Yeah, Xerox really blew it.

As you record, they had all the components in place of what we would call the modern desktop computer. Mac advocates who claim that Gates stole the GUI desktop metaphor from Apple, would do well to remember that Gates got his ideas from PARC.

What is more, Xerox once had a big lead in desktop publishing software with their application Ventura Publisher. (More under link, below)

In the late 80's/early 90's, the DOS-based Ventura was an effective, if not slightly clanky answer for the publishing needs of many organizations as they pioneered the move away from offset to the desktop.

At the time, Xerox practically had the field to itself.

Ventura was WYSIWYG, supported multiple frames to flow text or insert graphics, was reasonably snappy, had a decent selection of propriatary fonts, and critically, reliable LaserJet II drivers for print, and usable video drivers for our NEC MultiGraph portrait-mode monochrome monitors.

We used Ventura to publish parts catalogs, and all this was current just a decade ago.

Ventura was orginally set-up to run on the GEM desktop, one of the early competitors to Windows. (screenshoot) This transpired in the days of Windows 2 and Windows 386, if anyone remembers those variants, the latter being designed to take advantage of the then-new protected mode of Intel's revolutionary 386.

At any rate, Apple sued GEM and won, Microsoft soon brought out Windows 3, which was a big improvement over earlier versions, and not long thereafter, Windows 3.1, when Microsoft finally started getting it together. Windows 3.1 was the standard version until Windows 95, another big advance.

Somewhere along the way, Xerox seemed to lose interest in Ventura. We continued to use the application, and I ran it fine under Windows 3.1, albeit full-screen only. Xerox did release a Windows version of Ventura, but like WordStar and eventually even WordPerfect, DBase and so many others, they never were able to make the transition to the Windows environment completely successfully.

Corel eventually ended up with Ventura, but by then, FrameMaker, Pagemaker, Quark, and finally even Word had pretty much elbowed Ventura out of the way. A few outfits still use it, but not many.

I wonder if any of these cases of failure in transit from DOS to Windows were due to the disadvantages of being kept in the dark by Microsoft's secrecy with the inner-workings of Windows.

sp