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...