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The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “p
by bombcar 5mo ago
The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “program started later”.
- simondotau 5mo agoAnd perhaps most critically, other semi-GUI platforms made lesser attempts to demand consistency.
- II2II 5mo agoEarly on, sure. I seem to recall Apple having their Human Interface Guidelines early on, which helped, yet there were developers who were either unaware of them or experimenting with different ideas. Other platforms tried to improve consistency later on though. For example: there was CUA for IBM. Of course, most of that went out the windows in the late 1990's and early 2000's when companies figured out that the easiest way to differentiate their products to consumers was visually, rather than technically.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo agoThe mandatory graphic GUI - and MacPaint - made the point that the Mac was primarily a visual design tool that happened to handle text. That was absolutely revolutionary. S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics. The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based. Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.
- michaelcampbell 5mo ago> The mandatory graphic GUI... What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?