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the DG/One http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/dg-1/. It may not qualify as 'clam shell' due to having it's hinge more toward the centre but to my mind it set the design that all others followed. It was a full laptop pc in 1983!

When the Xerox Star came out, it had icons because they had been proposed in a PhD thesis by David Smith.

No doubt, esp those company songs IBM had...

And who implanted my false memories of installing Windows 2.0 just to play Balance of Power? (I always lost in the 4th turn because I refused to concede any territory to the commies.) :)

Slashdotters, I have been working with the Raskins for several years to document Jef's life and work for the DigiBarn Computer Museum. I have turned Jef's page at the museum site into a memorial page for him. See what Jef was all about (more than just GUIs) at:
Jef Raskin: A Life of Design and the rest of the DigiBarn is of relevance to this topic at:
DigiBarn Computer Museum
Thanks!
Bruce Damer, Curator

Slashdotters, I have been working with the Raskins for several years to document Jef's life and work for the DigiBarn Computer Museum. I have turned Jef's page at the museum site into a memorial page for him. See what Jef was all about (more than just GUIs) at:
Jef Raskin: A Life of Design and the rest of the DigiBarn is of relevance to this topic at:
DigiBarn Computer Museum
Thanks!
Bruce Damer, Curator

When the 128k mac shipped, the signatures of the people who created it were molded on the inside of the case. Here's the collection; Jef's name in the bottom-left corner.

That's probably the best mention Apple gave Raskin - his name's inside every 128k and 512k mac.

Here is the most recent interviews before he died. He is a very creative guy, that's for sure.

(Didn't the original Xerox machines have a mouse with three color-coded buttons?)

The software proect may have been too ambitious to be practical (on hardward of the time) but just try to touch his 1974 book for less than $100 (not the Msft reprint).

"Heading 3 from the article: Programs as Data. Yep, lisp was doing that decades ago :P"

And Forth was Data as code.

It sounds like we all are pining for the "Good , old, days".

When men were men, and our development environments respected that. None of these 'sissified' "Can I wipe your chin?" we presently have. :)

While there were a lot of similar models throughout time, I got you beat: I used to carry around a Tandy TRS-80 Model 4P. The "P" stands for Portable! Mine weighs 30+ pounds (still have it in the basement). I found it at goodwill for something like $4.50, and at the time it seemed like a good idea, but 16 year old nerds always think getting more computer junk is a good idea. A friend and I used to take turns taking it to our classes- mind you, this is in 1996, and this machine has been long obsoleted- and use it for taking notes. For some reason, the teachers were stuck between telling us to shut the damn thing off and thinking it a great use of "technology in the classroom." Every key you'd hit would cause a *beep.* Oh, those were the days...

Damn, wish I'd kept my old tapes now. I wrote a bunch of games for the C1P because, being 12 I was too poor to actually buy any (I spent every penny I had saved for 2 years to buy the C1P (I saved my lunch money and worked at a used car lot washing cars on weekends)). I did a few chase em games, a half finished space invaders in assembly, a car driving game in assembly, and a 3D maze game using the in-built graphics and a 2D view of the maze which (ahem, due to my small and young brain required you to draw the maze in 2D first) - maze traversal algorithms were a little ahead of me at the time. Only now do I realise I was a huge dolt throwing that machine out after it died (around 1990) and scraping the tapes. Doh!

For an audio-only solution, my choice is the 3Com Audrey, a cute little retro-futuristic gadget from the short-lived "Internet appliance" bust a few years ago. It was originally meant for lightweight users to read email and news at the breakfast table and look up recipes on the web, but the $500 price tag didn't work out. But now the EBay price (about $85) makes it a nice cheap UI for selecting music to play in different rooms of the house. The Audrey hacking community has made lots of alternative software freely available for playing mp3s, X10 control, etc.

The Audrey has a 7" touch screen, wireless keyboard, microphone, audio jack, 2 USB ports, and a 56K modem or USB LAN dongle. No hard drive, no fan, totally silent. It runs QNX, an embedded Unix.

Setup is very easy, especially if you already have network wiring. All I had to do was plug it into a network jack and a stereo, and add a couple lines to the boot file to connect to my Windows share. My ambition is now to figure out how to get the original telephony software to work, so the 5 Audreys I ended up buying can double as speakerphones and a home intercom system. I highly recommend this nifty toy!

(like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)

You want me to send them my old TRS-80 Model 4P?

This kind of reminds me of this computer, which used what was called Tempest sheilding to stop people from picking up EMPs from the computer. They used it as wall paper too.

They did make wooden computer cases (Apple I).

Yes, one step closer after ten steps back.

Even earlier - as far back as 1971 Maze Wars

I remember playing this on a mac in the late '80s.

My PERQ Workstation came with PNX (an ICL UNIX derivative) from 1981.

PERQ image
PERQ info

This had a command "winit" to start the *windowing system*. Whilst not X, it's a similar concept, and referes to the 'areas you can resize/move/minimise/cover" as windows.

Apple most certainly didn't. It was Xerox who put all the hard work into figuring out how to make it work. Early versions were modified copier engines, but later, the laser printers that came with Xerox's Star office system were commercially available, reliable boxes.

I'm seeing so many stories on here about Apple innoavting this, and Apple innovating that. Not true. Most of Apple's Mac-era development - bitmapped display, mouse, WIMP OS - was derived from Xerox's PARC work due to a visit there in the early 1980s. I suggest you read this about the Star, and possibly source a copy of Dealers of Lightning for some factual history lessons in technology.

Hats off to Xerox PARC, the only people in recent history who can truly be called innovators.

In 1974, Ted Nelson had some thoughts to share on this very topic in his revolutionary book Computer Lib. As the "crackpot, visionary, gadfly" he calls himself he stated that "Universities require higher math (usually calculus and at minimum linear algebra) before allowing students to program a computer. This is preposterous! This is akin to requiring a PHD in mechanics in order to drive a car down the road! Grade school kids can - and do - learn how to program computers with no math background at all!"

This is a paraphrase, because unfortunately I don't have my copy in front of me at the moment. But I believe I got it pretty close. While I agree with Ted on the whole, I also concede that it entirely depends on what you want to do with your programming projects.

If it's got anything at all to do with breaking apart, twiddling or mangling things like sound and video and many applications of graphics then yes higher math will be a requirement. It will also be useful in helping one think logically enough to handle programmatic tasks more easily.

That being said, there are still many many programmatic tasks you can accomplish...to make your life easier because someone else hasn't in the area you're programming in, or just to learn the internals - the process! - of programming: Ted was dead on (as he was about a lot of things!). No math will be required for a great many tasks!

That was "Applesoft", from, you guessed it, Microsoft. Before the PC, I think Microsoft built itself on that product. Please see this page.

It goes back much further than that. Try Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson with the revolutionary fist on the cover.

for all the problems that MS do bring to the market I can still remember the cost of Macs (in AUS) as always being well above comodity PC's with MS software. MS has always traditionally had low entry costs (hah eat my own words) pre say 1998.

Consider Macs, easier yes. but they still cost a lot. What about Xerox. Parc was not geared up to selling. It was at that time a thinktank for very smart engineers. Alto, easy to use but never destined to be commercialised. Consider it. The mouse (Englebart), smalltalk (Alan Kay), ethernet (metcalfe, boggs[see networking] ) all within Parc but never commercialised within Parc.

For all it's faults, Microsoft kick started the personal PC revolution to the masses. Say what you like about the quality of the software, usability, the price we pay for it and the tatics the company employs.

They excelled in bringing together the mouse, languages, hardware (forget networking ... took ages) - the bits needed to use a computer in the form of operating system(s) a lot like say Ford did with the T-Ford: exploiting all those developers who built the components ecessary to build cars.

Current textbook companies will stall on porting to the digital world just like book, magazines and music did. Then they'll see the light and jump all over it because an outsider is pushing them out of their own market. Pushing bits is a lot cheaper than printing on dead trees. Textbook publisher's profits will soar.

IMO the best solution is to also use GPL textbooks created through a wiki system. Schools would save a ton of money. Add the ability for teachers to easily send students notes, allow anyone to create books and Sony will make a ton of money. Everyone wins. It's up to Sony to play this into a bigger profit center than the PS2 or to have it end up like their MagicLink (also a great device which I own).

Great post AllenChristopher.

They fardles bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life.

Shit, you deserve an extra +1 for that alone.

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox- 8010/index.html

For the low low price of $17,000 the Xerox Star had a better GUI than the Lisa, Mac, or Geos. Ran on beefier hardware too.

Neat stuff, I wonder if a Xerox Star emulator would ever be possible...?

As long as it doesn't come with a chicklet keyboard...

"Star was designed as an office automation system. The idea was that professionals in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, distribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All of the workstations in an organization would be connected via Ethernet and would share access to file servers, printers, etc.

Star's designers assumed that the target users are interested in getting their work done and not at all interested in computers. Therefore, an important design goal was to make the "computer" as invisible to users as possible. The applications included in the system were those that office professionals would supposedly need: documents, business graphics, tables, personal data-base, and electronic mail. The set was fixed, always loaded, and automatically associated with data files, eliminating the need for users to worry about obtaining, installing, and starting the right application for a given task or data file. Users could focus on their work, oblivious of concepts like software, operating systems, applications, and programs.

Another important assumption was that Star's users would be casual, occasional users, rather than people who spent most of their time at the machine. This assumption led to the goal of having Star be easy to learn and remember."

...and man that thing was badass.

You just plugged it into a tv and you were up and running. Sort of an early portable. And even cooler, if you didn't have a system disk in it when it started up, you could just start programming in basic. I've still got it somewhere. Damn thing still works. Take that, modern hardware!

10 PRINT "(little brother) SUCKS!!!"
20 GOTO 10

Good times.

AFAIK, the prototypical GUI windowing system was the Xerox Star office automation system, ca 1981. As I recall, it's said that Jobs and Woz saw a demo at Xerox PARC, cost cut the design from a $25K office system to a $5K personal system, and begat the Macintosh of 1984.

Oh how quickly they forget. MSX? Windows 1.0? MS Xenix? The not-so-compatible 1980s MS-DOS Compatibles? The list goes on and on...

*sigh*
A booke I own is at least twice my age :/ (although I think I own a later edition one...)

While there are some machines that will get this treatment, there are too many that are too costly to run or repair to ever try to plug in again.

Certainly most of the PC era systems would still boot, but in an attempt to preserve them, we aren't going to try.

There are a few places where more contemporary machines can be seen in their fully pixelated splendor (running) that you can visit.. Get it while the getting is good.. it only takes a blown power supply or burned in tube to ruin it forever.

Here is one example where they have a great collection of systems plugged in and warming up the place. Actually a barn, so a little heat isn't so bad.

http://www.digibarn.com/

Yeah, and it's a collector's item, now. The world's largest computer museum needs one piece, too.

I thought that as we all saw on TV, we should have all been using VR interfaces back in 1996!

Desktops? How quaint.
What about the kitchen metaphore?
Or better yet, the bathroom user interface?
What about countertops?
Or stovetops?

What ever happened to VRML?!! I've got this mungo-ass 3D accellemerator card that came with my PC, but my operating system utilizes exactly 0% of it. Where are the direct-to-brain elecronical interfaces invented by William Gibson? Why has the state of the art been polishing the same turd since 1978 ?!!!

Here are some photos of the Apple Knowledge Navigator. This is a page from the larger document about the Knowledge Navigator mentioned in my other post.

And here is a video - very s l o w - someone mirror it....

Its blazing computational stats:

BCPL: 5-10 uSec for a simple expression
Nova Asm: 1-2uSec / instruction
Microcode: 170 nSec / micro instruction

Can be found with a lot of other cool information on its original programming language and some software on this very cool page by an Alto collector.

Neat machine. I think I want one now.

-----

Somebody please mod the parent up!

Thank you! I've long wondered how Jobs managed to get inside PARC. I'd never known that Xerox held a large portion of Apple shares. Fumbling The Future is one of those books that is on my "list" along with about 500 others.

It really is amazing that Xerox never could realize the potential in what it had. The Star, 3 years ahead of the Mac, was amazing. IIRC, and I apologize if my memory is faulty, you guys at Xerox AI Systems did a lot of work in making practical expert systems. Astounding. Xerox has all this brainpower producing such beautiful stuff and completely and totally blows it.

If anybody is interested, I highly recommend Bruce Damer's Personal Histories of the Desktop User Interface.

• It is difficult today to remember how intimidating computers were for non-technical people in the early 1980s [...]

Jeff was a little more than one of the early macintosh engineers. He was the originator of the Macintosh project. The guy who decided to call the Mac a "Mac". Though he originally wanted to call it the McIntosh, there was a high level audio component manufacturer of the same name and Apple's lawyers decided to change the spelling of the name to "Macintosh". Though as Theodore Nelson pointed out in his classic geek opus Computer Lib/Dream Machines, the name "Macintosh" if you actually followed the rules of English syntax would be pronounced "Mah-Sin-Tosh".

I'm on a reading tear at the moment of old computer books where they are talking about the design of the interfaces that we have all come to know and love (books from a time when these were all new ideas). I plan on topping it off with Jeff Raskin's new book.

As far as actually designing interfaces goes, several of my friends who actually design interfaces for a living have claimed that this book has been a tremendous help in providing a direction and design philosophy. Most people who design interfaces for the web, for instance, don't seem to ask themselves questions like "How would I design a telephone if I had never seen, never heard of what this device was or was supposed to do".

But it Swings with performance!

We're gonna rock-tane!