How Steve Jobs & Bill Gates Stole The Future From Xerox

[@gordonwang888]

Jobs and Gates did not steal from Xerox. Xerox engineers who made this system were neglected and sidelines by the management. Then CEO famously/infamously said, "We are a paper company and will always be a paper company." Out of frustration, Xerox engineers invited Jobs and Gates over, hoping their work could gain some traction outside of Xerox.

[@catt3911]

Both are true.

[@onigvd77]

yes that’s been reported before as you have said so why bring up a false claim of stealing?

[@victorgw]

Xerox quite literally gave away the future

[@Tech_History_Channel]

indeed :o

[@LordApophis100]

Xerox failed to commercialize their product. Their GUI implementation required a $10000+ computer, while the Mac GUI implementation could do more with less and was affordable for normal consumers.

[@danh5637]

Often times it’s not the inventor or even the invention that counts. It’s the person who can exploit and popularise it that wins and gets the recognition.

[@LordApophis100]

@@danh5637 The Xerox system could not do overlapping windows. But an Apple engineer found a smart implementation that could do that on a much slower Macintosh.

[@danh5637]

@ I’m not sure who told you that. You could do overlapping windows on an Alto. Furthermore you drew out the windows dynamically yourself. An idea which ended up being popularised on Plan9 albeit in a less interesting way!

[@chasebase76]

This is a bad take that rests on a vague idea of theft. Why do you think Xerox opened up their lab to entrepreneurs if they wanted to keep their technology a secret? If they were trying to keep trade secrets they would have held their employees to contracts limiting what intellectual property they could share. The poster seems to fundamentally misunderstand how Parc operated as a research lab.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

There is nothing unusual about this. Shortsightedness has been plaguing successful companies for years. IBM created the PC and left it to rot deciding to focus in its Mainframe business only to see it becoming an open standard and redefine the market when steered by other companies with actual vision. Commodore had the most powerful personal computer ever for its time (the almighty Amiga) but just couldn't sell it. Kodak invented digital photography but kept it on the back burner to focus on their traditional film-based photo business. Microsoft famously missed the Internet completely but Gates recognized the mistake on time and turned the company around, steering its cannons towards Netscape. Google kills successful applications as if there was no tomorrow and is currently playing catch up in the AI business, specially now that its search business has been threatened by smaller, nimble competitors that are using AI to boost their search results. Xerox simply misunderstood what they had in their hands and at the time planned to focus on their photocopier business and the rest is history.

[@JesterEric]

Digital Research GEM was a far better GUI for 80s PCs than Windows and was being bundled with many clone PCs, Apple sued DR and GEM version 2 had to be downgraded as DR did not defend the claim. That allowed later versions of Windows to compete

[@Tech_History_Channel]

That's quite interesting

[@Rouxenator]

Rotten to the core - in the 70s and up to this day.

[@esotericmissionary]

Xerox copied then got copied. Strange how that happened.... 😛

[@Tech_History_Channel]

Maybe its karma :)

[@onigvd77]

Jobs and Gates were invited to Xerox so the technology they invented wasn’t going to wasted, the Xerox higher ups just wanted to make photocopiers. Dude you can’t just make shit up for clicks, how low can you go?

[@Ashley-wp2rn]

Every idea is a stolen one I guess 😂

[@Tech_History_Channel]

you might be on to something :)

[@foradome5204]

Amazing video!

[@Tech_History_Channel]

Thanks!

[@davidmullins3802]

I think you got your facts completely wrong to say the least. See, Apple Inc wasn’t even called Apple Inc back then it was called Apple Computer Company. While yes Xerox originally just licensed their operating system to Apple Computer Company. Soon after that Apple Computer Company would acquire the full right to the operating system. Xerox couldn’t work out the bugs in the operating system they created that is where Apple Computer Company came into to play. When the CEO of the company saw the operating system it was cheaper for him to license the operating system than build everything from scratch. That would in turn create operating system called System Software. While many people know this story and think System Software is still part of macOS. They are dead wrong asking anyone that owned a Mac at the time, know about the trouble they had with the change over. Today macOS is based on Free BSD and not the original System Software. As for Microsoft they had nothing to do with this at all. They built windows from the ground up with a custom Kernel. While Microsoft made their operating system compatible for IBM computer it was still a mess back in the day. Apple Computer Company would even try to sue Microsoft for creating Windows. They would lose in court through. Microsoft was the first company to make software for System Software operating system and that is all they did before the creation of Windows. So you see nothing was stolen at all. It was a business transaction we do everyday. Nothing more!

[@John-bi1lv]

This video is total BS. They didn't steal anything. They were smart businessman that's all that business opportunity and did it quite legally

[@zimzam9166]

if you're going to make an AI video then the very least you could do is choose an accent that people can actually understand

[@Tech_History_Channel]

It's not an AI video, I wrote the script, recorded it, and did all the editing myself, pardon the accent I am not American

[@Line49Design]

You think the host speaks like a software program .. Poor guy 😊

[@ReflexVE]

@@Tech_History_ChannelI understood you just fine, keep up the good work!

[@georgeabraham7256]

Reclaiming jeffrey island Richie-Rich HQ, semmy real, spy ops fake/real leaks.. but a real startup event for us ai io