Book
Steve Jobs:
I have always been shameless
about stealing great ideas
Many books were published about Steve
Jobs including a 626-page book by Wal-
ter Isaacson, the managing editor of Time
Magazine and the former chairman and
CEO of CNN, a book by Leander Kahney
titled “Inside Steve’s Brain” and other pub-
lications which we summarize in a number
of consecutive parts.
Goldmine ...
During the summer of 1979 Steve Jobs
knew that the investment department at
Xerox was interested in taking part in the
second round of Apple financing scheme.
He offered them to invest $1 million in
Apple against revealing what they were
developing at Xerox PARC, which was es-
tablished in 1970 to seek room for gener-
ating digital ideas. Xerox accepted the of-
fer and agreed to keep Apple on its cutting
edge of technology. In return, Xerox would
buy 100,000 shares at $10 each. One
year after this agreement, Apple’s shares
were offered for public subscription and
Xerox’ shares, which were originally worth
$1 million, were valued approximately at
$17.6 million.
Following this Agreement, Jobs felt that
Xerox had not given him enough informa-
tion and asked for full explanation within
the few coming days. Xerox team tried
hard to conceal some information but
failed to do so and had eventually to dis-
close all the information they had to Jobs
and his aides, who knew that Xerox had
a programming language called Smalltalk.
Once Smalltalk was being demonstrated,
Jobs and his aides got frantic with excite-
ment and kept staring at the screen to
examine every pixel inside it. Jobs kept
yelling at them, unbelieving that they had
not marketed this technology. “You are
sitting on a goldmine but do not know”, he
yelled.
The most important features of Small-
I
t was the tumultuous life led by Steve Jobs that enabled him to spark revolutions in six different
industries around the world such as personal computers, animation movies, music, phones, tablet
computers, digital publishing, as well as the revolution he caused in the application-based digital
content market. Therefore, we may consider his apple, the logo of Apple Inc., to be the third apple to
change the world after Adam’s and that which led Newton to gravity law.
"Smalltalk"
is not a theft
but a Xerox
folly
(Part 9)
