Apple and Steve Jobs Steal From Xerox To Battle Big Brother IBM

An Apple Inc. Lisa II computer circa 1983 sits on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, U.S. Photographer: Noah Berger/Bloomberg This week's milestones in the history of technology include the public unveiling of the air defense system that led to networked and interactive computing, and the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh that led to the mainstreaming of the graphical user interface. The development of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) is disclosed to the public. It collected and coordinated data from radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area, directing the response of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to an air attack. SAGE's use of telephone lines to communicate from computer to computer and computer to radar laid the groundwork for modems. The control program, the largest real-time computer program written at that time, spawned a new profession, software engineering.