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> Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Othe
by musicale 3y ago
> Steve jobs saw the GUI, and Ethernet, and object orientated programming, and laser printers, and office software, and yet Mac is famous for just the GUI. Others would run with networking, programming, MS with office and do on.
In the 1980s Apple adopted/commercialized:
GUI -> Lisa (later Mac) Desktop
LAN -> AppleTalk (NBP lookup eventually influenced mDNS)
OOP -> Object Pascal (still exists in Delphi/Lazarus); arguably HyperTalk (messages/events/handlers)
Laser Printers -> LaserWriter
Office Software -> Lisa Office System; MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint
And of course Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint debuted on the Mac.
But your point is well taken - PARC alumni (and ideas) did not only land at Apple; for example, most of us have probably used Ethernet, Microsoft Word, PDF (derived from PostScript), etc.
- bruce511 3y agoOh, I agree, Apple did ultimately make use of those technologies. They built on those ideas, but the again so did lots of others. I'm not suggesting Apple didn't (ultimately) embrace those technologies, but rather that they weren't the "driving force" behind them. Whereas you could say Apple was the "driving force" of the GUI. Microsoft would go on to drive Office software. There were word processors, and spreadsheets before Office, but Office integrated all those tools together and became the gold standard. Adobe would drive desktop publishing, PDF and so on. Sooo much of today's world is built on PARC, SRI, Bell Labs, and a couple others. It was an explosion of development and research seldom seen in any field outside times of war.