"PARC was not at all secretive about its work. Its researchers published widely, and there was a regular flow of traffic between PARC and Stanford's computer science community. "
as opposed to a military intelligence company where all that would get you fired if not in prison.
I can't recall the female scientist's name, but I am certain have read an 'oral history' where this specific person, present when Apple people show up, angrily calls up Xerox HQ in east coast to protest and was told, over the phone, to "show them everything".
This one is different from the other source I recall. It could have been someone else's oral history and she was mentioned. This is what she says in her own OH:
"When Stewart Brand came into PARC and there was a book Cybernetics 2? [II cybernetic frontiers], half of it was about the "secret" company and Stewart had pictures of PARC and so there had been publicity that I guess hadn’t been properly signed off on. And so there had been a bit of a “You don’t get to publish for awhile” period. I think Alan took it too seriously. He didn’t like having his hand slapped. We did start publishing again more in the ’76 timeframe including the personal dynamic media paper that Alan and I did for IEEE Computer Software. I wanted to go to corporate and ask for permission and it was a little risky because you didn’t know what would come back. There’s no reason for them to say yes.
Lucky for me, between the time I suggested it and actually asking, Xerox’s venture group had bought a lot of equity in a little fledgling computer company that wasn’t doing very well called Apple Computer and they had arranged for the Apple executives and then later the Lisa programming team, to come for a visit.
I kind of parlayed that into, “Well you’re willing to give it away. You’re not interested.” And I wrote this motivator about why we should be able to publish it all because we were planning to write a book and we were planning to have this community implementation event. I think it went to one of the principals at the venture group who then asked Jeff Rulifson his opinion. Jeff was on some special leave from PARC to corporate and he wrote “Oh sure, publish all this”. So I had it [the permission] on paper."
-- end --
I don't recall hearing about this Xerox venture group and its "lot of equity" in Apple. But ..
"Xerox had had an active CVC program since the 1960s, operating an internally managed fund that invested in some of the most legendary figures in Silicon Valley, including Raymond Kurzweil and Steve Jobs. Kurzweil got his start in technology when Xerox invested in his first company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc., in 1982, to develop a computer that could transcribe spoken English. The idea behind the investment was to create technology that would increase demand for Xerox’s printing products when it ultimately hit the market.
When Apple released its revolutionary Macintosh computer, some observers claimed that it had commercialized technologies first developed at Xerox PARC, such as the mouse, windows, and icons, even dating the origin of the supposed copying to a 1979 visit to the lab by Jobs and other Apple employees — the tour is considered a seminal event in Silicon Valley lore. Although the accusation that Apple outright copied its ideas for user interface from Xerox is generally refuted today, the revelations stung Xerox’s management. The company was eventually spurred into rethinking its CVC program in an effort to better capitalize on the company’s languishing in-house technologies."
Xerox was paid for the crown jewels and according to Larry Tesler, it didn't take any arm-twisting to get him to move to Apple as Xerox was dragging their feet commercializing PARC's innovations.
Xerox received Apple stock for those meetings which they sold in the IPO. I’ve never seen anyone do a calculation of the present value of that stock but it’s probably a significant fraction of Xerox’s market cap today.
Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing.
It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.
Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.
Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.
