Your comment reminded me of this interview [1] with Steve Jobs:

"And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two.

One of the things they showed me was Object Oriented Programming. They showed me that, but I didn't even see that.

The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over a hundred Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't even see that.

I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the Graphical User Interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember, it was very flawed; what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn't know that at the time. Still though, the germ of the idea was there, and they'd done it very well.

And, within, you know, ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this. Basically, they were copier-heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM. Could have been the IBM of the 90s. Could have been the Microsoft of the 90s."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK7TQVFSA1Y&t=56

>Now remember, it was very flawed; what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn't know that at the time.

I find it amusing how Steve Jobs crams three negs into one sentence.

Not only, but it's a very Aristotelian perspective on human interaction. I'd caution not to cheat rich analysis through binary thinking, but then again, I'm not the billionaire here...

I'm more interested in what was going on before the visit, because the myth is that Jobs was like Prometheus. To counter that myth, we must look into what people knew earlier. Quoting from the Standford link I mentioned before, at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html :

> Both the Macintosh and Lisa projects were underway before the 1979 visit. Documents in The Book of Macintosh (a collection of essays, technical specs, and brainstorms written by Jef Raskin on and others) dating from the fall of 1979-- months before the PARC visit-- show that the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device

It also comments that the myth "assumes that Xerox PARC's ideas weren't well-known before Apple engineers saw them, or had even been actively kept hidden from public view." I see echos of that in your own comment that Smalltalk was a secret. As that Stanford link points out "Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there."

I think you have misremembered the part about Smalltalk and overlapping windows being a secret? Ingalls wrote "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" for POPL '78, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages (doi:10.1145/512760.512762). It shows overlapping windows for figures 1-3, where figure 1 is "A typical Smalltalk display." It also has "if the stylus is depressed within the window, the content is redisplayed, thus showing it “in front of” the other windows", which is a description of how overlapping windows works.

As some additional background, you mentioned "forced by management to show Steve Jobs all the secret stuff". This is because, and quoting again from that Stanford link, "Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."

A lab, by the way, which received thousands of visitors each year.

Jobs may not have been Promethean in the foresight department, but he made a pretty good go of it in the "having your liver taken out of you" department.

No surprise that Jobs would fixate on the UI thing. He never struck me as a techie, but someone that got into tech because it was easy to mesmerize people with. The UI was a perfect tool for that.

Yeah, that makes a certain kind of sense. I'm spending some spare time listening to interviews with old Atari employees on the ANTIC podcast and one thing comes through again and again. Lots of investment was being made in networking and programming languages and almost nobody outside of PARC had any real ideas about GUIs. A couple Atari employees who came from PARC at the time tried to get it into products, but just couldn't.

Apple likewise didn't produce a GUI for their contemporary computers.

The most that people seemed to really be shooting for was higher density text displays and colorful graphics, but nobody had really figured out the magical combination of manipulation device and interface metaphor and Jobs did just "get it" and understood why it would be a major differentiator - few people had more than one computer to network, and few people liked programming.

You're saying it like GUIs are just a trick, an illusion...