New Imacs are out...

[Diesel]

Quote:

---

There is a common story that a trip to Xerox PARC by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs led to the GUI and mouse being integrated into the Apple Lisa and, later, the first Apple Macintosh. This is only partially true. Steve Jobs was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment which had a small portion of the GUI features in the Star. For example Smalltalk-80 had one or more windows per running process. Each window could be miniaturized (iconified) into a rectangle with a name, but it didn't have a desktop with icons representing data (e.g., folders, text documents) or services (e.g., print, email).

The Lisa engineering team saw Star at its introduction at the National Compuer Conference (NCC '81) and returned to Cupertino where they converted what had been a text-based user interface into a GUI. The initial Macintosh interface was a simplified version of the Lisa interface (i.e., single-tasking), supporting only a single floppy drive instead of the hard drive of the Lisa (and Star).

The list products that were directly inspired or influenced by the user interface of the Star include the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh, GEM from Digital Research (the DR-DOS company), Microsoft Windows, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Elixer, Metaphor Systems, Interleaf, Microsoft OS/2, Sun OpenLook, SunOS, KDE, Ventura Publisher and NeXTSTEP. Adobe Systems PostScript was based on Interpress. Ethernet beat out Token Ring and other networking technologies to become the standard.

Over the years many people have complained that Apple, Microsoft (and others) ripped off the GUI (and other innovations) from the Xerox Star. There have also been complaints that Xerox didn't properly protect their intellectual property. The truth is a bit more complicated. Many patent disclosures were submitted for the innovations in the Star. However, at the time the 1975 Xerox Consent Decree restricted what the company was able to patent. When the Star disclosures were being prepared the Xerox patent attorneys were busy with new technologies like laser printing. And finally, software patents were an untried area at that time. Xerox did in fact sue Apple in 1988 for infringement of copyright regarding the GUI, but the case was dismissed on a technicality.

---

[chillzatl]

than you could read in a lifetime. I've read so many of them over the years that I really lost interest. People on teh mac side will say that Apple was already working on a GUI and that Jobs was invited to Parc where he saw Alto/star and just implemented some of the ideas into the system he was already developing.

Other versions go like what you presented, he saw it at a conference or somethign and just copied it outright. There are other versions as well. It's ancient history at this point though.

Again, most of teh players back then (gates, jobs, etc) had seen or knew what Parc was doing and knew it was the way to go. It was just a natural evolution of the text interface.

[Diesel]

Click.

Credible because there was no dog in the fight.