Xerox PARC invented the GUI and mouse, then let Apple and Microsoft build empires on them

Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), founded in 1970, was one of the most extraordinary research labs in computing history. Working with unusual freedom 3,000 miles from Xerox headquarters, its scientists invented or pioneered a stunning list of technologies: the laser printer, Ethernet, object-oriented programming, and — most consequentially — the modern personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), windows and icons, operated with a mouse, on machines like the Xerox Alto.

Xerox, though, was a copier company, and its management struggled to see the commercial potential of what PARC had built. The famous turning point came in 1979, when Steve Jobs and a team from Apple visited PARC and were shown the Alto and its graphical interface, in a deal that included the right to buy Apple stock before its IPO. Jobs was electrified by what he saw; Apple went on to build the Lisa and then the Macintosh around the GUI-and-mouse paradigm.

Microsoft, in turn, brought the graphical interface to the mass market with Windows. The two companies Apple and Microsoft built trillion-dollar empires on ideas that PARC had pioneered, while Xerox never turned its own inventions into a comparable business. 'Xerox had it all,' the saying goes, 'and gave it away.' PARC's story is less about a single bad decision than about a company that could invent the future but couldn't imagine itself selling it.