Bill Atkinson was Apple Computer’s main developer of the user interface that first appeared on the Lisa and later on the Mac. A passionate photographer, Atkinson had the foresight in the late ’70s and early ’80s to document his UI work for Apple in a series of Polaroids. The photos were published by another Mac pioneer, Andy Hertzfeld, in his book ‘Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made’. Through Hertzfeld, Atkinson permitted CNET News.com to reprint the photos. Similar shots here.
That “What’s next for apple” story is a year old. If this was posted in retrospect then thats cool, but it talks about the release of the old mini and the 75% chance of an iPod with video playback.
They were wrong though, no wireless ipod yet.
Why post year old news?
Edited 2006-03-29 18:39
Why post year old news?
Because we make mistakes
. Fixed.
Well, it happens to everyone. 🙂
Lol, it is cool man, we all do it. I was just confused as to whether it was an accident or like, a funny “haha look what people thought was going to happen a year ago” which is actually pretty interesting in of itself.
Not just the Smalltalk environment but the Xerox work on Interlisp and Cedar programming environments and the Star interface as well: overlapping windows, icons, multiple fonts, all finalized well before the Mac, and true multiprogramming with a preemptive scheduler, a feature the Mac wouldn’t get until nearly the 21st century.
Those photos show so little that is original the book should have been named “Ripoff in the Valley”.
May be old, it’s important to remember the legacy of the people at Xerox PARC. They’re the ones who actually originated the first Graphical User Interface that spawned the idea for the MAC.
It’s also important to remember just how much Apple Computer and the Mac have changed the world. Imagine being a company with a relatively small percentage of the market but you have the look & feel that may want to copy.
Thant’s impressive.
While Steve Jobs may have adopted the idea following his vist to PARC, it was clear that senior management at Xerox had no idea what to do with the GUI technology created at PARC.
And because of the Mac, small/home computing took on an entirely new focus & dimension.
Whether people like him or not, Steve Jobs took serious risks and changed the world.
What would have happened if Apple and Steve Jobs had patented (if they could) Drop down Menus, drag-n-drop, popup menus, window resizing, and all the other cool “inventions”… as Microsoft describes software ideas.
Edited 2006-03-29 20:07
Xerox patented the ideas first. Apple just happened to be the first (and maybe the last) to pay for a licence to what Xerox later considered to be free ideas.
Microsoft got sued for imitating the Macintosh interface a little too closely in Windows 1.0 and was forced to change to the crappy user interface in use until Windows 95 when the GUI got a rebuild to bring about the more modern looking Windows we are more familiar with.
The only reason nobody else got sued is because Xerox threatened to cancel Apple’s licence and countersue them because Apple really had no standing in the Microsoft case thus other Xerox clones emerged such as GEOS on the Commodore 64, Workbench on the Amiga, and many, many others that I haven’t used.
There are more pictures on the folklore.org website, which contains interesting articles about Apple history.
I’ve never owned one personally, but the site is a great read regardless.
Here is a link to the developing interface:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being…
Actually no, the story does not go that way….
Xerox had SmallTalk, the gui, and local area networking bundled into a single system. Neither of which ideas where exclusive to Xerox nor where initially developed there. There had been previous gui systems, and early object oriented programming projects had also been carried about, same for networking. So Xerox did not held the pantent portfolio due to the fact that their alto and later the d-machines were based on previous art, it was the fact that they bundled these ideas into a tangible single system that was the significance of the PARC systems. People tend to think that the gui was invented at PARC, and that is a diservice to the pioneers of the field (mainly SRL)… Apple did the same, they brought the gui down to a system that was affordable to a large number of users…
Apple had patented the look-and-feel not the actual aparatus. Two very different things, Mercedes did not invent the wheel… but they will sue you if you produce an exact replica of their latest s-series. Same with apple and microsoft and their 80s legal scuffles.
Nice to be reminded of the evolving design of the Graphical User Interface.
The Apple ‘multi-touch’ Graphics User Interface of the future? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6379146923853181774
The first part is just pretty colours, but then watch how he interacts with the touch sensitive display using more than one finger at a time.
He rotates flat objects by using two fingers on the object at a time and moving them around each other. He then stretches or expands the object by moving the two fingers on the same object further apart from each other. He does the same with the map zooming and rotation.
He then has a 3D display of an ushi (and also on the map) where he uses both hands, one finger on the left hand is used for holding the pan-direction of the object then 3 finger on the right hand for 3 Dimensional rotation. In the case of the map when he is in 3D mode, he sweeps all the fingers on the right hand in the same direction (down right) to drag the terrain in that direction without any rotation or zooming thus giving a flying action.
And here is the Multi-Touch Interaction Research website: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
The Apple ‘multi-touch’ Graphics User Interface of the future? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6379146923853181774
Thanks for that link. Very fascinating UI. I liked the photo sorting/zooming app.
This is a good comparison showing by screenshots the different User Interfaces over a comparable timeline: http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html
Especially from 1984 and ’85 it really gets moving. Very interesting to see where the different features appeared first. Wasn’t only Xerox and Apple that were inspiring. I think there have been many other systems wth their fair share of innovation into the UI. Archimedes RISC OS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS and AmigaOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS also played an important role of innovation in the early days.
Additional:
(1) http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interfac…
Edited 2006-03-30 04:21
Why is it that (at least with most of the early stuff) the Apple and NeXT stuff are the only one’s that don’t cause me pain to look at?
( some of those are downright ugly )
(Gallery 2, picture 2 in the news.com link)
“… a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill had dated them. It’s tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can’t say for sure. “
I wish he had dated them too :/
BTW, this is where I read it first (and it shows the polaroids in full, with hand scribbled annotations:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_B…
Also interesting is the link (circa 1996) “On Xerox, Apple and Progress”, at the end of the Folklore.org article. Here, for the lazy
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xer…