Comment by turnsout
7 months ago
This is how (checks notes) everything has always worked.
In a large project such as introducing the first GUI for general use, you can't do everything yourself. If you're within a company, you hire people. You take inspiration from the outside. It's a team effort, and not the result of a lone genius.
That does not diminish what Jobs did. The Mac and the Lisa were underway before the Xerox PARC visit. The idea of mixed graphics and text were already out there as an ideal—it's pretty obvious if you think about it. Engelbart's demo was already legendary.
But as we all know, it's one thing for a technology to exist in a research lab, and quite another for it to be adopted by millions of people. That's where Jobs was actually exceptional. He was able to manage these massive projects with just the right compromises to take great technology and turn it into great products.
The Lisa product - a business-focussed follow on to the Apple II, was initiated before Jobs visited Xerox, but nonetheless copied Xerox's Alto GUI.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influe...
Lisa attracted a lot of interest, but was outrageously expensive (~$50K in 2025 dollars) as well as being slow. The Mac in its final form is best regarded as a cheaper performant Lisa.
Three things to add:
1. Neither the Lisa nor Mac "copied" the Alto. They took inspiration, but again, the Lisa project began before the team ever visited Xerox. These ideas were in the air in SV, but no one had figured out how to commercialize it. Sort of like conversational UI circa 2015.
2. The Mac was more than a warmed-over Lisa. If you use both, you'll see how much more polished and complete the Mac is.
3. The Mac was a product where the price point really mattered, and was part of the product identity. You can't have "the computer for the rest of us" at the Lisa's price point. Getting that retail price down required a ton of ingenious software and hardware engineering, which was driven forward relentlessly by Jobs.