Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Xerox PARC
The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been 
established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better 
and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate 
headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great 
maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who 
are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small 
personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy enough for children to use. So 
Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the 
command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they 
came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and 
you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.
This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced “gooey”—was facilitated by another 
concept pioneered at Xerox PARC: bitmapping. Until then, most computers were character-based. 
You would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer would generate that character on the 
screen, usually in glowing greenish phosphor against a dark background. Since there were a 
limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn’t take a whole lot of computer code or 
processing power to accomplish this. In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each and every pixel 
on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer’s memory. To render something on the screen, 
such as a letter, the computer has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color 
displays, what color to be. This uses a lot of computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, 
fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays.
Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC’s prototype computers, 
such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Jef Raskin decided that 
these features were the future of computing. So he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues 
to go check out Xerox PARC.
Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs’s own 
more precise terminology, “a shithead who sucks.” So Raskin enlisted his friend Atkinson, who 
fell on the other side of Jobs’s shithead/genius division of the world, to convince Jobs to take an 
interest in what was happening at Xerox PARC. 
What Raskin didn’t know was that Jobs was working on a more complex deal. Xerox’s venture 
capital division wanted to be part of the second round of Apple financing during the summer of 

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1979. Jobs made an offer: “I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will open the 
kimono at PARC.” Xerox accepted. It agreed to show Apple its new technology and in return got 
to buy 100,000 shares at about $10 each.
By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were worth 
$17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see 
Xerox PARC’s technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn’t been shown 
enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox 
scientists called upon to do the briefings, and he was thrilled to show off the work that his bosses 
back east had never seemed to appreciate. But the other briefer, Adele Goldberg, was appalled that 
her company seemed willing to give away its crown jewels. “It was incredibly stupid, completely 
nuts, and I fought to prevent giving Jobs much of anything,” she recalled.
Goldberg got her way at the first briefing. Jobs, Raskin, and the Lisa team leader John Couch 
were ushered into the main lobby, where a Xerox Alto had been set up. “It was a very controlled 
show of a few applications, primarily a word-processing one,” Goldberg said. Jobs wasn’t 
satisfied, and he called Xerox headquarters demanding more.
So he was invited back a few days later, and this time he brought a larger team that included 
Bill Atkinson and Bruce Horn, an Apple programmer who had worked at Xerox PARC. They both 
knew what to look for. “When I arrived at work, there was a lot of commotion, and I was told that 
Jobs and a bunch of his programmers were in the conference room,” said Goldberg. One of her 
engineers was trying to keep them entertained with more displays of the word-processing 
program. But Jobs was growing impatient. “Let’s stop this bullshit!” he kept shouting. So the 
Xerox folks huddled privately and decided to open the kimono a bit more, but only slowly. They 
agreed that Tesler could show off Smalltalk, the programming language, but he would 
demonstrate only what was known as the “unclassified” version. “It will dazzle [Jobs] and he’ll 
never know he didn’t get the confidential disclosure,” the head of the team told Goldberg.
They were wrong. Atkinson and others had read some of the papers published by Xerox PARC, 
so they knew they were not getting a full description. Jobs phoned the head of the Xerox venture 
capital division to complain; a call immediately came back from corporate headquarters in 
Connecticut decreeing that Jobs and his group should be shown everything. Goldberg stormed out 
in a rage.
When Tesler finally showed them what was truly under the hood, the Apple folks were 
astonished. Atkinson stared at the screen, examining each pixel so closely that Tesler could feel 
the breath on his neck. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly. “He was hopping 
around so much I don’t know how he actually saw most of the demo, but he did, because he kept 
asking questions,” Tesler recalled. “He was the exclamation point for every step I showed.” Jobs 
kept saying that he couldn’t believe that Xerox had not commercialized the technology. “You’re 
sitting on a gold mine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”
The Smalltalk demonstration showed three amazing features. One was how computers could be 
networked; the second was how object-oriented programming worked. But Jobs and his team paid 
little attention to these attributes because they were so amazed by the third feature, the graphical 
interface that was made possible by a bitmapped screen. “It was like a veil being lifted from my 
eyes,” Jobs recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”
When the Xerox PARC meeting ended after more than two hours, Jobs drove Bill Atkinson 
back to the Apple office in Cupertino. He was speeding, and so were his mind and mouth. “This is 
it!” he shouted, emphasizing each word. “We’ve got to do it!” It was the breakthrough he had 
been looking for: bringing computers to the people, with the cheerful but affordable design of an 
Eichler home and the ease of use of a sleek kitchen appliance.
“How long would this take to implement?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six months.” It was a wildly optimistic assessment, 
but also a motivating one.