denbeste@cc5.bbn.com.BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste) (05/30/87)
SMALLTALK (predecessor of the MAC and of WORKBENCH, among other things).
They realized that they had something truly special - a revolutionary
approach to human/computer interfaces, and that it would go right
into the toilet unless it got widespread industry acceptance fast.
They therefore chose six (I think, but it may have been five) companies
and gave them unlimited rights to all the development they had done, and
asked them (nay, begged them) to develop products with it. Tektronix
was one of them. I think Apple was another.
I just read an article from Chuck McManis who (if I am not oversensitive)
implied that Apple stole the concept - that is far from the truth.
Incidentally, the only one of the Xerox products I have used (the Star)
is significantly worse than the MAC, or the Amiga. Their version of a
word processing program required far too fine of hand motion - non-surgeons
would find it almost impossible to use (as I did). Specifically, they didn't
use the "sweep" mechanism to describe areas to move. Instead, on the left
side of a line was a place to land the mouse that indicated "the line".
The problem was at the beginning of a paragraph - You could land on the
first character, the first word, the line or the paragraph itself - and all
these (nonlabelled!) hot spots were within a few millimeters of each other
in terms of hand movement. Eeek.
Anyway, so far as I know, Xerox makes no claim to exclusivity to the Smalltalk
concept, and neither wants nor gets any royalties for it. I myself only
feel resentment when I hear people who think that Apple invented all of this!
(Not at Apple, at the historical-illiterates who don't know any better...)
Quick, Nurse, my Valium!
--
Steven Den Beste
Bolt Beranek & Newman, Cambridge MA
denbeste@bbn.com (ARPA or CSNET)
"The voice within the candle whispers of a timeless peace beyond." - Paul Winterdenbeste@cc5.bbn.com.BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste) (05/30/87)
[Sorry, folks, I got nailed by the lineeater again. When will I learn??]
I worked at Tektronix when PARC was developing what they referred to as
SMALLTALK (predecessor of the MAC and of WORKBENCH, among other things).
They realized that they had something truly special - a revolutionary
approach to human/computer interfaces, and that it would go right
into the toilet unless it got widespread industry acceptance fast.
They therefore chose six (I think, but it may have been five) companies
and gave them unlimited rights to all the development they had done, and
asked them (nay, begged them) to develop products with it. Tektronix
was one of them. I think Apple was another.
I just read an article from Chuck McManis who (if I am not oversensitive)
implied that Apple stole the concept - that is far from the truth.
Incidentally, the only one of the Xerox products I have used (the Star)
is significantly worse than the MAC, or the Amiga. Their version of a
word processing program required far too fine of hand motion - non-surgeons
would find it almost impossible to use (as I did). Specifically, they didn't
use the "sweep" mechanism to describe areas to move. Instead, on the left
side of a line was a place to land the mouse that indicated "the line".
The problem was at the beginning of a paragraph - You could land on the
first character, the first word, the line or the paragraph itself - and all
these (nonlabelled!) hot spots were within a few millimeters of each other
in terms of hand movement. Eeek.
Anyway, so far as I know, Xerox makes no claim to exclusivity to the Smalltalk
concept, and neither wants nor gets any royalties for it. I myself only
feel resentment when I hear people who think that Apple invented all of this!
(Not at Apple, at the historical-illiterates who don't know any better...)
Quick, Nurse, my Valium!
--
Steven Den Beste
Bolt Beranek & Newman, Cambridge MA
denbeste@bbn.com (ARPA or CSNET)
"The voice within the candle whispers of a timeless peace beyond." - Paul Wintercmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (06/01/87)
[Warning, strong OPINIONS ahead, nothing personal y'all] In article <1439@cc5.bbn.com.BBN.COM> (Steven Den Beste) writes: >I just read an article from Chuck McManis who (if I am not oversensitive) >implied that Apple stole the concept - that is far from the truth. Oops, I should have been more clear. The story I have heard is that Steve Wozniak took a tour of the PARC facilities and liked what he saw. That vision later became the Macintosh user interface. It was 'stolen' only in the fact that it used a 'desktop' metaphor, mouse pointer to icons, had a lot of the same 'feel' at the Alto and 8010's had at the time, and was developed after Apple had seen the stuff at PARC. >Anyway, so far as I know, Xerox makes no claim to exclusivity to the Smalltalk >concept, and neither wants nor gets any royalties for it. I myself only >feel resentment when I hear people who think that Apple invented all of this! >(Not at Apple, at the historical-illiterates who don't know any better...) They don't, at least I haven't heard them sue anybody over this stuff yet. Two things *really* irritated me about Apple. The first was those 'historical- illiterates' [Ed. Should that be hysterical?] Who expound on how the Macintosh is/was/and will be the originator, designer of the true user interface. Apple does not seem to correct them so I can only suppose they would like this misconception to persist. The second thing was the way they went after Digital Research for the GEM interface. They may have been completely within their legal right to do so (I have heard it debated both ways) but from where I was sitting they appeared to be extremely arrogant and dastardly. I decided right then and there I would never buy anything from Apple nor would I write any code that worked on an Apple product. Consider it one man's protest against a computer company. >Incidentally, the only one of the Xerox products I have used (the Star) >is significantly worse than the MAC, or the Amiga. ... > Steven Den Beste Well have you ever used the Mesa development environment (at one time known as XDE) ? That was something that continues to work well on the Xerox machine. Strangely enough it has a lot of similarities to the Amiga interface, only when it caught a bug you were dropped into CoPilot which was a powerful debugger, rather than RomWack which is nice but leaves a bit to be desired. They also used Pop-Up menus like rather than pull down menus. Of course not many people besides Xerox use Mesa, Modula-2 has some of the flavor of Mesa, but it isn't the same. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.