8 ms·

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring.

by dalke 10y ago

I know it's not really relevant to the repair work, but I jumped back to the first article, at http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring.html http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-resto... . It says > The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto and Star, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox's ideas, making the GUI available to the mass market. The reference is " Malcolm Gladwell describes Steve Jobs' visit to Xerox in detail in Creation Myth." But quoting http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html : > The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. ... It's a good story. Unfortunately, it's also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong. ... > Both the Macintosh and Lisa projects were underway before the 1979 visit. Documents in The Book of Macintosh (a collection of essays, technical specs, and brainstorms written by Jef Raskin on and others) dating from the fall of 1979-- months before the PARC visit-- show that the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device. ... > Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
You can't seriously expect factual accuracy from Malcolm Gladwell.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Dealers in Lightning would seem to contradict Gladwell's account plus the first video with the others being background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOF-j6Nxm04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOF-j6Nxm04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614
mayank10j 10y ago
This doesn't mean Macintosh wasn't inspired by Xerox , even if they started work with Macintosh and Lisa there's is big chance getting first hand look at Xerox they have changed their approach drastically. Even if Android was in development before iphone debute they got drastic inspiration from iphone UI.
- dalke 10y ago
  I didn't say otherwise. It's absolutely clear that ideas in Macintosh were inspired by PARC, just like ideas at PARC were inspired by SRI. My complaint is about the assertion that "[Jobs] was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox's ideas", when the inspiration came before that visit, and was not due to Jobs.
kens 10y ago
Chapter 23 of "Dealers of Lightning" points out that everyone describes the Steve Jobs visit(s) in contradictory ways. "No anecdote from PARC's history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. PARC engineers disagree about who delivered what portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado..." I recommend "Dealers of Lightning" for the best description of Steve Jobs' visits and their impact on him. The short summary is there were two visits to PARC in December 1979. Adele Goldberg tried to demonstrate just the publicly-announced technology (WYSIWYG browser, mouse, drawing program) but was forced by management to show Steve Jobs all the secret stuff (e.g. Smalltalk, overlapping windows). Steve Jobs considered the three mind-bending things he saw to be the user interface, object-oriented programming and networking, but he was "saturated" by the UI and missed the significance of the others. The book goes into detail on exactly what Apple was doing before the visit and how it changed their plans. The book has a whole chapter on this, way more than I can cover here, so please read the book if you're interested in this.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  No surprise that Jobs would fixate on the UI thing. He never struck me as a techie, but someone that got into tech because it was easy to mesmerize people with. The UI was a perfect tool for that.
  - frandroid 10y ago
    You're saying it like GUIs are just a trick, an illusion...
  - bane 10y ago
    Yeah, that makes a certain kind of sense. I'm spending some spare time listening to interviews with old Atari employees on the ANTIC podcast and one thing comes through again and again. Lots of investment was being made in networking and programming languages and almost nobody outside of PARC had any real ideas about GUIs. A couple Atari employees who came from PARC at the time tried to get it into products, but just couldn't. Apple likewise didn't produce a GUI for their contemporary computers. The most that people seemed to really be shooting for was higher density text displays and colorful graphics, but nobody had really figured out the magical combination of manipulation device and interface metaphor and Jobs did just "get it" and understood why it would be a major differentiator - few people had more than one computer to network, and few people liked programming.
kps 10y ago
> the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device. There is a big difference between having a bitmapped screen and graphical input on one hand, and having a Starlike WIMP user interface on the other. This sounds like it was written by someone who has never seen anything else.
- dalke 10y ago
  I think you have drawn an incorrect inference from that text. Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project at Apple, was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year. He and others in the AI lab "were tightly intermixed with the people at PARC" (Quoting http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interviews/raskin/preapple.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interview... ). I believe he knew what a Starlike WIMP user interface entailed. He also "explained the details and rationale of the work at PARC to Atkinson, Jobs and others. PARCs philosophy was therefore well known at Apple [before Jobs' famous visit]". - http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.html http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.ht... .
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    I don't think Raskin liked WIMP very much. You can see what his original vision for the Macintosh was in the Canon Cat, which he went on to develop after leaving apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
    - fzzzy 10y ago
      I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c
      - 10y ago
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I agree that its a great story. Like all good stories it tries to distill the point from a much more complex and nuanced world. And because the world is more complicated than narrative fiction, there are always other aspects that contribute or can be portrayed in different ways. The reality of things as I came to understand them were these; Jef Raskin was passionate about user interface design like few people I have ever known. The folks at PARC were excited about the possibilities offered by the advanced state of the art in graphics and input devices and they had some really excellent thinkers and engineers who were implementing really different ways of interacting with computers. Steve Jobs was passionate about design with strong opinions on what was "right" and what was "wrong" about any given product feature. Now you have to put that into an engineering context. Apple is building a new computer system, one of its, if not THE, lead designers has ideas about how the user will interact with it. The company is pushing back on these ideas because they are "radical and new" and questioning how the engineers know that this will be a better way to build computers than the existing examples in the Apple II and CP/M machines of the day. So this conversation within Apple gets more and more energetic. If you are in an engineering company and are leading any sort of project you will have this experience. You propose something different than what the company expects, and the company pushes back on that proposal in a bunch of different ways. In an effect that is oddly reminiscent of how a band-gap forms in a PN junction, groups line up for or against the concept. And it percolates up the management chain until someone in authority "decides" and shuts down all of the side conversations. Having had conversations with various people both on the Xerox side and the Apple side who were part of that experience, I concluded that Steve Job's visit to PARC where he saw a realized example of what Jef was trying to push through, convinced Steve that it was better design. I based that conclusion on stories about how the conversation within Apple changed once Steve had seen for himself the possibilities presented by a window based system with a pointing device. Jef related in a talk that he gave about interface design that resistance to the ideas essentially evaporated once Steve was on board. So is that the "real" story? I don't know. It is the most likely explanation of events that followed all of the statements I heard from people who participated in the design of the Macintosh/Lisa and people who build XDE and Star (the Xerox Development Environment and their office suite). Does it matter? I don't know that it does, the origin story for the Macintosh is what it is.
- 10y ago
cmrdporcupine 10y ago
You should browse around folklore.org and look at the posts about the early Macintosh: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Origins http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... The Lisa and Macintosh projects interfaces pre-Xerox visit were remarkably different from post-visit. The Macintosh pre-early-1980-Xerox-visit was based around soft keys. Yes it had a bitmapped graphical display, but it was not a mouse based user interface as we know it, it was more like what Raskin did later with the Canon Cat. The office desktop with icons interface that shipped on the Lisa is very clearly influenced by the Xerox Star office system more than it is by Smalltalk. And the Mac copied the Lisa.
- dalke 10y ago
  I have read through folklore.org but I never noticed that change in UI from 1979 to 1980. Thank you for pointing that out. Now that I am paying attention to that, I see in Jan. 1980 Raskin wrote "A lightpen for graphic input is being considered" for the Macintosh. http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/bom/jan80.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/bom/... . In the link you pointed to shows that by summer of '80 there was no longer support for softkeys and there was support for a mouse. The primary documents at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/mouse0.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/mouse0.html only start talking about a Macintosh mouse in spring of '80. This fits well with a transition from Canon Cat UI to a PARC-derived UI, as you've described.

by dalke 10y ago

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

You can't seriously expect factual accuracy from Malcolm Gladwell.

protomyth 10y ago
Dealers in Lightning would seem to contradict Gladwell's account plus the first video with the others being background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOF-j6Nxm04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOF-j6Nxm04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614

mayank10j 10y ago

This doesn't mean Macintosh wasn't inspired by Xerox , even if they started work with Macintosh and Lisa there's is big chance getting first hand look at Xerox they have changed their approach drastically. Even if Android was in development before iphone debute they got drastic inspiration from iphone UI.

dalke 10y ago
I didn't say otherwise. It's absolutely clear that ideas in Macintosh were inspired by PARC, just like ideas at PARC were inspired by SRI. My complaint is about the assertion that "[Jobs] was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox's ideas", when the inspiration came before that visit, and was not due to Jobs.

kens 10y ago

Chapter 23 of "Dealers of Lightning" points out that everyone describes the Steve Jobs visit(s) in contradictory ways. "No anecdote from PARC's history is burdened by so much contradictory testimony. PARC engineers disagree about who delivered what portions of the demonstration; on how many demos there were and when they took place; whether Jobs and his people saw an Alto or a Dorado..." I recommend "Dealers of Lightning" for the best description of Steve Jobs' visits and their impact on him. The short summary is there were two visits to PARC in December 1979. Adele Goldberg tried to demonstrate just the publicly-announced technology (WYSIWYG browser, mouse, drawing program) but was forced by management to show Steve Jobs all the secret stuff (e.g. Smalltalk, overlapping windows). Steve Jobs considered the three mind-bending things he saw to be the user interface, object-oriented programming and networking, but he was "saturated" by the UI and missed the significance of the others. The book goes into detail on exactly what Apple was doing before the visit and how it changed their plans. The book has a whole chapter on this, way more than I can cover here, so please read the book if you're interested in this.

digi_owl 10y ago
No surprise that Jobs would fixate on the UI thing. He never struck me as a techie, but someone that got into tech because it was easy to mesmerize people with. The UI was a perfect tool for that.
- frandroid 10y ago
  You're saying it like GUIs are just a trick, an illusion...
- bane 10y ago
  Yeah, that makes a certain kind of sense. I'm spending some spare time listening to interviews with old Atari employees on the ANTIC podcast and one thing comes through again and again. Lots of investment was being made in networking and programming languages and almost nobody outside of PARC had any real ideas about GUIs. A couple Atari employees who came from PARC at the time tried to get it into products, but just couldn't. Apple likewise didn't produce a GUI for their contemporary computers. The most that people seemed to really be shooting for was higher density text displays and colorful graphics, but nobody had really figured out the magical combination of manipulation device and interface metaphor and Jobs did just "get it" and understood why it would be a major differentiator - few people had more than one computer to network, and few people liked programming.

kps 10y ago

> the Macintosh was going to feature user-friendly interfaces; a screen that could handle multiple fonts (that is, bitmapped screens); graphics capabilities; and a graphical input device. There is a big difference between having a bitmapped screen and graphical input on one hand, and having a Starlike WIMP user interface on the other. This sounds like it was written by someone who has never seen anything else.

dalke 10y ago
I think you have drawn an incorrect inference from that text. Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project at Apple, was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year. He and others in the AI lab "were tightly intermixed with the people at PARC" (Quoting http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interviews/raskin/preapple.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interview... ). I believe he knew what a Starlike WIMP user interface entailed. He also "explained the details and rationale of the work at PARC to Atkinson, Jobs and others. PARCs philosophy was therefore well known at Apple [before Jobs' famous visit]". - http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.html http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.ht... .
- fzzzy 10y ago
  I don't think Raskin liked WIMP very much. You can see what his original vision for the Macintosh was in the Canon Cat, which he went on to develop after leaving apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c
    - 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I agree that its a great story. Like all good stories it tries to distill the point from a much more complex and nuanced world. And because the world is more complicated than narrative fiction, there are always other aspects that contribute or can be portrayed in different ways. The reality of things as I came to understand them were these; Jef Raskin was passionate about user interface design like few people I have ever known. The folks at PARC were excited about the possibilities offered by the advanced state of the art in graphics and input devices and they had some really excellent thinkers and engineers who were implementing really different ways of interacting with computers. Steve Jobs was passionate about design with strong opinions on what was "right" and what was "wrong" about any given product feature. Now you have to put that into an engineering context. Apple is building a new computer system, one of its, if not THE, lead designers has ideas about how the user will interact with it. The company is pushing back on these ideas because they are "radical and new" and questioning how the engineers know that this will be a better way to build computers than the existing examples in the Apple II and CP/M machines of the day. So this conversation within Apple gets more and more energetic. If you are in an engineering company and are leading any sort of project you will have this experience. You propose something different than what the company expects, and the company pushes back on that proposal in a bunch of different ways. In an effect that is oddly reminiscent of how a band-gap forms in a PN junction, groups line up for or against the concept. And it percolates up the management chain until someone in authority "decides" and shuts down all of the side conversations. Having had conversations with various people both on the Xerox side and the Apple side who were part of that experience, I concluded that Steve Job's visit to PARC where he saw a realized example of what Jef was trying to push through, convinced Steve that it was better design. I based that conclusion on stories about how the conversation within Apple changed once Steve had seen for himself the possibilities presented by a window based system with a pointing device. Jef related in a talk that he gave about interface design that resistance to the ideas essentially evaporated once Steve was on board. So is that the "real" story? I don't know. It is the most likely explanation of events that followed all of the statements I heard from people who participated in the design of the Macintosh/Lisa and people who build XDE and Star (the Xerox Development Environment and their office suite). Does it matter? I don't know that it does, the origin story for the Macintosh is what it is.

10y ago

cmrdporcupine 10y ago

You should browse around folklore.org and look at the posts about the early Macintosh: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Origins http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... The Lisa and Macintosh projects interfaces pre-Xerox visit were remarkably different from post-visit. The Macintosh pre-early-1980-Xerox-visit was based around soft keys. Yes it had a bitmapped graphical display, but it was not a mouse based user interface as we know it, it was more like what Raskin did later with the Canon Cat. The office desktop with icons interface that shipped on the Lisa is very clearly influenced by the Xerox Star office system more than it is by Smalltalk. And the Mac copied the Lisa.

dalke 10y ago
I have read through folklore.org but I never noticed that change in UI from 1979 to 1980. Thank you for pointing that out. Now that I am paying attention to that, I see in Jan. 1980 Raskin wrote "A lightpen for graphic input is being considered" for the Macintosh. http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/bom/jan80.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/bom/... . In the link you pointed to shows that by summer of '80 there was no longer support for softkeys and there was support for a mouse. The primary documents at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/mouse0.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/mouse0.html only start talking about a Macintosh mouse in spring of '80. This fits well with a transition from Canon Cat UI to a PARC-derived UI, as you've described.