The GUI was invented by Douglas Engelbart and his research group at the Stanford Research Institute. It was then copied by researchers at Xerox PARC. One fine day, Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, was touring PARC and saw a GUI on a Xerox computer and said something to the effect of ‘‘Holy mackerel. This is the future of computing.’’ The GUI gav e him the idea for a new computer, which became the Apple Lisa. The Lisa was too expensive and was a commercial failure, but its successor, the Macintosh, was a huge success.
When Microsoft got a Macintosh prototype so it could develop Microsoft Office on it, it begged Apple to license the interface to all comers so it would become the new industry standard. (Microsoft made much more money from Office than from MS-DOS, so it was willing to abandon MS-DOS to have a better platform
for Office.) The Apple executive in charge of the Macintosh, Jean-Louis Gasse´e, refused and Steve Jobs was no longer around to overrule him. Eventually, Microsoft got a license for elements of the interface. This formed the basis of Windows. When Windows began to catch on, Apple sued Microsoft, claiming Microsoft had exceeded the license, but the judge disagreed and Windows went on to overtake the Macintosh. If Gasse´e had agreed with the many people within Apple who also wanted to license the Macintosh software to everyone and his uncle, Apple would have become insanely rich on licensing fees alone and Windows would not exist now