See: http://www.parc.com/about/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

There is no question that Alan did invent the term "Object Oriented Programming" (and was rewarded with a Turing award for his work) and also invented Smalltalk which was well known to be inspired by Lisp, Simula, Logo, Sketchpad.

The GUI, overlapping windows on a bitmap screen, WYSIWIG editor, etc i.e. the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC that later influenced and was commercialized by Apple.

Naming something isn't inventing it.

Kay's Turing award was "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages" which might or might not include inventing "Object Oriented Programming..." and as it happens turns out not to.

See: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm

Key quote from the article:

"While working on FLEX, Kay witnessed Douglas Engelbart’s demonstration of interactive computing designed to support collaborative work groups. Engelbart’s vision influenced Kay to adopt graphical interfaces, hypertext, and the mouse."

Incidentally, Doug Engelbart is still alive and a Turing award winner:

http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_7929781.cfm

"Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers had become alienated from him and left his organization when Xerox PARC was created in 1970."

History of OOP including Simula 67: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

Go look at the "Mother of All Demos" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos -- which introduces the mouse, a macdraw-like drawing program, and a mouse-driven word processor. This is the invention of the GUI that not only predates Xerox PARC but students from the lab that did this work went on to work at Xerox PARC. (And the Xerox PARC mouse was a clumsy, expensive, and unreliable device very similar to the crude device from the older demo -- the modern mouse was actually invented by an engineer contracted by Steve Jobs).

"the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC"

The personal computer as we know it today was invented by a lot of people over a period of time, although it is usually ascribed to Apple, Altair, IMSAI, etc. -- not Xerox. Xerox added a GUI to their $10,000 "personal computer" and that is a feature of today's personal computer, but so are scalable fonts (btw: that's Donald Knuth who deserves as much fanboi love as Alan Kay) and web browsers, neither of which were created by Xerox.

At MIT we had perfectly usable and reliable mice on Lisp Machines long before the Mac or Lisa existed. It is true that they were not mass-produced, however.

Interesting: when did the Lisp Machine actually ship as a product? And did it have a mouse from day one? According to the Wikipedia article it looks like something may have shipped in 1980 for $70,000 per unit...

MIT never made Lisp Machines as a product. The ones made at MIT were hand-made for use only at MIT. (Well, there was a robotic wire-wrapping machine that did a lot of the work automatically, and there was another robot that would automatically test the connectivity of all the wires. IIRC, it would take a couple of weeks for the robotic connectivity tester just to test one backplane.)

Most of the people involved with designing the Lisp Machines ultimately left MIT, however, to start companies to manufacture and sell them. The most prominent of these was Symbolics. There was also LMI.

And yes, Lisp Machines were very expensive personal computers. But computers for "professionals" were generally pretty expensive at the time. A timesharing computer that could handle 20 or 30 users could easily cost $1 million.

How much did the mouse for a Lisp Machine cost? IIRC, around $250. Economies of scale, and all that.... Yes, Lisp Machines always had mice.

Btw, it was the founding of Symbolics and LMI that prompted Richard Stallman to become a free software radical. He stayed at MIT, and spent a lot of his time porting back to MIT's Lisp Machine Lisp the improvements made to it by Symbolics. This is why Stallman came up with the GPL. He was galled that Symbolics had hijacked MIT's open code and had made it proprietary.

@nessus42: Thanks for the info. Another question is how intrinsic the mouse was to use of the machine and did it have more than one button? Part of the genius of the Mac design was doing with one button what Xerox did (badly) with three. (Yes, other companies later added more buttons all over again, but the Xerox UI, which I used briefly, required using different buttons for distinct operations in a way that, once you'd used a Mac mouse, made no sense at all.)

The mouse was completely intrinsic to the Lisp Machine. Though I'm sure that most people would consider the GUI rather ugly and primitive by today's standards. Think Emacs for X11.

The mouse was a three button mouse. The way it worked certainly made sense to me at the time, but it was made for nerds. Apple certainly did a ton of great work to make personal computers usable (and affordable) by normal people.

Apple added other buttons, but you had to use your other hand to press them to get shift-click etc

Commercially the MIT derived Lisp Machine was first sold in 1981. With mouse. You could not use it without mouse.

At that time Xerox was also using their own Lisp Machines internally - Alan Kay knew those. Those were later also sold as a product.

The personal computer first created at PARC was the Alto, not the Star, and from what I've read/seen, I agree with the quote.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlYSzMqGR8 (I only watched the first minute or so)

Overlapping windows were first done by Apple. (See your own references)

Actually I tried chasing this up. Xerox did overlapping windows first and they performed abominably (they drew everything using painter's algorithm). They dropped overlapping windows as a performance optimization.

Then Andy Hertzfeld or Bill Atkinson implemented clipping in such a way that most drawing commands became no-ops when they were outside a clipping region (if you set a clip rect then call "fillrect" and it's outside the clipping rect then you do nothing, right?), allowing highly performant overlapping windows. There's a bit somewhere (folklore, Hackers? can't remember) where they showed this to Xerox folk who couldn't believe how well it worked.

Actually, Bill Atkinson saw the PARC demo along with Jobs, and he thought Xerox had come up with an efficient implementation for overlapping regions. This inspired him to work on his own implementation for a problem he previously had considered too difficult. Only after Atkinson had finished his implementation did he learn that PARC was using a brute-force technique. (The Alto was a more powerful and expensive computer than the Lisa and Macintosh, so it could get away with a less efficient implementation.)