3 ms·

The Xerox Star did that before Apple. Interestingly enough, it had hardware keys for it [0] - no mnemonics required. Raskin (Macintosh team) ended up really li

by GuiA 13y ago

The Xerox Star did that before Apple. Interestingly enough, it had hardware keys for it [0] - no mnemonics required. Raskin (Macintosh team) ended up really liking dedicated keys (cf. the Canon Cat and his book) after all. I would have agreed a few months ago; but as someone who is slowly forcing himself to become a touch typist because I was getting irritated at how much my hands moved over the keyboard when there was no need for them to, I prefer chording keystrokes :) [0]: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/keyboard/keyboard2.JPG http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/keyboard/keyboar...

acqq 13y ago
> The Xerox Star did that before Apple. .. it had hardware keys for it So Xerox did not do that what Mac did (Command-X keys). Edit: Answer to your " xerox with dedicated keys ... was the first to have to solve that problem though" in the reply to this post: Xerox was not the first to have the dedicated keys for common operations: e.g. cca 1965: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/big/17234/IBM-1052-Printer-Keyboard/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/big/17234/IBM-1052-Printe... Whereas Xerox PARC was founded in 1970: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) And we should rewatch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos Done in 1968, I wouldn't be surprised there's more to find! Engelbart was the real pioneer for different concepts "natural" to us today.
- GuiA 13y ago
  They solved the same problem (associating menu items with keyboard actions) in 2 different ways - xerox with dedicated keys, Apple with keyboard shortcuts. Xerox was the first to have to solve that problem though.