Founded in 1971, the Xerox PARC research facility in Palo Alto, California, developed and predicted key technologies that would be the cornerstone of the personal computer systems we now use – the graphical user interface, the mouse, being able to print exactly what appeared on the screen (WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get) and linking computers (Ethernet) so you could send and receive email, among other innovations. US computer scientist Alan Kay (1940-) developed the SmallTalk object-oriented programming environment at Xerox, an early GUI.

The Xerox Alto computer was used to demonstrate some of these developments to Steve Jobs and the Apple entourage in December 1979. Upon seeing the mouse being used with a graphical user interface (GUI) Jobs was transfixed – he understood that these were the tools non-computer users needed to interact with a computer.

Xerox tried to commercialise these technologies however the Xerox Star computer system was expensive. Despite this Xerox helped pave the way for the computer interface we use today.