Steve Jobs talks about what he saw and he missed at Xerox PARC
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as Jobs's own account of what Apple took from Xerox and why Xerox failed.
What it is
A one-minute clip from the 1995 Steve Jobs interview in which he describes what he saw at Xerox PARC and what he missed. He says he grasped the graphical interface but not the networking and object-oriented parts.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2020 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites froasty · 2020-06 · on “Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017)”
Let's consider two academics. Academic A is constrained to traditional rational discourse and Academic B is constrained to post-modernism. Which of these two is going to publish more articles? The person that must meticulously build on prior research, or the person who can publish non-falsifiable articles with no chance of collision with prior work? Which of these two is going to get more grants for their institutions? Which of these two is going to get promoted and get tenure? Which of these is going to be in charge of advising the next generation of graduate students? Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education: [this video] Or consider th
Cites leoc · 2021-09 · on “So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?”
* On the software side, Big Mac's vision of Unix with Macintosh on top is familiar from NeXT and OS X. It was also roughly paralleled by many other projects, from Pink/Taligent and BeOS to OS/2 and WinNT. But it's worth asking where Jobs and the other Big Mac supporters got the idea from in turn. One obvious source of inspiration for the NeXT work was Xerox PARC, and Jobs seems to have been acknowledging (or claiming) that influence in the famous clip from the 1995 Triumph of the Nerds "lost" interview where he talked about not understanding the importance of PARC's networking or OO work originally [LINK] [this video] . Furthermore Alan Kay had just joined Apple in 1984 [LINK] . But there were pl
Cites lproven · 2022-07 · on “Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened”
Apple took resizable overlapping windows from Xerox; in return, Xerox got shares in Apple. Not stole: bought , with stock. Then, on the Lisa, Apple invented from scratch : Standarised dialog boxes; a global menu bar; window title bars with global controls on them; standardised icons and functions and buttons (OK, Cancel, etc). None of this stuff was in Xerox Smalltalk. Xerox invented 3 things: overlapping resizable windows; an object-oriented programming language to create and manipulate them; ubiquitous networking to connect the machines. Apple took the windows, missed the rest. Source: Steve Jobs. [this video] But Apple invented most of the standard GUI controls that we all know and use today.