> The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird "Weird" means only that you haven't used other similar UIs. Smalltalk 80 was a development environment. There were appli

> The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird "Weird" means only that you haven't used other similar UIs. Smalltalk 80 was a development environment. There were applications written in it with more extensive UI examples. > At first glance, this looks incredibly similar to something like the desktop of the Apple Lisa or early Mac OS. Not at all. But the Smalltalk 80 UI was only one of several that were developed. It would be better to compare the Mac OS UI to the office system from Xerox. An early application domain for the Mac was "Desktop Publishing" (Apple LaserWriter, Adobe Postscript, Aldus Pagemaker). > The first thing is that the Smalltalk environment wasn't really an operating system the same way something like Mac OS was. It’s more like an IDE that runs on bare hardware. The Mac hadn't also much of an OS in the early days. It was like running c/pascal/assembler code on bare hardware with a loader and a system library. > You can’t even move or resize a window by clicking and dragging. The "Direct manipulation interface" was made popular by the Mac. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface A good idea to compare those systems is to check how early applications looked and worked. On the Mac that would have been MacPaint and MacWrite. You'll find earlier such applications for the Xerox systems, too. The Xerox Star UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html Apple also had Smalltalk 80 running on the LISA: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/23277-lisa-smalltalk-80 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/23277-lisa-smalltalk-80