Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first Smalltalk-80 tape was delivered to Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC on February 17, 1981. So in a way, they all had licenses at this point though it was more a contract to review the system and the book that was being written as well as dedicating at least two engineers each to try to implement it. Three more tapes followed (the last one probably early in 1982). When Smalltalk-80 Version 2 was released all four…
Thanks for the info. Now, if I understand the time line for Lisa, what you have said, and what 'dealers in Lightning' have said; the book must be refering to a pre 1980 decision (or the book is out to lunch)? When did Lisa actually start? // sorry for the latency on my responses, I'm driving west on I94
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.t...
This contradicts some accounts which say that the Lisa was a text based minicomputer before the Xerox visit.
In practice both the Lisa and the Macintosh projects started in 1979. This is pretty amazing when you consider that the floppy disk for the Apple II had just been made available less than a year before and Visicalc had not yet been released. That the Apple III was in development at this time seems pretty reasonable, but these more advanced machines were pretty ambitious.
Jef Raskin was very familiar with the Xerox PARC work since he had visited there when he was a professor at UCLA before he joined Apple to work on documentation. He didn't like the mouse or windows, but had always been interested in a fully graphical computer. His ideas for the Macintosh can be seen in his later Canon Cat machine. Steve Jobs didn't like his project and kept trying to kill it. Jef thought that if Steve could see the Alto he would "get it" and leave the Macintosh group alone. That is indeed what happened. But not long after that Steve was kicked out of the Lisa project by the board who wanted someone with more experience to be in charge of such an important project. Steve joined the Macintosh project and reshaped it as a "Lisa Jr", which caused Jef to leave Apple.
In the Lisa timeline you can see the effect of the second visit to PARC (both were in 1979) in the form of windows, though these didn't stay like the Smalltalk ones for very long (this style reappeared in the BeOS for some reason). And the effect of the launch of the Xerox Star can be seen in 1981 in the form of icons which look very much like the ones on the Star.
The Smalltalk project at Apple was started in October 1980 and lasted 18 months. The system first started running on the Lisa in April 1981.