[Swordmaker]

but I also believe that PARC hadn’t patented the mouse or done any legal intellectual property work on the GUI. Consequently, from a legal perspective both the GUI and the mouse were only protected as trade secrets, which protection would have been waived by the tours in the absence of a confidentiality agreement, of which there was none that I know of.

There's a lot you "don't know of" since PARC did not invent the mouse or the concept of the GUI. In fact PARC got many of their ideas from Jef Raskin, an ex-professor of computer science and human interface who had lectured at PARC before they started work on their GUI, who was then head of Apple's GUI project and suggest that he and Jobs visit PARC . . .

[dfwgator]

The first introduction of the mouse was by Doug Engelbart, of the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, in 1968, probably the most famous demo of all time

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

[achilles2000]

I didn’t say that PARC invented either the mouse or the “concept” of the GUI. PARC did develop working versions of both before Apple. Apple did a better job of commercializing them by, for example, with the mouse, drastically reducing the cost and improving its durability.

What I wrote was also entirely consistent with SRI owning the rights to the mouse. The overall point, however, was that Apple’s use of the mouse together with the GUI was spurred by the visit to PARC. While I agree that most of the ideas and concepts in the valley were traceable to SRI and the universities, development of those ideas generally occurred elsewhere.