[breput]

I think you meant a quote attributed to Bill Gates:

"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

[walrus01]

Yes, I think the Gates quote was a response to repeated and aggressive complaints originating from Jobs (to anyone who would listen) that he had been ripped off.

[jakebasile]

I don't know if that's a real quote from Gates, but I do know it was in Pirates of Silicon Valley.

[Maxatar]

Seems legit:

https://www.folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html

[jakebasile]

Neat, so the scene in the movie was pretty close to reality then!

[itopaloglu83]

I thought Xerox demoed something they haven’t implemented yet, and Apple turned a mockup into a real GUI.

[marcusb]

They implemented it. They just couldn't get out of their own way to successfully sell it (See "Dealer's of Lightning"[0])

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

[walrus01]

It's not so much that they couldn't sell it, but adjusted for inflation to today's money, a well equipped Xerox Star workstation with reasonable amount of RAM, HDD ($20000+ in 1981 money), would be the equivalent of $70,000 in today's money. It was very much a high end system affordable only by a few niche users.

It's not clear to me how much it cost them to build the Star, but it might have been pretty close to that 20000 figure if they included all the R&D costs that went into it, and the fairly specialized high end hardware at the time like 20MB HDD. And it was being done in fairly low quantities so not much economy of scale.

[noosphr]

They changed the live system from having line by line scrolling to pixel scrolling after Jobs asked why they didn't do it during the lunch break.

[Upvoter33]

No that is not true. Read about PARC and all the crazy tech they built some time. It was ahead of its time!