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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20050213/530c261d/attachment.pgp