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this is the standard air-brushed Hollywood tale, where PARC had this great stuff (true), then Jobs came and stole it and made the Macintosh. It's called the "Pr
by AlbertCory 3y ago
this is the standard air-brushed Hollywood tale, where PARC had this great stuff (true), then Jobs came and stole it and made the Macintosh. It's called the "Prometheus myth." (In fact, Jobs didn't "orchestrate" the visit; he was almost dragged to it.)
Largely a myth, although the research that brought the GUI into being is mostly correct. In fact, Xerox WAS commercializing it, and Wikipedia has the story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
Star was introduced in Chicago in May, 1981. I was there, and Jobs himself came to see it. At the time, the Lisa was Apple's main GUI effort.
Dave Smith, who appears to be talking about his icon research (it doesn't sound like his voice, though) was one of the architects of the Star. That's his son on the cover of my book, Inventing the Future. It's a novel and no hindsight is allowed, i.e. the characters don't know how it ends.
Jerry Morrison and I wrote a paper
https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
where we ask what went wrong and what Xerox should have done.
- Rochus 3y agoNot quite. In contrast to other documentaries about the same topic the author takes a lot of time with the relevant earlier origins of graphical user interfaces. Concerning Jobs and Apple the documentary doesn't follow the narrative you suppose. I didn't notice (significant) errors. Thanks for the link to the paper, which I will read.
- AlbertCory 3y agoOK, you're right, I thought it was going to be the usual Prometheus myth. They do show the Star and even Dave Smith talking about it. It's much better than I thought it was going to be. Some notes: The first successful iteration of Windows was not Win 95. It was Win 3.1. "Microsoft Bob" -- yay. Don't knock it /s I think you find almost everywhere that people who originate a concept that takes off are not happy with what the world does with it. Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart (not featured in this, but I know he wasn't happy with GUIs as they evolved), Tim Berners-Lee have all said a variation on "No! That's not what I meant!" Usually, it's too late for them to fix it, though. You get your one shot, and that's more than most of us get.
- bitwize 3y ago> The first successful iteration of Windows was not Win 95. It was Win 3.1. I would say Windows 3.0 -- because that was the version Microsoft started leaning on OEMS to preinstall. Before it came preinstalled, Windows was an expensive, memory-hungry runtime nobody wanted; people got by just fine with Lotus and WordPerfect for DOS. After it came preinstalled, and every reasonable IBM-compatible computer you could buy could be expected to have it, it suddenly very obviously was the future and the Year of the Windows Desktop was upon us.
- KerrAvon 3y agoYou’re likely right. Anecdotally: I don’t recall anyone actually using Windows 3.0 as anything other than a temporary runtime for, like, DTP apps, which was also how Windows 2.0 had been used much of the time. Otherwise, they’d be in DOS. Windows 3.1 was a little closer to an environment you could live in. I don’t know when Microsoft Word for Windows overtook WordPerfect for DOS, but I’ll bet there’s some correlation between that and actual Windows usage.
- hulitu 3y ago> The first successful iteration of Windows was not Win 95. It was Win 3.1. Win 3.1 was empty. All relevant programs ran in DOS. It was not until Win 95 that people started porring programms to windows (win32).
- AlbertCory 3y agoNow you're moving the goalposts. The history doesn't agree with you: https://www.howtogeek.com/795478/windows-31-30-years-later/ https://www.howtogeek.com/795478/windows-31-30-years-later/ https://www.pcworld.com/article/469692/windows-3-1-twenty-years-later.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/469692/windows-3-1-twenty-ye...
- zubairq 3y agoYes a very airbrushed tale of the history of UIs . I agree