On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 21:15 -0600, Sam MacDonald wrote:
> I do believe Xerox had the point and click icons.
> Apple and Xerox were in court for years over the icons, it cost Apple a 
> large amount of market share.

What the Xerox workstations were capable of in the late 70's is quite
impressive. They were indeed a solid 15 years ahead of what mere mortals
would ever see on their desktops.

High resolution 19in displays, object oriented OS environment from top
to bottom, well integrated network capability in the OS and
applications, its where Ethernet originated after all. Scanners, laser
printers with print sharing, file sharing, domain login, email...

Xerox's trailblazing goes way beyond icons, overlapping windows, menus
and mice.

The more I learn, the more it feels like all we've been doing for the
past 20 years as far as GUI environments and application development is
reinventing what Xerox already had in 1981. Badly. And repeatedly.

Apple only initially ripped off the concept of the GUI itself. Steve
Jobs himself has said he was so amazed by the GUI that he missed the
significance of everything else he was shown at PARC. Namely, desktop
publishing, networking, and object oriented programming. Apple
eventually did desktop publishing, and a weak try at networking, but
totally missed the boat about OOP. Jobs had to get kicked out of Apple
and start NeXT before he took a decent shot at OOP...

And of course NeXTStep remained purely a luxury item until the release
of OSX. 20 years after Xerox.

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/alanfreier/index.html
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox6085/index.html
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox-8010/index.html
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/alto/index.html
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/xerox-parc-1970-80/alto-
article/index.html
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