“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
That line usually gets credited to Pablo Picasso, and Steve Jobs loved it. He quoted it on camera in 1996 and he lived by it. It’s also the best summary I’ve found for how we ended up with the graphical user interface, the windows, icons and mouse pointer we’ve all been staring at for over 40 years.
I first dug into this story in 2014, in an ethics course at the University of Winnipeg PACE program. I wrote a paper on it, and it has stuck with me ever since. This is that paper, rewritten, fact-checked, and with the good parts put back in. Because the real story is better than the version most people know: Apple didn’t invent the GUI. Neither did Microsoft. And the company that did, gave it away.
Xerox PARC built the future, then shelved it
What most people think of as a personal computer was built by Xerox, a copier company, in April 1973.
Xerox opened its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. They hired some of the best computer scientists and engineers in the world, and for most of the 70s PARC was the place to be if you were serious about computing. They were inventing modern computer technology while everyone else was still running room-sized machines.
The biggest thing to come out of PARC was the Alto. It was mainly designed by Chuck Thacker, who later won the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the Turing Award for his work. The Alto started as an experiment in personal computing. Computers back then were huge and expensive, and the idea was to build something small and cheap enough for one person to sit at.
It had a graphical display, a mouse and a keyboard, which is why it’s considered the first personal computer in the modern sense. Butler Lampson, one of PARC’s founders, pushed Xerox executives to fund a whole fleet of Altos so they could be networked together. That’s where Ethernet came from. PARC also had laser printing and object-oriented programming going at the same time.
Here’s the problem. The Alto was never sold. Xerox finally put a commercial version on the market in 1981, the Xerox Star, and it flopped. It cost around $16,000 per workstation and needed a whole office setup to make sense. A lot of Xerox’s leadership just didn’t get what PARC had built, or why anyone would want a computer on their own desk.
The visit that changed everything
By 1979 Apple was already a leader in personal computers thanks to the Apple II. But the Apple II was all text. No GUI.
Jef Raskin, who joined Apple in 1978, had been to PARC plenty of times and kept telling Jobs he needed to see what they were doing over there. Getting in wasn’t free. Xerox wanted in on Apple before its IPO, so they made a deal: Xerox got to buy 100,000 pre-IPO Apple shares for about $1 million, and Apple got access to PARC. Xerox paid for those shares, so the tour was basically a perk of the investment.
In December 1979, Jobs and his team went in for demos. Larry Tesler, a PARC researcher who later jumped to Apple, said that after an hour of demos the Apple guys understood the technology better than Xerox’s own executives did after years of seeing it.
Jobs came back wanting his whole team to get the full demo. PARC’s researchers were furious. Adele Goldberg was asked to give it and flat out refused:
“I had a big argument with these Xerox executives telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink and I said that I would only do it if I were ordered to do it cause then of course it would be their responsibility, and that’s what they did.”
So they ordered her to. Jobs later said PARC only really showed him three things, and he was so blinded by the first one, the graphical user interface, that he barely took in the other two. He called it the best thing he’d ever seen in his life.
Apple ships it: Lisa and the Macintosh
Jobs went back to Apple fired up and pushed the board to go all in on a GUI system. He drove his people hard, long hours, and he wanted everything perfect.
In January 1983, Apple released the Lisa. It was a GUI computer with a mouse, but at $9,995 almost nobody bought it. A year later, in January 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh. Cheaper, simpler, and with that famous “1984” Super Bowl ad, it’s the machine that put the GUI in front of regular people. Worth noting: Xerox’s Star beat the Lisa to market by about two years. Apple wasn’t first. They were first to make it work for normal people.
Years later, in the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Jobs was brutal about Xerox. He called them “copier heads” who had no clue what a computer could do, and said they “grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry.” In his view, Xerox could have owned the whole industry. Honestly, he’s not wrong.
Enter Microsoft
While the Mac was being built, Apple brought in Microsoft to write applications for it, including early versions of what became Word and Excel. To protect itself, Apple had Microsoft agree not to release its own mouse-based software for other computers for a set period after the Mac came out.
Then in November 1983, before the Mac even shipped, Microsoft announced Windows.
Jobs lost it. He called Bill Gates into a meeting at Apple and tore into him in front of the Mac team for ripping them off. Gates stayed calm and came back with one of the best lines in tech history. He said it was more like they both had a rich neighbour named Xerox, and when he broke in to steal the TV, he found out Jobs had already stolen it.
That one line is the whole story, really.
The lawsuits: everybody sues everybody
Windows 1.0 finally shipped in November 1985. Apple’s lawyers immediately threatened to sue. Gates had leverage though: Apple needed Microsoft’s Mac apps, and he made it clear those could go away. Days later, Apple CEO John Sculley signed an agreement with Gates that licensed parts of the Mac’s visual interface to Microsoft for Windows 1.0. The wording didn’t clearly limit it to just 1.0.
That turned out to be a massive mistake.
In 1987 Microsoft released Windows 2.0, which looked a lot more like a Mac, with overlapping windows and all. In 1988 Apple sued, claiming Microsoft copied 189 elements of the Mac’s look and feel. Then Xerox jumped in and sued Apple in 1989, basically saying “hold on, you took it from us first.”
Here’s how it shook out:
- Xerox v. Apple: thrown out in 1990, mostly because Xerox waited too long to file.
- Apple v. Microsoft: the court found almost all of Apple’s 189 claims were covered by that 1985 license. The rest weren’t protectable on their own, things like the idea of windows or icons. Apple lost in 1993, lost the appeal in 1994, and the Supreme Court refused to hear it in 1995.
So Apple’s case didn’t die on some random technicality. It died because Apple’s own CEO signed away the rights. Sculley later admitted they never meant to give Microsoft anything past Windows 1.0, and that their lawyers just weren’t good enough.
Why this story stuck with me
Xerox invented it. Apple made it real. Microsoft made it everywhere. And the funniest part is how it all flipped since. Microsoft bailed Apple out with $150 million in 1997. Today Apple throws its office apps in for free, while Microsoft charges you for Word.
I was sitting in an ethics class at PACE in 2014 when this story first landed on me. The assignment was about intellectual property. I expected a dry case study. What I got was three of the biggest companies on the planet all pointing at each other, and every one of them was a little bit right.
At the time I was a graphic designer and photographer. That Picasso line hit home, because that’s how creative work actually happens. You see something great, it gets in your head, and you twist it into something that’s yours. I never copied anyone’s work outright, but I’d be lying if I said I never “stole” an idea and made it better.
Ten years later I finished my Network Security Diploma, and I realized the same rule runs that world too. Attackers borrow techniques from each other constantly. A trick that hits one company shows up everywhere a month later. The defenders who keep up are the ones who study what works, steal the good ideas, and adapt fast. Same lesson, different field.
So no, I’m not telling you to go rip off someone’s work. Xerox, Apple and Microsoft spent a decade in court over exactly that. The real lesson is simpler than that.
Xerox had the best idea in computing and sat on it. Apple shipped it. Microsoft shipped it. Xerox ended up in court trying to claim credit for something it never put out, and lost. Nothing is truly original, and ideas are cheap. Everybody has them.
What’s rare is finishing the thing and putting it out into the world. If you don’t, someone else will, and you get to watch them take the credit.
Ship your work, or pay the price.
So what do you think: innovation, or theft? Let me know in the comments.
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