Smooth Operators

Posted at: Tuesday 13th July 2004 by Ben Hardwidge

In the early 1970s a group of scruffy computer bums sank into their beanbags at Xerox PARC and devised an OS with bit-mapped graphics, scrollbars and pop-up menus. Sound familiar? Ben Hardwidge finds out where Windows first started

The big apple
The other main advantage of BitBlt was that it allowed text to scroll smoothly, and this is what specifically impressed Apple's Steve Jobs when he visited PARC for a Smalltalk demo in 1979. According to Robson, the real clincher for Apple was 'the fact that we could smoothly scroll the text so that it didn't jump a line at a time. There was a little area of the scrollbar that showed you exactly what was visible in the window, and if you put your cursor over it and pressed the mouse button, the window's contents would scroll smoothly up and down. The fact that this happened one bit at a time rather than one line at a time was what really caught Apple's imagination'.

By this time, Apple had already launched a couple of primitive personal computers, but its next project, the Lisa, was going to be the one that altered the face of computing, and Jobs wanted to involve PARC's ideas. So much so, in fact, that he poached several of its staff, including Alan Kay, to work on it. The Lisa was released with a full-on GUI in 1982, and was then followed by the more sophisticated Macintosh two years later.

So why isn't Xerox battling Microsoft and Apple now?
At this point you're probably wondering where Microsoft comes into all of this, and the answer is pretty much that it doesn't. Microsoft didn't launch its first version of Windows until 1985, and even that was an extremely primitive effort compared to Mac OS at the time. So, with this in mind, how come Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, while Xerox is still flogging photocopiers?

It's a question you'd think that Xerox would be asking itself repeatedly while beating its fists on the floor, but apparently not. Dave Robson (who now works on the business side of the Xerox pond) explains: 'Making a successful business out of an idea involves a lot more than just having the idea. If you took a company such as Xerox that sold electro-mechanical equipment to offices with a direct sales force, and then said, "Okay, we're now also going to sell software operating systems to the general public through retail channels", then you'd find it incredibly difficult. In fact, I'd say it was impossible.'

Xerox was, and always will be, a business-oriented company, and, unlike Alan Kay and many of the other guys at PARC, it really had no interest in building personal computers. Besides, just keeping a huge technology company afloat in those rapidly changing times was difficult enough, without having to worry about branching into another area. Robson also quite rightly pointed out to us that out of all the huge computer companies in the late 1960s, it's really only Xerox and IBM that have survived.

But even so, if Apple and Microsoft can own so many patents on something that wasn't fundamentally their idea in the first place, then how come Xerox hasn't at least made a quick buck from licensing Smalltalk? This, frustratingly, is all down to generational luck. At the time Smalltalk was developed, you weren't allowed to patent computer software, as it still fell into the 'mathematical algorithm' category, and you couldn't license Smalltalk without a patent.