One of the on-going myths of Steve Jobs is that he was a visionary because he saw what a research lab run by Xerox had done, and then turned the idea into the Lisa computer first, and then the Mac.
He gets credit for commercializing it, but not for dreaming about it. The engineering office in which I worked in the early 1980s had two IBM DisplayWriter word processing systems that used the Xerox monitor and printer. These were dedicated word processors, at which two secretaries turned our hand-written engineering report into beautiful pages that looked like they were typeset.
The DisplayWriter computers featured a white-screen monitor in portrait orientation, using WYSIWYG to make the screen look like the printed page. I remember seeing them and thinking, wow! Wouldn't it be great to have that on the desktop.
This was around the time that IBM launched its PC in 1981, which came with either a green text-only screen or very-low res graphics; but it was good enough. Apple launched the Lisa a few years later, in 1983. The base model was $10,000, and eventually it failed in the market place due to its high price and failing hardware.
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