Today in 1981, Xerox introduced the Xerox 8010 Star Information System, featuring a bitmapped screen, Ethernet, a computer mouse, a laser printer, the Smalltalk language, a WYSIWYG word processor, and software for combining text and graphics in the same document. It failed in the marketplace.
On January 19, 1983, Apple introduced Lisa, a $9,995 PC for business users. Many of its innovations such as the graphical user interface, a mouse, and document-centric computing, were taken from the Alto computer developed at Xerox PARC, introduced as the $16,595 Xerox Star in 1981.
Steve Jobs recalled (in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs) that he and the Lisa team were very relieved when they saw the Xerox Star: “We knew they hadn’t done it right and that we could—at a fraction of the price.” Isaacson says that “The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry” and quotes Jobs on the subject: “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas… They [Xerox management] were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do… Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.”