27 April 1981: Xerox unveils the Star, and lets others profit from it
On April 27, 1981 Xerox introduced the Star workstation, with a graphical interface, mouse, icons, folders and networking, years ahead of anything else. It cost about $16,600 and sold poorly. Much of the technology came from Xerox's Palo Alto lab, which Steve Jobs had famously toured. Apple and later Microsoft turned those ideas into mass-market products, while Xerox kept selling copiers.
The lesson: Inventing something is not the same as profiting from it; distribution and price usually decide the winner.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Xerox at the start of 1995 → $167 today, vs $14,783 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1995, the first year in our price data after the event. That is a loss of $833, while a plain index fund over the same years made $13,783.
What Xerox teaches: Inventing the future does not mean owning it; Xerox's lab created breakthroughs worth trillions to others while its own franchise depended on a fading product.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $30.00 | $167 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $60.00 | $83.33 | $4,626 |
| 2003 | $8.00 | $625 | $7,727 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Xerox? Every starting year and the full story →
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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