So smart, yet so stupid.

Tbh. 40k would look pretty appetising. Especially when they were probably downplaying it's use when they offered to buy.

I assumed they evolved

That's pretty reasonable, considering the price tag for the tech demo that introduced Steve Jobs to the GUI was Xerox having the opportunity to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock at a pre-IPO price of $10 per share. Considering Apple's IPO price was $22.00, that wasn't bad, and it closed at $29. Remember that this is before a long series of CEOs who were desperately trying to run the company into the ground.

But I digress. That opportunity to buy a million dollars' worth of stock wasn't any sort of a license or anything like that; it was just for a demo, because Xerox PARC was where all of the cool stuff was happening. Yes, at Xerox. Stop laughing; it's not funny. Okay, fine, cool stuff was happening at IBM, too. ... You know what, if you can't take this seriously, I'm just going to leave.

Anyway, that price tag didn't come with a license, so Xerox was waiting to see how the "look and feel" part of the Apple-Microsoft legal wars shook out, because if Apple could take Microsoft for basically stealing the Mac interface for Windows, then Xerox could take Apple for doing the same for the Macintosh operating system. But, turns out look and feel doesn't get legal protection and turning a trash can into a recycle bin is just enough of a change to qualify as different. And so, Xerox never got any more out of Apple than a good purchase price on the stock.

No, I couldn't tell you when Xerox sold that stock. Hopefully before the end of the Sculley administration, let alone Michael Spindler or Gil Amelio, who were desperately trying to sell the company to anyone dumb enough to buy it. Yeah, there was a time when Apple had about two weeks' of operating capital left. But, to close out the Xerox story, because of stock splits and such (a 4-for1, a 7-for-1, and three 2-for-1s), that $10 per share would have been about a nickel per share today. You might think, "Wow, they're so dumb for selling," but you have to remember that at the end of 1997, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that split-adjusted stock price was floating around fifteen cents. Nobody knew if Apple was going to be around in six months, and if a time-traveler told you that it would be the biggest company on earth, you'd have asked the guy where he gets whatever drugs he's smoking, so Xerox probably sold before that.

And he hated calling it a mouse. Always thought it should have a much more impressive name for such an important device...

But the grad students started calling it a mouse (remember kids, back in the day, it used to have a tail) and then....

Really not surprising, and we all owe him and his peers a debt that could never be repaid in money anyway. “Share and share alike” was the common attitude among computer scientists and engineers back in the day, and had that not been the case, this thread would not exist. Nothing you’re looking at on your screen or holding in your hands as read this comment would exist in its current form. It simply isn’t possible to create something so complex, consisting of so many essential yet disparate components, in an economic milieu that prioritizes short-term monetary gain over long-term societal contribution.

I highly recommend checking out Neal Stephenson’s essay “In the Beginning... Was the Command Line.” Excellent read about how humans interact with computers and how computers have become integral to human cultures. Part of it describes how strange it was to see computer tech go from scientific tools freely used to consumer commodities exploited for profit, especially software—a thing that can only exist as an ever-changing idea.

I suspect your thinking is incorrect. How does one measure "societal contribution"? Society will never benefit if ideas remain in the lab to be enjoyed by a small group of specialists. You have to connect these ideas to actual objects that society in general can use and create value out of.

This idea that profit is somehow evil is misguided at best. If no resources are allocated to design, produce, distribute, educate and utilize ideas, the ideas are generally not valued. The concept that these resources and processes are extraneous to societal contribution is illogical. Why would millions of people be employed today in technology industries without the logic of value creation and appropriation?

There is no magic wand that makes computers, write the software, understand the problems and creates solutions. The idea of it not being profit oriented is to completely miss the idea of how value is created and distributed in any human society in any era under any ideology.

"Gabriel told me I should've patented those little squeaky fuckers but I didn't listen."

-- God

We have to assume that he was some sort of time traveler.

His "Mother of all Demos" in 1968 included most of the fundamentals of modern human-computer interaction (minus touch screens and voice commands.)

He pioneered the idea of using a mouse to to navigate a graphical user interface with windows that first Apple and later Microsoft adapted as the standard.

He came up with the basic for things like hypertext links and video conferencing and how to mange multiple people editing a single document at the same time.

If you today use things like Office with stuff like teams and sharepoint or any of its competitors that may not sound like much, because that is just the waxy things are done.

they were not as obvious in the 60s. He came up with the whole package while working for Xerox who didn't know what to do with it and it wasn't until Apple started implementing some of the ideas that the world took notice.

phrases like "ahead of his time" and "visionary" get thrown around far too much nowadays, but we didn't catch up with the future he saw until the mid 90s and didn't fully implement his ideas until dot-com bubble burst. It is only now that we try to reach beyond what he came up with and come up with new things many of which fail.

If anyone hasn't seen his "Mother of All Demos" mentioned in the link, do yourself a favor and check it out.

1. Whatever the number of people currently working on making and developing IT for profit, it is deserted by orders of magnitude more people using it for its benefits.
2. Indeed, R&D is necessary to develop the tech, and that requires resources. In most cases, the resources for the elements of computing tech that are fundamental—programming languages, human interfaces and the like—came from government and university research grants. Not hard to understand why, since business executives and VC “angels” aren’t big on the idea that, say, this little chunky thing you move around a desk with your hand will become essential to the way we do—well, everything, but not until a decade or two after you make the investment.
3. Nothing in your argument demonstrates that treating information tech as a form of private property to be exploited for profit, first and foremost, is intrinsically necessary for its development. No sense in trying to force such reasoning, either, since we’ve already got several decades of history that prove otherwise. Indeed, to this day there are dozens of examples of tech you use every day that you probably paid a company to obtain, that consist of pieces that were and still are freely distributed to the public. The open research and exchange of ideas made profiting from these things possible in the first place. Profit is a basic function of commerce, and treating it as such is healthy enough. I’ve yet to see an instance where treating profit as a goal unto itself hasn’t corrupted an otherwise worthy human endeavor.

Rainer Mallebrein from the german company telefunken and his rollkugelsteuerung would like a few words with you

​

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Rollkugel-Erfinder-gibt-allerste-PC-Maus-nach-Paderborn-4421963.html

Same with a Texas Instruments employee who invented the integrated circuit that revolutionized the electronics industry. I think he got a $50 bonus.

The weird thing about your post -- which I think is a fine analysis, -- is that it's all about the machinations of those three tech companies.

Meanwhile Doug Engelbart, over at Stanford/SRI, who started the whole thing by inventing the mouse, not only got nothing, but Stanford itself only got $40k out of it.

Lol, Apple has no fucking clue what a mouse is either.

Edit: Apple Dick suckers downvoting me for calling out their mindless propensity to gurgle Apples balls makes my dick hard.

Government grants and open research etc are still subject to the distribution of resources. A government gets money by taxing income and profits. So it is taking from someone and giving to another. It is resource allocation by fiat that wouldn't be possible without excess generated by production and labor.

If everyone could only grow enough food to feed themselves and could not generate excess, then there is no excess to distribute. From whence then comes a "free" exchange or development of ideas. There is no "free" in this - only what one recognizes as more legitimate and less legitimate forms of distribution and allocation of resources.

Again, irrespective of ideology, societies only develop new ideas and technology when society generates excess. If a society produces more than enough for the basic needs of their society, then some people can explore other venues of value creation (again, being agnostic about what is value).

Profit isn't a goal into itself - that is a strawman. The problem is distributional both in the resources to create and develop the idea as well as the resources needed to bring the benefit to society at large. Otherwise we end up subscribing to magical thinking as far as how ideas can develop and how ideas either in the form of knowledge or products are distributed.

If you want to overwhelm yourself, stop for a second to consider how many mice are being used this very second across the entire planet.

Thank you Douglas for your contribution.

> “Share and share alike” was the common attitude among computer scientists and engineers back in the day, and had that not been the case, this thread would not exist.

Neither would my computer at home. I use linux so without that, I'd be looking at a blank monitor instead of videos / games at night after work.

“It simply isn’t possible to create something so complex, consisting of so many essential yet disparate components, in an economic milieu that prioritizes short-term monetary gain over long-term societal contribution,” he writes, while living in a society that prioritizes short-term monetary gain over long-term societal contribution. “Also, I am an inanimate object. I don’t even exist.”

He drew his salary. And if he had produced nothing, he would have drawn his salary.

That’s the deal he chose. He didn’t complain, why should you?