I am reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and also an application for funds for research, a research grant proposal. The biography is for pleasure, and I am really enjoying it, the grant proposal because I am refereeing it. The grant proposal has, as it is required to, a “Pathways to Impact” section, in which the applicants are supposed to put down how the new knowledge discovered in the proposed research will have an impact – by making money or by an impact on society. Requiring scientists to talk about the possible impact of their work is pretty reasonable, although doing that even before you start the work is tricky.

Reading the biography of Jobs in parallel with the “Pathways to Impact” section has got me thinking that Jobs and Apple have clearly had a big impact on us (I am typing this on a Mac), so what would be Jobs’ “Pathway to Impact”. He has done a lot of things but I am early on in the book, and Jobs has just gone to see the Xerox corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and seen the first computers with a graphical use interface (GUI).

The picture up top is of the Xerox Alto. It was the first computer with a modern computer interface: where there are icons and you can click on things with a mouse, etc. At the time Jobs visited PARC computers just had a text terminal at which you typed commands.

So Apple’s exploitation of this Xerox ideas led to the first computer with a modern GUI, which is now absolutely ubiquitous, all Macs, Windows machines and Linux-based machines have these interfaces. So the impact is huge, but what was the pathway?

First, a large corporation, Xerox, set up an innovative lab, PARC in California. Xerox’s management completely failed to exploit the absolutely genius ideas this lab came up with. Then as part of a deal with Apple, Xerox showed these ideas to Jobs and others at Apple, who realised the enormous potential, and then went on to exploit it, transform computing and make a lot of money.

At this point (late 70s) Jobs was dressing as a hippy, and not bathing for days under the mistaken (according to numerous contemporaries) impression that his vegan diet prevented body odour. So the “Pathway to Impact”, to use the British government term, of the computer interface you are using to read this blog, is via a driven but smelly hippy. Sadly, when I come to write one of these things, I do not think that I can write anything remotely like the story above. Even though it all happened. I will have to make up something much more plausible.