🚀 go-pugleaf

coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) writes:
> >>[...] it's clear that the pace of
> >>innovation picked up massively around the time that user interface
> >>copyrights were become more of a viable notion).
> 
> If you don't see this as obvious, we're watching two different
> industries. Note that my quoted statement does _not_ say that
> innovation picked up _because_ of user interface copyrights, it merely
> says that they were correlated. Anyone who has watched the computer
> industry for more than ten years and doesn't think that user interface
> innovation picked up a lot of speed around 1982 or so (about the time
> of the Franklin case, the K.C. Munchkin case, and some others) has,
> IMHO, either a very strange view of innovation or wasn't paying much
> attention.

Well, let's look at some of the UI ideas developed before 1982:

The mouse, multiple overlapping windows, chord keyboards [Engelbart], 
spreadsheets [Visicorp], pop-up menus [present on Quantel and Xerox machines,
and probably much earlier than that], light-pens, track balls, joysticks
[Sketchpad], scroll bars [Xerox, maybe earlier].

Now your turn.  Name some major UI ideas developed since 1982.


mathew

-- 
Another would-be Mac owner put off by Apple's monopolistic practices.