🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13929@swan.ulowell.edu> sbrunnoc@hawk.ulowell.edu (Sean Brunnock) writes:
>From article <4627@ficc.uu.net>, by peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva):
>> In article <41604@bbn.COM>, mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard) writes:
>>>   3) The Mac solved the user interface problem.  It didn't perfect it.
>> 
>> The Xerox Star solved the user interface problem. The Mac took this
>> solution and tried to cram it into a 128K box. 
>
>   Alan Kay (working at Xerox) solved the user interface problem. His 
>machine was the Dynabook which was available as early as 1973. The
>Xerox Star was introduced about a year after the Mac.

OK, time for a history lesson.

.  The Dynabook *still* isn't available :( but it's getting close.
   What Alan Kay had when I was hanging around the edges of his group
   in 1971 or thereabouts was the *Interim* Dynabook: the Alto.  It
   was probably the first workstation.  Its programming language was
   Smalltalk (in an early incarnation).  It *did* have a mouse,
   overlapping windows, scrollbars, popup menus, and icons (used in
   menus).  The screen was 640x800, portrait mode.

.  The Dynabook was to be a flat laptop with a touch-sensitive screen,
   equipped with cellular radio networking and a CPU able to do
   real-time animation of "Japanimation" quality (~10 frames/sec) and
   high-quality sound.  Take a "NeXT" machine and put it in a package
   the size of half a ream of paper, and you have the idea.

.  Xerox also had several "paint" programs remarkably similar to
   MacPaint.

.  The laser printer was invented at Xerox at about the same time; a
   CRT-based thing called the Xerox Graphics Printer came out somewhat
   earlier (`69 or `70, I think).  (But the Dynabook's hardcopy
   mechanism was even simpler:  just lay it face down on a copier!)

.  The Ethernet was invented at Xerox in, I think, 1972.

.  The mouse (with three buttons) was invented by Doug Engelbart at
   SRI in the mid-60's; it was used in Doug's implementation of
   hypertext, NLS (which was also the first "outliner").  (The *word*
   "hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson at about the same time).
   Many of the ideas behind NLS came from an article by Vannevar Bush
   entitled "As We May Think" published in 1945.

.  Many of the ideas for the Alto/Dynabook interface came from Ivan
   Sutherland's "Sketchpad" program, and from Alan Kay's doctoral
   thesis at Univ. of Utah. Some of the ideas for Smalltalk came from
   Logo; both were intended for use by kids (as well as adults).

Xerox PARC had some wonderfully inventive people; Xerox's marketing
basically didn't know what to do with their ideas (after all, they
were in the copier business).
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