The GUI was a combination of inventions and innovations, some of which pre-dated xerox and some of which were added by Apple.
The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done.
I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc.
"To this day, nothing sticks more deeply into he craw of Lisa and Macintosh designers than the suggestion that all their interface work simply consisted of making a copy of the work they saw at PARC[2]. This is simply not true. A look at the revolutionary design of the Lisa interface shows that much more was involved. Xerox never seriously intended to go to market. Apple was primarily in the business of selling personal computers and could not afford such a luxury. Apple had to design an interface intended for use by millions of people. It had to be intuitive and robust. The Lisa team built the Lisa OS from the ground up with the intention of making it friendlier to novice users. The Lisa's engineers realized that the PARC's ideas had to be stripped down and rebuilt to more demanding specifications[2]."
"The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done."
From the article:
Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would "open its kimono."
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the changes from the Alto and Star to the Macintosh, and the changes from the Macintosh to Windows 1.0-3.0-95.
However, I can never seem to find solid info on the Alto or Star, except occasionally a fond remembrance of awesome equation handling or something similar.
I think there is an Alto emulator out there. I never successfully booted it however. There is also a Star emulator, made by Xerox, that runs on Windows, but I also never successfully booted it to the desktop.
All you needed to do was look at the Windows APIs back then and see just how much stealing took place. Apple saw Xerox's product, asked questions, and then built something cheaper and better. Microsoft got special access under the hood and then built something cheaper and worse.
> Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done.
The article mentions Apple gave Xerox stock options they could use on Apple's IPO.
> I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc.
That's weird. I know the Alto ran Smalltalk, which had overlapping Windows, but nothing like icons, a desktop entity or dragging stuff (not even the scrollbars were draggable - you had to click their sides for them to go up-down). IIRC, there was another environment that didn't have Windows (I remember seeing the Bravo text editor and a dual-pane file manager) and they were popular because the Alto ran them faster ST80.
As for the Star, it seems there are videos that document a more or less complete GUI with overlapping windows, draggable stuff, select-then-act semantics and so on.
Unless my memory fails me, the Lisa introduced the menu bar on the top, the trashcan and some dragging semantics that were not present on the Star. The folks at Digibarn have, AFAIK, a functioning Dandelion and can, probably, clear this up.
Comments
Some points on the article:
The GUI was a combination of inventions and innovations, some of which pre-dated xerox and some of which were added by Apple.
The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done.
I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc.
"To this day, nothing sticks more deeply into he craw of Lisa and Macintosh designers than the suggestion that all their interface work simply consisted of making a copy of the work they saw at PARC[2]. This is simply not true. A look at the revolutionary design of the Lisa interface shows that much more was involved. Xerox never seriously intended to go to market. Apple was primarily in the business of selling personal computers and could not afford such a luxury. Apple had to design an interface intended for use by millions of people. It had to be intuitive and robust. The Lisa team built the Lisa OS from the ground up with the intention of making it friendlier to novice users. The Lisa's engineers realized that the PARC's ideas had to be stripped down and rebuilt to more demanding specifications[2]."
From: http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/lisagui.html
"The article fails to mention (near as I can tell) that Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done."
From the article:
Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would "open its kimono."
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Gates&sortOrder=Sort by Date
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the changes from the Alto and Star to the Macintosh, and the changes from the Macintosh to Windows 1.0-3.0-95.
However, I can never seem to find solid info on the Alto or Star, except occasionally a fond remembrance of awesome equation handling or something similar.
I think there is an Alto emulator out there. I never successfully booted it however. There is also a Star emulator, made by Xerox, that runs on Windows, but I also never successfully booted it to the desktop.
All you needed to do was look at the Windows APIs back then and see just how much stealing took place. Apple saw Xerox's product, asked questions, and then built something cheaper and better. Microsoft got special access under the hood and then built something cheaper and worse.
I think the best link to folkore.org related to this article is http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
> Apple corp gave Xerox a large chunk of Apple stock in exchange for a license to build on the work that Xerox had done.
The article mentions Apple gave Xerox stock options they could use on Apple's IPO.
> I've used an Alto and a Star (yes, I'm that old) and to call them a "GUI" isn't appropriate, given that they didn't' have real windows, etc.
That's weird. I know the Alto ran Smalltalk, which had overlapping Windows, but nothing like icons, a desktop entity or dragging stuff (not even the scrollbars were draggable - you had to click their sides for them to go up-down). IIRC, there was another environment that didn't have Windows (I remember seeing the Bravo text editor and a dual-pane file manager) and they were popular because the Alto ran them faster ST80.
As for the Star, it seems there are videos that document a more or less complete GUI with overlapping windows, draggable stuff, select-then-act semantics and so on.
Unless my memory fails me, the Lisa introduced the menu bar on the top, the trashcan and some dragging semantics that were not present on the Star. The folks at Digibarn have, AFAIK, a functioning Dandelion and can, probably, clear this up.