Largely on the strengths of its 70s triumphs, Xerox PARC retained enormous cachet through the 1990s. You can read its official history page on the Web. For a site full of details and links on its commercially unsuccessful Star project, see here.

It was way too long to set for class, but I would heartily recommend the recent book Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Harperbusiness, 2000. You can see the Amazon page here.

Steve Jobs is one of the most famous figures in the world of computing. There are a ton of books about him, and on the origins of the Mac. The Smithsonian conducted an oral history interview with him, covering his earlier years. In 1996, shortly before his return to Apple, he gave a long interview to Wired (4.02 -- February 1996). At this point, Jobs had just burned through $250 million of venture capital to sell 50,000 Next computers.

One of the best known books on the Mac is by Steven Levy, who you know as the author of Hackers. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, Viking-Penguin, 1994.  It's readable, but Levy is a little bit too caught up in his own love affair with the Mac to do as good a job here as he did elsewhere. You can read a short extract on-line. However, the best book on Apple and the origins of the Mac remains the early Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, William Morrow, 1984.

Alex Pang, who teaches and does web things in the library at Stanford, produced a website at Stanford University on the Making of the Macintosh as part of a broader exploration of Silicon Valley history. It includes a great selection on primary documents and so rises far above the many of the fan sites on the topic. The idea is to get away on an exclusive focus on a couple of people. Includes  focus on Raskin's original vision and on the creation of the Apple mouse.