After Jobs returned from PARC, he met with a man named Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. Jobs went to Xerox PARC on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I saw him on the Friday afternoon, Hovey recalled. I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, No, no, no, youve got to do a mouse. I was, like, Whats a mouse? I didnt have a clue. So he explains it, and he says, You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Heres your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans. From that meeting, I went to Walgreens, which is still there, at the corner of Grant and El Camino in Mountain View, and I wandered around and bought all the underarm deodorants that I could find, because they had that ball in them. I bought a butter dish. That was the beginnings of the mouse.
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The trick was to connect the ball to the rest of the mouse at the two points where there was the least frictionright where his fingertips had been, dead center on either side of the ball. If its right at midpoint, theres no force causing it to rotate. So it rolls.
Hovey estimated their consulting fee at thirty-five dollars an hour; the whole project cost perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. I originally pitched Apple on doing this mostly for royalties, as opposed to a consulting job, he recalled. I said, Im thinking fifty cents apiece, because I was thinking that theyd sell fifty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand of them. He burst out laughing, because of how far off his estimates ended up being. Steves pretty savvy. He said no. Maybe if Id asked for a nickel, I would have been fine.
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So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical animal back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels.
If you lined up Engelbarts mouse, Xeroxs mouse, and Apples mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.
The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobss imagination. Xerox PARCs innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the users intention and the computers response.
Jobss software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized direct manipulation. If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash canall features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.
The difference between direct and indirect manipulationbetween three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ballis not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something thats appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1WK0vo2YI
Even in school for my dissertation presentations, I always took notes from how Jobs approached his keynotes and how to convey my passion to the audience and convince them. Having said that, I also admire Bill for all the work he's done outside of his industry through his foundation, he inspires me to give back. So in effect, I draw inspiration from Steve to be successful and from Bill to be more successful in helping the less fortunate.
I remember that, thanks for the nostalgia rush. It's rather weird how far behind Mac/Atari/MS were back in the day from Amiga and now Amiga is just a relic from the olden days 
