jet, owned a mansion in Pebble Beach.
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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 19d ago
I remember watching that in my tenth grade Computer Programming class, it was amazing
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u/rg35xxsp 19d ago
I don't remember learning much of substance from Walter Isaacson's famous biography of Steve Jobs that I hadn't already learned first from this film many years prior.
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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 19d ago
It's interesting, I remember most of the overall story and details, but the only specific thing I remember was thinking that Woz is the only likable guy in the bunch.
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u/TheFatNinjaMaster 18d ago
Yeah. Paul Allen wasn’t too bad, either, but spent a huge part of his life fighting lymphoma on and off until it killed him.
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u/ecmcn 19d ago
Not DOS, but my dad led one of the ThinkPad dev teams in the 90s, and he told a story about one of their people visiting MS to negotiate pricing on Win95. This was while IBM was trying to make OS/2 a thing, which obviously was a direct shot at MS. The guy came back and described how they had these different pricing tiers for different partners, levels 1 to 5 or something, with 1 getting the best price. “Where are we?” someone asked. The answer was “somewhere between 5 and dog shit.”
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u/Parlicoot 19d ago
RISC OS was still the best implementation of a windows system of the 3 that were widely available in the early 1980s
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u/DesignTwiceCodeOnce 19d ago
It's not coincidence that the windows 95 development team had RISC OS experience
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u/Lilja-Logason 19d ago
Seems it's all about timing.
- Windows: 1983
- MacOS: 1984
- RiscOS: 1986
Same prefer as today's relevancy.
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u/quackdaw 18d ago
Windows was released late 1985. By then Digital GEM (same graphical interface used by the Atari ST) had already been available for the IBM PC for 8 months, and both the Atari and the Amiga had been released. The Amiga also supported true multitasking, which wouldn't be available on Mac and Windows until a decade later.
Of course, serious workstations like those from Xerox, Apollo (ah, good old AEGIS!) had already offered graphical desktop environments for years by the time Apple launched the Lisa, and later the Mac. But the Mac made the technology more available and somewhat affordable, and they reached the market a year earlier than competitors. I guess the real Steve Jobs magic is getting people hyped on a quite limited, somewhat overpriced and very flawed knock-off...
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u/hedoeswhathewants 19d ago
It just occurred to me this is the first thing I've ever seen talking about a Windows version prior to 3.1. I always assumed 3.1 was the first release and they just had an odd numbering scheme.
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u/Beneficial-Neat-6200 19d ago
Windows 1 was released in late '85 but developers were pretty much the only people using it for the next year or so. 3.1 was the first stable release.
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u/thunderbird32 19d ago edited 19d ago
Not entirely true. Windows 1.0x was also used in desktop publishing. Aldus PageMaker would get its start on the PC with Windows 1.0. The only decent alternative on PC at the time was (ironically) Xerox Ventura, and that used Digital Research GEM as the windowing system. Windows 2.x had true multitasking (in the 386-only version) which was pretty nice, even if it didn't sell particularly well.
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u/FalxIdol 19d ago
So that’s what may have inspired the scene in South Park The Movie.
It's fucking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here! - The General
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u/grubas 19d ago
Nah that was Win 98 infamously being crappy after Win 95 was pretty stable.
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u/OGBRedditThrowaway 19d ago
It might be a reference to to the infamous COMDEX '98 demonstration where a pre-release copy of Windows 98 blue-screened live on stage when Gates was trying to show off Plug and Play.
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u/orkichrist 19d ago
That was just based on 98 being shit.
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u/Frank_Scouter 19d ago
“but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they [microsoft] were capable of doing a decent implementation”
Reasonable take to be fair.
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u/Burpmeister 18d ago
Except Microsoft went on to dominate the PC industry for the rest of Jobs' life.
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u/ErikTheRed2000 18d ago
The Apple Lisa had a GUI and released a year prior to the Macintosh in January of ‘83. Due to its high price point ($10,000 in 1983 dollars) it flopped. The Macintosh replaced it. But yeah, both companies stole the GUI idea from Xerox, but Xerox never sold their GUI software
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u/RootyPooster 19d ago
The Pirates of Silicon Valley was one of the best TV movies ever, about the competition between Apple and Microsoft from the start.
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u/---reddacted--- 19d ago
They misrepresented the Xerox PARC issue but it was a great movie
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u/BourbonXenon 19d ago
And didn't mention that Gates' mother is who brought DOS to the IBM board
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u/WestStatistician2936 19d ago
Bill Gates’ mother never did this, lol. She mentioned Gates’ company to the IBM CEO, which put him on their radar, but Gates hadn’t even purchased QDOS at this time (which they would eventually refactor to MS-DOS). Keep in mind, Gates already had a profitable multimillion dollar business at this time. The IBM deal exploded his profits, but he was already extremely successful without them.
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u/GDMFusername 18d ago
Years ago I was looking for a copy of this movie because I'd seen it on TV and wanted to watch it again. Couldn't find it anywhere. I'd heard about this new thing called Netflix, where you could find and rent DVDs of pretty much anything you wanted. I started an account, rented the movie, cancelled the account, and kept the disc. I wonder where you can watch the movie now. Other than at my house, of course.
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u/NoIncrease299 17d ago
Seriously awesome film. Noah Wylie and Anthony Michael Hall were so great in their roles.
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u/differentshade 19d ago
Steve Jobs does not strike me as a very pleasant person.
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u/fastbikkel 19d ago
And this is somewhat confirmed in other stories. Apparently he looked down on most people and would only "respect" it when someone could compete with him on one or more levels.
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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 19d ago edited 19d ago
Ironically enough, this is what killed him. He refused to accept his doctors advice on how to treat his cancer, and instead opted to treat it himself using “holistic” treatments.
By the time he decided that his doctor was right and he should start effective treatments for his cancer it was too late. The cancer was treatable when it was first discovered, but thanks to the years that were lost due to Jobs messing around with alternatives he was convinced would work, the cancer had progressed to far to be treated effectively.
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u/ikediggety 19d ago
Oh but it's so much worse than that. Steve Jobs got the one kind of pancreatic cancer that hardly ever kills you. That's really rare for pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs won the cancer lottery. All he had to do was listen to his doctors and he'd still be around today.
Instead he chose to treat his cancer by eating fruit. Until he realized it wasn't working. THEN he bullied \ bought his way onto a liver transplant list he had no reason to be on because by that point his prognosis was very poor. Then he got a new liver that should have gone to somebody else. Then he died anyway.
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u/wokeboogeyman 19d ago
Maybe he was trying to finally earn that handicapped parking spot he'd been blocking actual handicapped people from using for years.
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u/ikediggety 19d ago
That is 100% on brand
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u/thebayisinthearea 19d ago
Zuck used to block the fire lane every day when he would enter from the Menlo Park classic campus building 16 side entrance.
Then again at Lobby 4 at MPK 20.
Not sure what he's been up to these days. I don't think he drives a GTI anymore.
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u/JustAnOrdinaryBloke 18d ago
And Jobs would routinely park his car in a spot reserved for handicapped people, even though he had his own reserved spot near the entrance.
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u/LindeeHilltop 19d ago
So, his own arrogance effectively killed him.
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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 19d ago edited 19d ago
Killed by his own hubris.
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u/Big_Juggernaut_2257 19d ago
Hoisted by his own petard.
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u/djanes376 19d ago
Shouldn’t have worn that petard if you didn’t want to be hoisted by it.
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u/SerialTrauma002c 19d ago
I’m not saying this to correct you—you’re doing a bit and it’s delightful!
I just want to make sure other readers know that a petard is a small bomb, not a piece of clothing. “Hoist with his own petard” is, literally, “He got tossed in the air by his own bomb”and essentially the same “he stepped on his own landmine” (except probably less messy because of the lower effectiveness of renaissance incendiary devices). Colloquially it’s an expression that means “to be taken down by one’s own previous actions.”
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u/Big_Juggernaut_2257 19d ago
You're good. I did the same research before I made my first comment but I couldn't resist making the pun.
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u/SerialTrauma002c 19d ago
This is one of those fun facts that just lives in my brain, no research required. I read a lottttttttt of optional Shakespeare during my high school years 😆
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u/sponge62 19d ago
Probably killed someone else too since he bought his way onto the liver transplant list even though he was too far gone for any real chance at success at that point.
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u/Adventurous-Plum5011 19d ago
A lot of the holistic doctors should lose their medical license. I dated a person that went to one. It bordered on being a cult. He would diagnose her with vague illnesses like chronic fatigue. Then drag her along for “treatments” which weren’t covered by insurance. It was basically IV cocktails. $800 a pop 1-2 a month. After a while he would do bloodwork, come up w a new diagnosis. One of the last ones was Candida in her intestines. I was with her for that appointment, I had researched it. He prescribed her a dosage for oral, which is like 150mg, intestinal is like 1 million or something way way higher. The look on his face was telling. He said we just want to go slow. Scumbag knew exactly what he was doing
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u/OdysseusX 19d ago
I like tim minchins quote " do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work? Medicine. "
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u/TellTaleReaper 19d ago
Do holistic doctors even have a medical license? I thiught they were just someones hippy aunt operating out of thier moms basement
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u/Euphoric_Affect_2629 19d ago
It’s the Wild West out there.
Folks marketing themselves as Integrative and “Functional” medicine doctors are often just as bad (if not worse) than the outright quacks since they know enough to be dangerous, actually prescribe real meds with real issues when used incorrectly, and use enough jargon to fool sometimes even the best of us.
Generally this is worst in the direct to “consumer” space where insurance isn’t being billed (prior authorizations are obviously a pain and much aligned in popular discussion, but insurance as a rule won’t pay for things that have no justification or evidence). They do act as a check on providers who might otherwise just sell whole body MRIs and snake oil all day.
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u/YippyKayYay 19d ago
Depends where you are located in the world
In the US people can and do get ND (Naturopathic Doctor) degrees
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u/Astralglamour 19d ago
They are not the same as MD or DO degrees. They are not licensed in half the states. Their training is not comparable to conventional drs.
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u/LordMimsyPorpington 19d ago
Which is like calling a Chiropractor a doctor. They went to a school, and they got a degree from that school, but that doesn't mean it was a medical school, nor are they licensed as an actual doctor to perform actual medicine.
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u/wanker7171 18d ago
I have a brother like this. He refuses to listen to doctors and believes he knows better, it’s so fucking aggravating. Getting him to get the Covid vaccine was only possible because multiple members of my family are physicians and he cares more about social cohesion than being right, thankfully.
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u/Duel_Option 19d ago
The fruititarian thing is what led to the name APPLE.
When you get to that level it’s hard to find someone to drag you down to reality.
Who’s going to tell Steve Jobs at his peak that he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to biology?
Ego that large isn’t going to listen to reason
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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 19d ago
I mean...maybe a licensed MD who specalizes in styding cancers and is up to date on modern treatments of the disease, the doctor who you are paying thousands of dollars to may have a better background in medical treatments then....me.
But then again, I didn't "design" the Iphone.
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u/bolanrox 19d ago
he also thought his diet would prevent BO. it did not.. which is why Atari made him work the night shift.
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u/Ohitsworkingnow 19d ago
Technically a reasonable outlook in the natural world…
lol but yes being unkind to people is not cool and dude was way too far up his own ass. There is that poem they found on his email that was pretty humbling
“From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing.
I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
Sent from my iPad”
Of course there’s an interesting twist at the end
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u/Duel_Option 19d ago
I work at a Fortune 500, high enough where I’m in meetings and events with VP’s and the surrounding characters that are involved with the C-Suite both internal/external.
Most of them are like this, meaning they legit won’t speak to people not on their same level or in a position that requires interaction.
Some of this is explainable in a way.
I bat cleanup for the big events (meaning I make sure everyone that’s drunk gets back to their room and the bill gets paid).
It was close to 3am and I rounding up everyone to leave, noticed our division VP was at the bar but changed to street clothes.
Wandered over to see if he needed anything.
Who are you again? (Mind you, this guy sees me 3 times a year and has shook my hand and asked this every single time).
I explained my position (again), he asked if there was an open bottle somewhere and I got him one of the reserves from our meeting room.
He invited me to share it with him and I had a chance to talk with a multi millionaire for over an hour.
Anyways….
Straight up asked him does he really not remember me and he explained that this was his 11th day or work straight, he had been in 2 other countries before this event within 72 hours, was jet lagged, and missed his daughters b-day for a crappy award banquet.
He wasn’t being an ass about it but said his brain could only hold so much in it at one time, then sort of laughed and said “the CEO still calls me Brian, even though I’ve been reporting to him for over a year” (his name is Ryan).
These guys are making decisions that affects money and people on a global scale, you don’t get there by being friendly and accommodating.
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u/fastbikkel 19d ago
"you don’t get there by being friendly and accommodating."
I understand what you are saying, but one can still show a level of respect and still make it to the top.10
u/Duel_Option 19d ago
Some do, most don’t as it’s cutthroat at that level. The amount of people gunning for their head is wild.
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u/Wise_Leopard7423 19d ago
but one can still show a level of respect and still make it to the top.
And that's exactly what he was doing by sitting down and having a drink with /u/Duel_Option.
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u/Elguapo69 19d ago
Typical bully. I’ve known and worked with plenty of people like this. One I work with now people are terrified of. He’s only around because he knows so much about our systems and architecture and he supports one of the core back-end systems that run everything.
And he is extremely intelligent. He often belittles people. He tried with me in a small meeting but I stood up to him and made him look dumb in a meeting. Since then he backs down with me, especially in larger meetings, and will actually respond to my slacks and I guess ‘likes’ me as much as that is possible for him. So people go through me to get to him lol.
Smart as he is I don’t think he is picking up that they are designing new things around him to make him obsolete
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u/ClacksInTheSky 19d ago
The outpouring of grief from Apple fanboys when he died was ridiculous.
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u/TiberiusTheFish 19d ago
I worked in IT for a while and had a colleague who had worked for Claris, Apple's software subsidiary, and he told a charming story about Jobs and his good pal Larry Ellison persuading some guy to apply for a senior job in Apple which, on the face of it, he was not qualified for. When the guy turned up for his interview Jobs had security throw him out of the building. There didn't seem to be any reason for humiliating this guy other than that they could.
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u/RaidriarT 19d ago
That’s psychotic
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u/wokeboogeyman 19d ago
And yet, for the majority of humanity, those are the idols of our society, all laws should be written for their benefit.
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u/ThePizzaNoid 19d ago
The Behind the Bastards podcast did a few episodes on him if that's any indication for you lol.
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u/Va1kryie 19d ago
Those were good ones, Wozniak got ratfucked so hard. I'd put Steve Jobs in Satan's mouth if I were Dante writing Inferno today.
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u/Endless_Avatar 19d ago
Seems all this tech "innovators" either claim they created something they didn't or just outright steal it.
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u/4daughters 18d ago
Because admitting your main skill is owning things sounds so much less cool than innovating.
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u/lonetraveler73 19d ago
He was an absolutely horrible human and he wasn't a designer or programmer.
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u/ikediggety 19d ago
Check out the episode of behind the bastards on him. Dude was a total piece of shit
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u/Gold_Telephone_7192 19d ago
Both these dudes were absolute titans of industry and innovation and also terrible psychopathic people.
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u/OpenGuava609 19d ago
Bill Gates is a pretty terrible person too.
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u/snorens 19d ago
Excellent businessman who really understood how to work the market in all the “evil” business ways and less so in the “actually developing a good product”. To much frustration for the rest of us having to use the products during those years. He has made up for it from the extreme amounts of money he has donated to helping the less fortunate around the world.
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u/wosmo 19d ago
Something that's often left out of this story, is that Apple had a deal with Xerox to use what they learnt from the PARC demos. In return, Xerox was allowed a pre-IPO buy-in, and ended up with a 1.6% stake in Apple.
Xerox today is worth about half a billion. If they'd held on to their 1.6% share in Apple, that share would be worth 80 billion. Ain't hindsight a bitch.
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u/NotSettle 19d ago
Xerox PARC engineers were reportedly furious with their own corporate management over that visit. Corporate viewed PARC mostly as an expensive research sandbox and had no real idea how to commercialize computing or graphical interfaces, completely missing that they were sitting on the future of the entire tech industry.
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u/Self_Reddicate 19d ago edited 19d ago
Corporate viewed PARC mostly as an expensive research sandbox
It's funny that an enterprise would have the forethought and resources to create and fund and staff this kind of thing, but then completely fail to actually DO anything with it. I think this sort of thing happens all the time. Look at Microsoft and all of their forward-thinking research projects that ultimately fail to be properly implemented and marketed. (If you don't see the potential and the mind-blowingly badass technology behind the Hololens, then I don't know what to tell you. But the fact that they got their just a *little* too early to where they can't really sell it and then basically dropped the whole thing is ridiculous.)
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u/Few_Carpenter_9185 19d ago
Bell Labs then AT&T-Bell Labs, then breakup under anti-trust, was a bit like this. They arguably straight up invented half, maybe three quarters of the foundations for the present day digital world.
They didn't create the first optical flash-pump ruby laser, but held the first papers & patent on it as an extension of the Radio/Microwave maser. They rejected fiber optics in favor of a (in hindsight) rather rediculous idea involving lasers in vacuum pipes. But once the initial papers & research on fiber optics happened, and Corning glass actually produced some, Bell Labs invented the semiconductor diode laser and amplifiers that made fiber optics workable.
Granted, they already operated under heavy anti-trust scrutiny, and had to do things like cheaply license out those innovations such as the transistor & semiconductors, and watch Fairchild, Texas Instruments become new billion dollar companies. And their inventions did make AT&T infrastructure possible, and able to grow.
So, Bell Labs is not a 1:1 "Invented it, then lacked the vision" story like Xerox PARC, with the GUI and Ethernet, etc. But in broadest terms, it might be the biggest example of the overall dynamic.
Even into the early 1990s AT&T, predicted a hell of a lot with startling accuracy. (minus "phone booths.") Although, being fair, "And we'll bring it to you..." could mean fundamental telecom infrastructure, and not discreet products, services, & formfactors.
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u/mnemoniker 19d ago
With the information they had at the time, Xerox corporate wasn't completely wrong, to be fair. They were shown a model that would cost over $100,000 in today's dollars. No matter how cool it was, that is not a viable product. It took 10 years of technological progress before a company like Apple was able to produce something like it for under $2500. And Apple didn't just wait for this moment to arrive. They had been building a whole top down computer company for 7 years before that with the Apple II line, so they were able to hit the ground running when the Mac's time had come. And despite this, the Mac was still a commercial disappointment for years and years after its release. Xerox, a company making money hand over fist in other sectors, probably would have chosen to fail or quit at desktop computers at many points after 1973 had they not done so then.
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u/Self_Reddicate 19d ago
I mean, given my example of the Hololens, this is the EXACT same thing that will inevitably happen with that. The idea of having floating screens (or widgets) of information and media content that can just *be* around you in your environment like your home and office in augmented reality will eventually happen one day. Microsoft's design and implementation of it was SPOT ON, but too limited by the cost and technology of today. So, they dropped it.
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u/Mental-Seesaw-1449 19d ago
Classic hand and and foot doing different things. I'm sure someone understood how important what they had was at Xerox it but if the Execs don't buy your vision it's meaningless.
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u/GetOffMyLawn_ 19d ago
Who invented Ethernet? Xerox PARC. But Xerox couldn't figure out how to use it to sell copiers so they squandered it.
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u/Photodan24 19d ago
And this was just for a glimpse of tech that Xerox wasn't planning to develop into serious products.
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u/wosmo 19d ago
Xerox was a really weird place for Star/Alto to come out of.
Customers didn't want it because it was way too expensive - $16k for a base system, up to $75k for a full system - and it was pretty underpowered for what it was trying to promise. And Apple knew that, because they'd just seen Lisa fail for very similar reasons.
But Xerox didn't really want it either - their entire business model was "profit per page", and they were pretty much at the peak of this. So selling the "paperless office" wasn't just outside their core business, it was harmful to their core business.
Of course, that didn't really work out for them because it just meant someone else got rich off the paperless office instead. But it's really difficult to change course, when the current course is bringing in the big bucks.
There's a lot of parallels to Kodak. We think of them as a camera company, but they were a chemicals company. They didn't really want to sell cameras, but all the consumables - film, developing, printing, etc. So even though they had a head-start in digital photography, they really failed to change direction. It was nothing to do with the cameras, its that their entire business was built around the consumables. We call this a "competence trap" - where you're so good at what you are good at, that it prevents you being able to explore superior alternatives.
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u/cav_scout_tj 19d ago
Xerox parc is the source of so many innovations we take for granted today. They invented everything but the big-wigs let it all slip through their fingers. They couldn’t see the future and they lost it. All classic lore.
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 19d ago
Same with Kodak.
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u/Telvin3d 19d ago
Kodak is a bit different. They were fundamentally a high end chemical processing company that happened to specialize in film. They had a whole lot of money sloshing around, and did a bunch of associated R&D, but they were a chemicals company. They didn’t make cameras, or lenses, or really hardware of any sort.
So, what were they supposed to do? It’s the year 1990, and you’re a chemical company that’s pretty sure that twenty years from now your business is going to get completely eaten by computer chip manufacturers. Now what? Do you try and start a chip fab from scratch? See if you can become Intel faster than Intel can wipe you out?
Or do you just milk your hugely profitable business as it slowly winds down?
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u/bolanrox 19d ago
do what fuji did at the start and partner with Nikon to make digital SLRs
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u/Telvin3d 19d ago
A big difference is that Fuji is/was your standard big Japanese conglomerate. Film was their biggest division, and what they were known for, but they already had everything from a pharmaceutical and biosciences divisions to office supplies.
Kodak actually did try and do some co-branded and white label digital camera sales. No one bought them. Why buy a Kodak branded Nikon or Canon digital camera, when you could just buy a Nikon or Canon camera?
Without manufacturing anything themselves, Kodak had zero value added to offer
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u/Typingdude3 19d ago
I can remember the 90’s when Microsoft was wiping the floor with Apple. I had a college computer class where in part we learned about Apple computers and I at the time felt like why are we learning about this when everyone is using Windows? I thought Apple was on the way out in the 90’s. Little did I know.
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u/ParalimniX 19d ago
If Microsoft hadn't bailed them out then they could have very well disappeared.
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u/celsius100 19d ago
That was one of the most brilliant moves Jobs did, and only he could have done it. He knew Apple was on the rocks, but he also knew Microsoft needed them or they would be at a much greater risk of being considered a monopoly. Microsoft bailed out Apple from its near death experience. Jobs channeled that money into the iMac, OSX, the iPod, and eventually the iPhone.
Eat a littje crow, have Gates appear on a big screen at your conference, wipe the lawsuits off your plate, live another day, then over the next fifteen years wipe the floor with your biggest competitor.
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u/Dense-Hat1978 19d ago
In what world is Apple "wiping the floor" with Microsoft? Apple may have a higher total revenue, but Microsoft has a much larger profit margin.
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u/Billy2600 19d ago
Pretty much. Really what they did is realize they didn't have a chance in Microsoft's market and pivoted to other markets instead, which is a smart move. 90s Apple tried to become an operating systems company like Microsoft with the Mac clone market, which didn't work out for them. 2000s Apple became a music publisher and electronics company.
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u/Confident-Low-2696 19d ago
Idk where these people get their stories from, both apple and microsoft are completely dominating their markets, and much of microsoft’s profit has nothing to do with consumer products, it’s so funny to read some of these messages istg
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u/mnemoniker 19d ago
He said something really smart in one of his first presentations after his return that has stuck with me, something like: "Apple and Microsoft represent 100% of desktop market share. So if Apple and Microsoft agree on something, it's a standard."
It was a brilliant verbal jiu jitsu to, in one statement, manage to stroke the egos of the Apple enthusiasts in front of him and the Microsoft executives outside of that room at the same time. And all of this without having to admit that in that moment Apple was a rounding error to Microsoft.
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u/Sherifftruman 19d ago
I mean they kind of were on the way out at that point.
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u/Cosmo_Seinfeld 19d ago
I think Jobs said that when he came back to Apple in the late 90's they were about 5 months away from bankruptcy.
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u/suuueki 19d ago
They were on the way out. The iPod saved their business.
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u/Old_Service_4598 19d ago
The colorful Macs saved Apple (iMac and iBook).
These products were earlier than the iPod (1000 songs in your pocket, the portable “jukebox”.)
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u/uknow_es_me 19d ago
Actually a big part of saving their business was Microsoft. "In August 1997, Microsoft made a historic $150 million investment in Apple to help stabilize the struggling company."
Microsoft had their own motivations - the government was looking at busting them up as a monopoly and Apple disappearing from the marketplace wouldn't have helped their defense. Then the most popular application for Mac was Office and Microsoft had invested a LOT of money in the development of that product.
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u/Binger_bingleberry 19d ago
Apple was on its way out in the 90’s… the iMac in the late 90’s, then the iPod in the early 2000’s, turned the whole company around
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u/ThetaDeRaido 19d ago
The Apple computers of the 90’s really did die out, though with a long transition period. Newton is gone, and classic MacOS got replaced by MacOS X. Other than some oddness around the keyboard, the name of Finder, and some UI conventions, the way macOS works now is completely different than how MacOS worked back then.
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u/BigMax 19d ago
It's interesting that there's an alternative world out there where Xerox is the huge powerhouse name that we all know.
It makes you wonder... what other possibly world changing tech is out there, languishing in some lab where the company that controls it doesn't know what they have, and let it just linger as a little tidbit in the research bin.
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u/randperrin 19d ago
Kodak with a working digital camera in 1975. Makes sense for them to have left it in the vault with the Ark of The Covenant though.
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u/VegaJuniper 19d ago
Xerox might have had the idea, but their GUI was a long way from what Apple and Microsoft would come up with. It was clunky, for example the windows were already there, but they couldn't overlap.
Idea is a just a starting point, execution matters a lot. Whenever you hear "I'm an ideas guy", remember that ideas cost nothing.
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u/monocasa 19d ago
Xerox had gotten overlapping windows working in their version on the Alto in the 1970s. They had just explicitly moved on to a tiling window manager with the Xerox Star by the time Microsoft and Apple were taking a look at it
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u/VegaJuniper 19d ago
Which kind of indicates they really didn't know what they had or how to make it marketable.
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u/NoWeb4843 19d ago edited 19d ago
Xerox were the actual innovators of the tech age. I believe they were the ones who developed Unix, the C language and the point and click interface used by my most operating systems. Update: Thanks to all who corrected me. It was Bell labs that created C and Unix.
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u/SomeRandomSomeWhere 19d ago
AT&T bell labs was the one who had Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson working for them when Dennia created C language and both of them created Unix.
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u/radiohead-nerd 19d ago
And Unix begat Linux. Linux begat Android.
Unix also begat NextStep, NextStep begat Mac OSX, Mac OS X begat iOS.Really when you think about it, there are far, far more Unix variants compared to Microsoft OS
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u/---reddacted--- 19d ago
Xerox corporate didn’t understand the value of what their developers had come up with and sold it off to Apple.
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u/Nall-ohki 19d ago
They didn't want to action it, because they believed that a paperless office would kill their paper-based office business.
It was a case of trying to squeeze everything out of a profitable status-quo as long as possible at the cost of losing out on innovation to other companies, leading to long-term losses.
The music industry also committed this sin.
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u/RobertPham149 19d ago
Same problem with AT&T: the renown Bell Lab was the early inventor of the transistor, but AT&T failed to properly invest in the computer business; they were also the early adopter of the internet with the dial modem, but did not focus on properly investing in it due to the belief that the internet would replace the phone, allowing startups like Cisco to beat them.
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u/GetOffMyLawn_ 19d ago
My friend worked for AT&T and was the database guy for the dial-up service. He retired 25 years ago and still shakes his head at how badly AT&T dropped the ball on so many things. Their ineptness is one of the reasons he took early retirement, they had to dramatically downsize and were offering golden handshakes to people so he took one.
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u/RobertPham149 19d ago
It is the problem with monopolies in general: they stiffle innovation, even their own, because they want to protect a status quo where they are the only player.
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u/ThetaDeRaido 19d ago
Point and click came from Stanford Research Institute, but Xerox carried it a little further.
What did come from Xerox were Ethernet and Object-oriented programming. But the actual engineers who created those then departed for their own company (3Com) or to join Apple.
Xerox also invented the laser printer, and made good use of this invention.
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u/Seagull84 19d ago edited 19d ago
Point and click and modern GUIs were developed by academic Douglas Engelbart. Even the precursor to the Internet came from him.
The Mother of All Demos on YouTube shows him showing off the very first mouse and file management system, and very first GUI all at once.
Xerox didn't innovate, it took publicly available information and refined it. An operating system was the very obvious next step to everyone who worked in computation academia like Engelbart.
So no one stole anything. It was all public.
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u/MediatingInstigator 19d ago
> Xerox didn’t innovate
Completely and verifiably 100% false.
You can go look this up yourself. If you think Alan Kay wasn’t an innovator I’m sorry but you are out of your mind.
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u/See_Yourself_Now 19d ago
Meanwhile the Amiga ended up being leaps ahead of either of them though unfortunately had terrible upper-level mismanagement so many had no idea.
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u/monobrowj 19d ago
crazy to think xerox is a dying paper company vs apple and microsoft. when you see what xerox had made its the modern desktop PC as a whole.. Fully stolen by Microsoft and Apple
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u/Hittingend 19d ago
Stolen?!? More like they gave it away.
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u/JantjeHaring 19d ago
They didn't give it away for free. Xerox received the right to buy 100,000 shares of Apple pre-IPO stock for $1 million. At the time of the IPO, 12 months later, those shared were worth 17 million.
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u/Hittingend 19d ago
Yes it was a deal, but in hindsight Xerox practically gave it away, especially since the same stock would be worth $80 billion dollars nowadays.
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u/theprotest 19d ago
If these people didn't become incredibly rich they'd just be difficult autistic people that their immediate family have to put up with.
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u/Scoobysnax1976 19d ago
Apple sued Digital Research Inc. (DRI), the creator of the Graphics Environment Manager (GEM) software that Atari used in its ST line of computers. That always annoyed my dad, who rightfully pointed out that Apple stole the idea from Xerox first.
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u/Full-Photo5829 19d ago
Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in the early 1960s in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). Not Microsoft. Not Apple. Not Xerox.
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u/TheBSQ 19d ago
The GUI using a desktop metaphor (desktop, trash bin, file cabinet with folders & files) & the navigation of that GUI using a mouse originated from Xerox PARC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor
I knew guys (now dead) who worked at SRI who’d also give credit to PARC if you could ask them today.
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u/Klopferator 19d ago
But both Apple and Microsoft were (by their own admission) directly inspired by the Xerox project.
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u/Smooth-Pop6522 19d ago
I still just love the fact that Xerox of all companies was out there developing the future well ahead of time, purely so that they could stay ahead of the curve in their arena of, well, toner sales, because the lads in New York were too stupid to realise the team in California had created several completely revolutionary technologies which would have made Xerox perhaps the most valuable company in the world, had they pursued commercialising them.
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u/W1neD1ver 19d ago
I saw the Star Station demo'ed to my design group at Boeing. How they missed the boat on this is beyond me.
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u/Numerous_Photograph9 19d ago
Maybe Jobs should have decided to allow the platform be used on open architecture so itd gain adoption and then apple would have maybe been more successful before they eneded up popularizing the smart phone which Apple didn't invent
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u/Scara_Manga 19d ago
He said some really horrible things to his daughter on his death bed. In return She did the windows shut down noise.
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