Everyone (at least at Georgia Tech) has heard of Bell Labs, and how Bell Labs revolutionized the world. Bell Labs was a place where some of the smartest people gathered and invented things like the transistor, lasers, the Unix OS, the C programming language, the cosmic background radiation, and a whole host of other stuff. Eight Nobel Prizes were awarded to people who worked here; Bell Labs was the place to be for a tech geek in the mid-20th century. But it wasn’t the only place where important tech research was taking place; Silicon Valley was getting off the ground in the 1960s.

Xerox decided to build a research center in the Bay Area and focus on computing research. They had a bunch of really smart people, and they ended up inventing the modern personal computer as we know it. They created a machine with a screen, a keyboard, a mouse, and a GUI called the Xerox Alto; this was in 1973. At a time when people still thought of computers as huge, room-sized mainframes, Xerox created a machine that was insanely revolutionary for its time. True, the machine was expensive, but it blew pretty much any other computer out of the water.

That’s not the only thing they did. They also invented the first multiplayer video game using networking, early word processing software, laser printing, and bitmaps. They also invented object-oriented programming via the language Smalltalk. This enabled programmers to be more productive and write programs that were readily extensible and modelled the real world more effectively. The majority of programming languages used today are still based at least partly on this paradigm.

They also played a crucial role in the founding of the Internet. They invented Ethernet networking, which was used widely by the DARPA workstations, which were Xerox Altos. Yeah thats right; Xerox actually helped invent the Internet, unlike Al Gore. And we still use Ethernet cables today for connecting to the Internet.

So what happened? Why didn’t Xerox exploit these technologies to make boatloads of money and dominate the computer industry? Well, the issue was that the management in New York didn’t care about computers; they were focused on photocopiers, which was Xerox’s core business at the time. This hindered efforts to commercialize the technology developed at PARC; Xerox only made one effort to cash in on the work in 1981 with the Xerox STAR, but that failed miserably.

But here’s what really doomed them; they let Steve Jobs and Bill Gates into the facility to look at all of the cool stuff they had. While this was in exchange for stock options in their companies, Xerox was basically handing over all their technology to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Both men were astonished by the genius shown before them and took as many ideas as they could. Steve Jobs really loved the GUI and the mouse; Bill Gates liked pretty much everything. Apple decided to come up with the Macintosh based on the innovations they observed; Microsoft released Microsoft Word, which was based on the text editors that PARC developed. And Windows followed in 1985. Both companies became ridiculously successful; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires and household names, renowned for their brilliance and genius.

While both men were definitely smart cookies, their real brilliance was recognizing the genius they saw at Xerox. And basically stealing/buying the innovations PARC made and actually commercializing them. Because of the failure of the Xerox management to see the genius of PARC, Microsoft and Apple are powerful giants while Xerox remains a simple manufacturer of printers and photocopiers. As Steve Jobs once said, good artists copy; great artists steal.