That's pretty reasonable, considering the price tag for the tech demo that introduced Steve Jobs to the GUI was Xerox having the opportunity to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock at a pre-IPO price of $10 per share. Considering Apple's IPO price was $22.00, that wasn't bad, and it closed at $29. Remember that this is before a long series of CEOs who were desperately trying to run the company into the ground.

But I digress. That opportunity to buy a million dollars' worth of stock wasn't any sort of a license or anything like that; it was just for a demo, because Xerox PARC was where all of the cool stuff was happening. Yes, at Xerox. Stop laughing; it's not funny. Okay, fine, cool stuff was happening at IBM, too. ... You know what, if you can't take this seriously, I'm just going to leave.

Anyway, that price tag didn't come with a license, so Xerox was waiting to see how the "look and feel" part of the Apple-Microsoft legal wars shook out, because if Apple could take Microsoft for basically stealing the Mac interface for Windows, then Xerox could take Apple for doing the same for the Macintosh operating system. But, turns out look and feel doesn't get legal protection and turning a trash can into a recycle bin is just enough of a change to qualify as different. And so, Xerox never got any more out of Apple than a good purchase price on the stock.

No, I couldn't tell you when Xerox sold that stock. Hopefully before the end of the Sculley administration, let alone Michael Spindler or Gil Amelio, who were desperately trying to sell the company to anyone dumb enough to buy it. Yeah, there was a time when Apple had about two weeks' of operating capital left. But, to close out the Xerox story, because of stock splits and such (a 4-for1, a 7-for-1, and three 2-for-1s), that $10 per share would have been about a nickel per share today. You might think, "Wow, they're so dumb for selling," but you have to remember that at the end of 1997, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that split-adjusted stock price was floating around fifteen cents. Nobody knew if Apple was going to be around in six months, and if a time-traveler told you that it would be the biggest company on earth, you'd have asked the guy where he gets whatever drugs he's smoking, so Xerox probably sold before that.