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Another prototype was developed under the guidance of Ken Rothmueller, a one-time engineer in Hewlett-Packard’s Instruments Division. His computer was calculated to win the hearts of the sort of people who ran data-processing departments in large companies and those with a technical bent. It had a green screen controlled in the same way as the screens on the Apple II and III, a conventional typewriter keyboard, and an overwhelming gray formality—and it by no means matched Jobs’s aggressive spirit. The cynics said that it was a dull, solid machine Hewlett-Packard might have introduced.

Progress wasn’t helped by the carping and clash of ideas that developed between Rothmueller and John Couch, then the head of the software department. Each man had, at various times, worked for the other at Hewlett-Packard, and at Apple they both reported to the same person. It was a battle for control of the computer: a struggle for dominance between hardware and software. But the critical importance of the software was emphasized by work that was conducted, not by Apple, but at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Xerox Corporation indelibly altered not only Jobs’s picture of the future but also the tone and nature of the computers that he was later to say would last Apple through the eighties. It enlarged his ideas and provided the specter of a competitor that, in the laboratory, was working on ideas that were far more dramatic than those being considered at Apple.

Set on a gently rising hill south of Stanford University, the research center had been built by Xerox as an incubator where young, bright sparks could dream up some grand new ideas that would have the spectacular impact of the company’s copiers. It had opened in 1969, but researchers hadn’t hatched any golden egg by the last month of the seventies when a group from Apple arrived to inspect the results of their work on personal computers. Xerox had spent more than $100 million at PARC to fund research on computers, semiconductor-chip design, and laser printers. That sum was more than double Apple’s total sales in 1979 but PARC had managed to demonstrate the wide gap that exists between the laboratory bench and the shop window.

Xerox’s substantial financial stake in Apple certainly smoothed the way for the expeditions of programmers and engineers that set out from Cupertino. But the curious didn’t need the mind of Sherlock Holmes to figure out what was going on at PARC. The center was a showcase for Xerox and visits by outsiders were part and parcel of daily life. Even without knowing the details of how Xerox’s prototype desk-top computers were designed, anybody who kept in touch with the field was certainly aware of some of the broader trends. A few well-placed telephone calls, a piece of cocktail-party chatter, or some interrogation of the bright high-school students Xerox was using as guinea pigs could shed light on the obscurer points. Computer journals had carried papers that reported on aspects of the Xerox research. A special 1977 issue of Scientific American contained an article by Alan Kay, an airy spirit and one of Xerox’s principal scientists, that described the work in Palo Alto and amounted to an enthusiastic prescription for personal computers that were easy to use.

More than a decade of research by scientists like Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, by child psychologists, and at Norwegian universities had all, to varying degrees, influenced the work at Xerox. Indeed some of the most important principles had been published in the mid-sixties and had been displayed by SRI as early as 1968 with a demonstration of a system called NLS. Its chief thrust was to find ways to help people with no technical training control computers. In a way it was an academic extension of the general effort of the hobbyists: to make computers personal and then remove, or at least conceal, the mysterious and intimidating elements. Xerox’s prototypes bore the traces of people who believed that computers