am said:
Problem with these hot companies is that one slip up and they get clobbered. After a while, just meeting their earnings goal is not good enough for Wall Street. Remember Kodak, Xerox of the 70s how big they were?
And of course the amazing thing: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developed almost everything that mattered that distinguishes the personal computer as we know it from the minicomputers of the 1970s. Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute developed the mouse. But, everything else? BITBLT, overlapping windows, Ethernet, object-oriented programming, Paint, Draw, and last but certainly not least the GYPSY and BRAVO WYSIWYG editors and their "compound documents" (pictures in place with text). I don't know whether they deserve credit for the
first use, but a very
early use of the phrase "personal computer" occurred in the title of the 1979 paper,
Alto: A Personal Computer).
An alumnus of the GYPSY and BRAVO projects, Charles Simonyi, went on to Microsoft to develop a product named Microsoft Word, while Steve Jobs and some key engineers got a tour of Xerox PARC, and after a look at the ALTO they quickly "got it" (and in rapid succession, so did Microsoft and Digital Research and--was it already VisiCorp or was it still Software Arts?)
I don't think this was a case of "it was in the air" and everyone got it at the same time, footrace to the patent office. I think this was a case of invented at Xerox, and Xerox had such corporate atherosclerosis they simply had no idea what to do with it. It may be hard to remember that Xerox was a "player" in the computer industry--their XDS computer systems were quite well-thought-of in the early 1970s. Much too late, they started ran ads about "the paperless office" showing workstations linked by Ethernet cables.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot laser printers. Xerox had those, too, and InterPress, a sort of predecessor to PostScript.
One can easily imagine visiting Xerox in the 1970s and saying "Wow! This is the Future! This is gonna be Big, I tell you, Big"--and being absolutely right about that, but being totally wrong about which companies were going to make money out of it.