Steve Jobs last insanely great idea was in 1979…

It’s well acknowledged that Steve Jobs took great inspiration from a visit he and others from Apple made in 1979 to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Xerox were a strange company – they invested in an R&D facility that had huge prophetic influence, and yet they managed to commercially exploit just about none of its output as they couldn’t draw themselves away from their cash cow of photocopying.

The basics of the now commonplace computing interface of Window, Icon, Menu and Pointing Device (WIMP as it used to be known) was invented at PARC, witnessed by Jobs on his visit there in 1979, refined in the Apple Lisa, and then commercially exploited in the Mac and Windows operating systems.

I had a quick play with an iPad for the first time yesterday. As you’d expect with a product from Apple, it’s beautifully designed, the interface is quicker to respond than I expected, and my undoubted dislike of the control-freakery of Apple means that I’m almost certainly going to dashed in my hopes that it’s not a commercial success.

I was chatting to Dad on the phone last night (he’s made massive improvements in the last 48 hours), and he mentioned that Alan Kay, one of PARC’s most influential thinkers, had had a concept of the DynaBook knocking around at the time of those Jobs visits to PARC, and that the DynaBook would be more than a little familiar…

Having done a little research, I found that Kay actually published his concept of the DynaBook back in 1972 in this document. Whilst no-one would argue that it is a blueprint for the iPad, the DNA is unmistakeable. However, whilst the form factor is very similar, the underpinning theory was very different… Kay saw the DynaBook as a tool for child learning, and today is heavily involved in Nicolas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative.

So next time you hear about the next amazing new innovation from Apple, maybe take a look at the PARC history and see if it’s another one to roll off that illustrious (if ancient) ideas production line.