Technology History | 3333 Coyote Hill Road — The Demo Was Arranged, Not Stolen

Apple did not steal the graphical interface from this building. Xerox sold the tour.

In December 1979 Steve Jobs brought Apple engineers to the Palo Alto Research Center and watched an Alto running Smalltalk: a bitmapped screen, overlapping windows, and a mouse driving all of it.

The access had been bought. Xerox's venture arm had taken about 100,000 pre-IPO Apple shares for roughly $1 million, and letting Apple see the lab was part of the arrangement.

Not everyone agreed to it. The researcher Adele Goldberg objected to demonstrating the work to outsiders and was overruled by Xerox management.

What Apple did afterwards was not copying either. Lisa and Macintosh took years and added the menu bar, pull-down menus and drag-and-drop, and in 1980 Apple hired PARC's Larry Tesler outright.

Xerox built its own version. The Star shipped in 1981, was technically ahead and commercially nowhere, and in 1989 Xerox sued Apple over the interface — the suit was dismissed the following year.

The line usually attached to this story deserves the same scepticism. Jobs quoted "good artists copy, great artists steal" and attributed it to Picasso; no Picasso source has ever been found, and researchers trace the pattern to T.S. Eliot writing about poetry in 1920.

PARC opened on 1 July 1970 and the interface was only part of what came out of it. The Alto ran in March 1973, and Bob Metcalfe's memo of 22 May 1973 proposed a 2.94 megabit network he called an Ether Network.

Accounts differ on whether Apple visited once or twice and on the exact share price, so the safe form is one arrangement, about $1 million, December 1979.

The building is still a working laboratory. Xerox spun PARC out as a separate company in 2002 and donated it to SRI International in 2023.

It is not open to visitors, and the low concrete entrance in the photograph, set into a hillside off Coyote Hill Road, is as close as anyone gets without an appointment.

Cover: the entrance to Xerox PARC.

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.