What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?

A good enough answer would be longer than is reasonable for Quora, but I can supply a few comments to highlight just how little attention is paid in the media, histories, and by most people to find out what actually happened. For example, I was present at the visit and demo, and it was the work of my group and myself that Steve saw, yet the Quora question is the first time that anyone has asked me what happened. (Worth pondering that interesting fact!)

First, it’s worth understanding that many people (perhaps even a thousand or more) had seen live demos of the Alto and Smalltalk before Steve. This is because Steve showed up in 1979, and the Alto and Smalltalk had been running for 6 years (starting in the first half of 1973), and we were a relatively open lab for visiting colleagues and other interested people (like Herbie Hancock and Al Gore).

Many more people had read articles that I’d written (e.g. in Scientific American, Sept 1977), and one with Adele Goldberg (in IEEE Computer March 1977). These included many screen shots and a wide variety of Smalltalk media. For example, here is the provocative title of the 1977 SciAm article:

And a picture of the Alto being used by children:

And a picture of the Alto screen and caption from the SciAm article in 1977 (SciAm did a bad scan of this, if I have time I’ll find the physical issue and do a better scan):

The readership of SciAm in those days was about 2.5 million, so a lot of people saw this.

A second important fact about the 1979 demo to Steve, was that he missed most of what we showed him. More than 15 years later he admits this in this interview:How Steve Jobs got the ideas of GUI from XEROX where he says that we showed him three things but he was so blinded by the first one (the GUI) that he missed both networking and real object-oriented systems programming. (A fun part of this is that Steve, after praising the GUI to the skies, realizes what he’s saying and immediately says “but it was flawed and incomplete”, etc. This was his way of trying to be “top gun” when in a room where he wasn’t the smartest person.)

And, actually, he missed a few things about the GUI (for example, that it had unlimited and persistent “desktops” which could be used to sustain work/projects over time without having to tear down and build up, and without stovepiped apps, etc.)

The demo itself was fun to watch — basically a tag team of Dan Ingalls and Larry Tesler showing many kinds of things to Steve and the several Apple people he brought with him. One of Steve’s ways to feel in control was to object to things that were actually OK, and he did this a few times — but in each case Dan and Larry were able to make the changes to meet the objections on the fly because Smalltalk was not only the most advanced programming language of its time, it was also live at every level, and no change required more than 1/4 second to take effect.

One objection was that the text scrolling was line by line and Steve said “Can’t this be smooth?”. In a few seconds Dan made the change. Another more interesting objection was to the complementation of the text that was used (as today) to indicate a selection. Steve said “Can’t that be an outline?”. Standing in the back of the room, I held my breath a bit (this seemed hard to fix on the fly). But again, Dan Ingalls instantly saw a very clever way to do this (by selecting the text as usual, then doing this again with the selection displaced by a few pixels — this left a dark outline around the selection and made the interior clear). Again this was done in a few seconds, and voila!

The Smalltalk used in this demo was my personal favorite (-78) that was done for the first portable computer (The Parc Notetaker), but also ran on the more powerful Dorado computer. For a fun “Christmas project” in 2014, several of us (with Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenburg doing the heavy lifting) got a version of this going (it had been saved from a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away).

I was able to use this rescued version to make all the visuals for a tribute to Ted Nelson without any new capabilities required. The main difference in the tribute is that the revived version had much more RAM to work with, and this allowed more bit-map images to be used. This is on YouTube, and it might be interesting for readers to see what this system could do in 1978–79. Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest

I’d defer to Alan Kay’s answer here as authoritative because I wasn’t at PARC when Steve Job visited. But, as Alan points out, a number of people got the demo there. I was one, as the editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

Looking back, I assume those engineers were waiting for some remark from me, even one as catty as Jobs’s seeming compulsion to play top dog. But I had gone brain-blank, speechless at my first look, and had nothing intelligent to say (a common occurrence, some might say). A monitor with multiple windows; one of the engineers pointed out that a different process was running in each window; a mouse (shaped something like a pack of cigarettes); and, just frosting on the cake, one of the PARC folks reached out and rotated the entire CRT from horizontal to vertical and the display rotated to match.

It felt like we were on the cusp of The Jetsons. I was never part of the “80 hours a week and loving it” Appletopia, I probably would not have survived the rough-and-tumble. But from the start I was very glad someone picked up the PARC work to polish and refine it — over years — to become something as akin to fine design as to the technology.