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I believe Apple licensed tech from Xerox, but Xerox didn’t understand its worth. A bunch of ex-Xerox people later joined Apple (Larry Tesler, Alan Kay).
by mamp 8y ago
I believe Apple licensed tech from Xerox, but Xerox didn’t understand its worth. A bunch of ex-Xerox people later joined Apple (Larry Tesler, Alan Kay).
- rahoulb 8y agoPlus if you look at old Smalltalk systems they are nothing like the GUI used in the Lisa or Macintosh. The concepts (mouse, bitmapped display, menus, object-orientation, networking) were Xerox's but the implementation (pull down menus, icons, drag and drop) were Apple's. (object-orientation and networking were two things Steve Jobs later said he wished he had taken to Apple, so instead made sure he used them in NeXT - hence Objective-C and the BSD layer in NeXTStep and now macOS)
- slededit 8y agoIt was certainly a lot less refined, and you couldn't just sit down in front of an Alto and get to work using today's knowledge. However they were very close, the original Lisa and Mac OSs were essentially polish on the broader theme. That doesn't diminish the fact they actually brought it to the masses - however their work was undeniably derivative.
- Aloha 8y agoI have actually sat down and used an Alto - it was not impossibly hard, if you'd used or touched some early XWindows stuff