One of the Bell Lab researchers who developed the Transistor, John Bardeen, taught physics at the U.I. Champaign, probably 15 years before the Paypal Mafia's time. (He received 2 Nobel prizes when they meant something.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen
“Bardeen was also an important adviser to Xerox Corporation. Though quiet by nature, he took the uncharacteristic step of urging Xerox executives to keep their California research center, Xerox PARC, afloat when the parent company was suspicious that its research center would amount to little.”
Xerox PARC researchers were responsible for the invention the first mouse, and if I remember correctly, the Graphical User Interface (GUEy). S Jobs and S Wozniak saw them on a visit to Xerox PARC, and used the ideas on their first personal computer.
***William Shockley and Walter Brattain were the other researchers at Bell Labs in NJ. Shockley took most of the credit for the development of the transistor.
That is what happened in the 2 generations before the rise of the Paypal Mafia.
No, the mouse preceded PARC by several years and was developed by at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center wasn't established until 1973. Engelbart and his team at SRI pioneered much of what you attribute to PARC which extended their work. Steve Wozniak never went to PARC, that was Steve Jobs of Apple, who liked what he saw and in exchange for one million shares of pre-IPO Apple stock was allowed by Xerox to bring a team of Apple engineers back for a one day visit to look and learn, but not take any code or even notes, but could use the rights to what they learned. Apple licensed the mouse from SRI.
ps; It wasn’t Apple’s first personal computer either, which was released in 1976.
Steve Jobs’ visit to PARC was in late 1979 and the second visit with the engineers was in early 2000. Those visits lead first to the Apple LISA in 1982 and in 1984 the Apple Macintosh.