The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) invented virtually all of what we recognize as the modern office back in the late 1970s. If you visited PARC back then, you would've seen networked computers (Ethernet) with laser printers running graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The applications were written using object-oriented programming (Smalltalk) and people regularily used email and just about all of the other things we take for granted. PARC had invented the future.

One problem - XEROX was a copier company. The corporate execs had no idea what PARC had invented. One day, they ordered the head of PARC to give a tour to an exec from a nearby computer company. The exec was Steve Jobs of Apple. The XEROX execs weren't bright enough to recognize the future, but Jobs sure was. XEROX could've owned it all.