4 ms·
Welcome to the Alto - that is exactly how it worked. There's no "desktop environment", as they were just beginning to figure out how to make applications with w
by FullyFunctional 5y ago
Welcome to the Alto - that is exactly how it worked. There's no "desktop environment", as they were just beginning to figure out how to make applications with windows, icons, mouse cursor, etc. The closest to what you expected to see is probably the Smalltalk environment.
The other part of this is that it's been dramatically overstated how much Apple "took" from Xerox. This issue of BYTE (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02) has awesome details on the development of the Mac (and a bit on the Lisa).
EDIT: wording
- gregsadetsky 5y agoThat BYTE issue is so incredibly fascinating. Thanks a lot for posting it. The in-depth interviews with Hertzfeld, Atkinson, Jobs, a diagram of the Mac's memory map (page 40), a block diagram of the Mac hardware (page 36), etc.
- killion 5y agoIt also reminds me that computer magazines were ~500 pages when I was a kid.
- themodelplumber 5y agoPersonally I can't believe how many of those pages I actually read and processed. It makes me reflect that a lot of what I'm doing on the web these days really is reading, even though it doesn't involve books, and is comparatively technical/informational. Those mags were fun though, and I remember reactions from "check out how many stars they gave Turbo Pascal" to "what a goofy author photo" to "somebody wrote in with a great system script" to "oh there's an obscure game company in Vermont still writing arcade titles for dad's office computer" :-)
- watersb 5y agoYeah that issue is a masterpiece. You should also check out the BYTE Smalltalk issue: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08