Xerox PARC: The minds behind the GUI, Ethernet, Laser Printing, and Much More 

I meet a depressing number of people who have never ever heard any of this history. I was at Xerox in the late 80s when they were trying to remain relevant. There were all kinds of things wrong with the Star, for all its innovation, but the business model was the real problem. It made no sense uniless you bought dozens of them and then bought laser printers and file servers... Also, sales force incentives (bonuses) were principally based on how much paper and toner the sales rep could move through all the other products they sold. So you could sell a staggeringly complex and expensive network of workstations, fileservers, printers, and applications etc. and hardly make a dime until you had lots of adoption and people still printed out paper docs on the laser printers... or you could just sell more copiers that used paper and toner and have immediate, simpler and more predictable stream of consumable sales to line up with your monthly mortgage and car payments :)

You sold Douglas Engelbart short in omitting his 1968 GUI presentation in the "Mother of All Demos". A demonstration of not just a GUI interface, but word processing and video-conferencing as well.

Timely upload! Taking a course on Operating Systems, and the instructor mentioned that Xerox were the first to implement a GUI.

Fascinating.

great history, thanks for this amazing documentary

Legendary.

Metaphor Computer Systems represent! We beat the Mac to market. :)

👍👍👍

They could've been Apple and Microsoft combined. But the leadership dropped the ball.

Gooey!

How did you get the pronunciation of "why-z-wig"? 😖 It's "wizzy-wig"! Otherwise I enjoyed this video. Not many people know how much a "copier company" changed the face of computing, or how Apple's marketing genius popularized all the ideas they stole.

Xerox PARC was the first machine with an undo function

good content ...slow down and e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e!!!

Xerox came out with Star Workstation Computers in 1980 But each computer cost 25 000. Many companies decided to purchase an ibm pc because it cost 6000.. Xerox had another chance to dominate the computer industry but they failed again

You cannot have two point ninety-four. It's two point nine four!

This was good BUT it’s pronounced WIZZY-WIG!!! 😊

A fucking photocopier destroyed the xerox alto :- s

Why use a gui when you can have a Linux terminal? :)

WHY SEE WIG??? ITS pronounced "WEE SI WIG"