It was at PARC that Steve and his group from Apple first saw the nascent technologies that would later become the distinguishing features of the Lisa and the Macintosh, and eventually all personal computers. They were shown a computer that featured a screen that was white like a sheet of paper, not black. Moreover, that screen had the exact dimensions of standard typing paper—8½ inches wide by 11 inches tall. On it were projected black characters so sharp and shapely that they looked as if they had been printed on that sheet of paper. The characters had been “bitmapped,” meaning that each pixel of the screen followed individual instructions from the computer, a radical new technology that gave developers full graphic control of the monitor screen. (Previously they had only been able to place rudimentary white, green, or orange characters on a black screen. Graphical images, other than meticulously arranged agglomerations of standard characters, were out of the question.) These bitmapped characters were really just the beginning of the changes: that screen also could display and organize the contents of the machine’s digital data storage by means of graphical “icons”—little symbolic figures a tad smaller than a postage stamp—representing documents that could be placed “inside” chimerical folder icons by means of a strange pointing device the geeks at PARC called a “mouse.” This mouse could also be used to directly move a cursor around a document on the screen when writing or editing. To delete a file or a folder, you would throw it in the trash by using the mouse to “drag” the icon representing a document over to a special icon on the screen that looked like a garbage can, and “drop” it in. Compared to the black screen with eerie green characters that had preceded it, this “graphical user interface”—or GUI (pronounced “gooey”), as it came to be known—represented at least as radical a break as when silent movies shifted to talkies.

The PARC researchers understood full well how significant a development this was, and were dismayed that Xerox had, in effect, paid for the privilege of giving Steve and the other Apple visitors access to technology this radical and new. They believed, correctly, that Xerox senior management back east was not that interested in building a full-blown computer; rather, they wanted to create better photocopiers, and perhaps a dedicated word processor to compete with Wang’s. Xerox did not come out with a computer using the PARC technology until 1981. Called the STAR, it was an intriguing device that was sold not to individual consumers but to businesses, as part of a networked system of at least three desktop units that sold for about $16,000 each. While it was a capable microcomputer for its time, customers balked at having to shell out $50,000 or so just to get the minimum setup for an office. It had little impact in the marketplace.

Steve realized that the Xerox GUI could be the foundation of something very ambitious and very personal. Visual iconography on a screen could make computing almost intuitive for just about everyone. Existing computer interfaces put a wall of arcane commands and typographical symbols that looked like expletives between the user and the results spewed back by the computer. If you replaced those commands with visual icons that could be easily manipulated via a mouse, harnessing the data-processing power of a computer might feel more like going to the library and pulling a book off the shelf, or like engaging in a discussion with a really smart friend or teacher. This interaction, this feeling of comfort with the back-and-forth with a computer, could lead to the realization of Steve’s overarching goal, the creation of a truly personal computer for ordinary people. Steve even had a metaphor for what that computer could be—a bicycle for the mind. After visiting PARC he was a changed man; these were technologies he wanted to bring to everyone in the world.

NOW STEVE FACED the challenge of delivering on this promise within the gnawing confines of Apple. It would be a staggeringly ambitious project—one that no one at Apple but Steve could have imagined, and one that no one but he could have made so maddeningly complicated. The long road had many detours and would be pockmarked with collateral damage, but it would eventually lead to the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984.

After that visit to Xerox PARC, Steve completed what had been a slow abandonment of the Apple III development. The more he realized that the machine was simply a modest renovation of the Apple II, the more his attention wandered. Now he turned away completely, with the intention of applying what he’d learned at PARC to another computer already under development at Apple. This machine was specifically designed for Fortune 500 companies that required heavy-duty networked computing to accomplish tasks that were significantly more data-intensive than anything that could be handled by the Apple II or even the Apple III.

The Lisa, as this machine was dubbed, had been gestating since mid-1978, without making much progress. So when Steve assumed full control of the project in early 1980, the team felt a brief spurt of optimism. Steve told them that he fully intended to have the Lisa be the first computer to feature a graphical user interface and a mouse. They had, he told them, a chance to make history. He asked Bill Atkinson, the project’s lead software architect, how long it would take to translate what they’d seen at PARC into software that could be run on the Lisa. Atkinson predicted that he could do it in a mere half a year—missing the mark by some two and a half years. Clearly, Steve wasn’t the only person at Apple who could confuse a clear vision for a short path.

Steve’s brief management of the Lisa project revealed all his weaknesses. Once again, he couldn’t resolve the disparity between the corporate demands for this computer and his own ambitions. The Lisa was supposed to be for businesses, but Steve focused almost exclusively on what would make the machine accessible and friendly for an individual. Once again, he had the right idea for the long run—years later, easy-to-use computers would make personal computing ubiquitous across businesses both small and large—without the perspective needed to succeed in the short term. He paid lip service to the special needs of corporations and institutions, but what really fascinated him were the rounded edges of the icons on the Lisa’s “desktop” interface.

Atkinson and his programmers did create significant improvements on what they’d seen at PARC; the Lisa project is where the modern user-interface concepts of overlapping windows, seamless scrolling, and the mouse came into their own. But Steve was a failure at managing this group, in large part because he didn’t offer them a unified vision to rally around, given that his own interests were not those of the target audience—business users. When the project stalled, as was inevitable, Steve lashed out, excoriating the team and threatening to bring in Woz, who could surely get things done better and faster. Scotty tried to help Steve out by recruiting Larry Tesler, one of Xerox PARC’s own top researchers, and a group of his associates to try to bring a little more discipline and focus to the project. But two months after Tesler’s hire, Scotty looked at where the Lisa was headed and saw that the computer he had been counting on to represent Apple in the all-important business market was going to be too late, too expensive, and most likely a muddled mess of a machine.

In the fall of 1980, Scotty kicked Steve off the team after only nine months of being in charge, and handed its management over to a former Hewlett-Packard senior engineering exec named John Couch. Twice now, in rapid succession, Steve had failed when trying to lead a team to create a computer for the business market. While more and more people in the computer industry were keenly in tune with the needs of enterprise customers, Steve wasn’t one of them.