Mark: Cathy Marshall at Xerox PARC originally started speaking about information gardening. She developed an early tool that’s the inspiration for the Tinderbox map view, in which you would have boxes but no lines. It was a spatial hypertext system, a system for connecting things by placing them near each other rather than drawing a line between them. Very interesting abstract representational problem, but also it turned out to be tremendously useful.

25 00:29:42 researchers did all of them 25 think about it cost about 12 million dollars a year in today's money every single company in this room every single 00:29:59 500 fortune company these are fingernail clippings on your IT budgets you waste more than this every other week and despite that there's not a single 00:30:11 company in America that until recently that has even taken the venture of doing a process like this you have to ask yourself why it's a question you really 00:30:25 wouldn't need to understand because we're not talking about money here return 30 plus trillion dollars in counting

For an opportunity at breakthrough invention (and massive wealth creation), it is important to understand what went right at Xerox PARC. PARC assembled the best people in the field and gave them license to build “the office of the future” (including the license to define what that meant). PARC managers, especially Robert Taylor, had the wisdom to separate responsibility from control and never presumed to “direct” the invention. Instead, Taylor focused on creating an environment safe from meddling and a culture that promoted cooperation when appropriate. The proof of this approach is all around us—and embodied in the device with which you’re reading this article.

The GUI was initially developed as one of many innovative new research projects at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center1. Silicon Valley being a small place back then, Steve Jobs got himself a tour one day, and just flat out fell in love with their GUI.

In 1995 Steve Jobs could still remember it exactly. In an interview with Robert X. Cringely for the PBS show “Triumph of the nerds” he said:I had three or four people (at Apple) who kept bugging that I get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they are doing. And, so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind. They showed me what they are working on. And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete, they’d done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn’t know that at the time but still thought they had the germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well. And within – you know – ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take. You could argue about who the winners and losers might be. You could’t argue about the inevitability, it was so obviousSteve Jobs about his visit to Xerox PARC – Clip from Robert Cringley’s TV documentation “Triumph of the Nerds“.

Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) developed its own Lisp machine, named Jericho,[7] which ran a version of Interlisp. It was never marketed. Frustrated, the whole AI group resigned, and were hired mostly by Xerox. So, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center had, simultaneously with Greenblatt's own development at MIT, developed their own Lisp machines which were designed to run InterLisp (and later Common Lisp). The same hardware was used with different software also as Smalltalk machines and as the Xerox Star office system.