A long time ago there was this place called Palo Alto labs. It was a place owned by Xerox corporation. What it provided was a place for computer scientists to meet and research with out bowing to market pressures. Many great things were produced in the equivalent of a computer dream works. However back in corporate America, company executives were not concerned with these new break hroughs. They thought these things like inter-office networks and Ethernet were so pointless that they allowed a young man named Steve Jobs into their labs to look around. Jobs was THE mover and shaker at Apple Computers. At Palo Alto he met a man named GUI. (Graphical User Interface) Though there were other things in the lab, like the first computer network, this GUI was what really interested Jobs. At the time all operating systems were based on keying in comands into the computer. Basiclly if you wanted to do things like copy using DOS you would have to type things like this:

copy computerinside.txt a:\

Where in the GUI you can drag and click. Jobs thought this was a wonderful idea. So he went back to Apple and started work on project Macintosh, named after America's favorite type of apple (I never heard of it either but that's what my research says). So in 1984 the Macintosh OS was born and Xerox exec's wake up in the middle of the night screaming for no reason. After that Microsoft "borrowed" the GUI idea, and now it is Microsoft that owns the computer world and not Xerox. On a side note those people that worked at Palo later started their own companys and made things like Ethernet Etc. (and got rich off them)

(Note from Galen: Maybe I should have titled this The Fumble Heard Round the Globe)

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