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On Xerox, Apple and Progress, 1996

You need to read a bit more closely because you're refuting a few things the GP didn't say - but even so, while being technically right on a lot of points you're underestimating the amount of innovating Apple did.

Apple had a bad case of NIH ("Not Invented Here") Syndrome through much of their early growth, and it was only their near-collapse (prior to their purchase of NeXT) that woke them up to leveraging standard technologies like PCI, ATA drives and USB. Your line about "huge resistance because the only motivation for doing so was to force people to buy overpriced Mac-only hardware" flies in the face of the huge number of PC-compatible USB accessories that were introduced largely because Apple pushed the standard. Yes, PCs had USB but the drivers were crap or nonexistent, so nobody used it on the PC side. You didn't have to buy Apple peripherals to take advantage of USB on the Mac.

As for Xerox, Apple took the kernel of the GUI-mouse paradigm developed at PARC (but invented at Stanford) and did a HUGE amount of work to develop and promote it. They created all of the Toolbox, QuickDraw, Lisa OS and Mac OS from scratch. They didn't get ANY code from Xerox. Xerox showed them Smalltalk and Apple didn't develop on Smalltalk.

If you want to find see just how much Apple did invent, read the stories on Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org - they are fascinating and enlightening.

Had one guy on a graphic design mailing list claim, ``Without Steve Jobs there wouldn't have have programs like InDesign.'' --- displaying an apparently willful ignorance of the existence of page layout programs on the Xerox Alto, back from the days when Apple was still making the Apple ][, and another guy claim Steve Jobs ``never designed anything'' (counter-example would be the Apple Macintosh Calculator Desktop Accessory: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt ).

He was an early pioneer (among many other pioneers) who worked as leadership to a lot of teams which did some amazing work (Apple ][, Macintosh, NeXT, iMacs, iPod, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad), and had some bad moments (Apple III, Apple Macintosh Portable, closing down the Newton). It's sad that he has passed away, and while it's appropriate to remember the good things which he has achieved (getting California to directly ask about organ donor status at the DMV was huge), and the good aspects of his character, he was a man like other men, and it's important not to lose sight of that.

William

Round rects are everywhere!

If you haven't already, filter through http://folklore.org/ , his antics at the beginning of Apple are hilarious.

It's funny to read Hertzfeld's blog posts. When I was a kid Andy Hertzfeld was my household's icon of poor choices and half-assed thinking - my family was deeply entwined with a lot of the people in the image on top of his blog and none of them thought much of him.

His final will stated that he be buried in a glossy white coffin with no visible hinges or latches. RIP Steve.

with rounded corners

Rounded rectangles are everywhere

Old versions of Mac OS (back when it was called "System " had a little 16x16x1 icon of Steve Jobs. The story on folklore.org is here.

I hope they leave in in, or put it back in the ROMs, from now on. Come on, guys, 32 bytes.

If you haven't already, filter through http://folklore.org/ , his antics at the beginning of Apple are hilarious.

A Strategy for What?
Maybe someone really wants to leave.

Actually, Apple literally did invent the rounded rectangle UI element: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt

I think you'll find that is just showing an algorithm for fast drawing of rounded rectangles, not an invention of any shape or UI element at all.

Actually, Apple literally did invent the rounded rectangle UI element: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt

Thanks for the rewrite of history. Apple were certainly inspired by Xerox (and hired a load of their engineers and designers) but the Mac/Lisa GUI was the interface that inspired all the rest. The Xerox GUI was a text-heavy modal interface; in other words it had more in common with the horrible MS-DOS pseudo-GUIs than with the Mac/Lisa.

Checkout this photographic record to see the work Apple put in to developing the Mac/Lisa GUI. Along the way, they invented: pull-down menus; pop-up dialog boxes; icon-based file management; palates of tools/colours/shades etc.. They pretty much wrote the book on user/computer interaction for the next 20 years, and deserve far more credit for that than they get.

It's true that Xerox gave them a very good starting point, but the idea that they "nicked... and popularized" something that Xerox developed is simply not true, and if you wanted to be that simplistic then the credit would be due to Douglas Engelbart.

This reminds me of the story on folklore.org: RoundRects
Just be thankful they didn't patent it back in 1981.

they had a sparse few GUI programs on the 8 bit II's, the IIc came with a mouse port standard in 84, the apple II mouse card was developed about the same time as machintosh (1981 according to folklore)

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Apple_II_Mouse_Card.txt

Don't forget those hijacked cargo ships and the pirates as a possible source too!

Ironically, there is a pirate flag in the history of Apple.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Pirate_Flag.txt

Things like "... the mighty Apple Inc. Apple ...." are already giving us the answer, aren't they? ^^

I finally understood the reality distortion field: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt
It's real.

And it's just as much our own damn fault. It's the same thing that caused the results of the Milgram Experiment and a certain group of brown/black-dressing guys who didn't like Jews or any foreigner very much. ^^

So "cult" may or may not be right, depending on your bestimmtion.
But in any case, the fix is to grow a pair, and also grow a spine. Something you can't ever expect from the ACP (average cattle-people). ^^

In a computing context, they were actually :

1981. So.. for how many years is a patent valid nowadays?

i think we have to thank apple for invention of 'the rectangle' and 'rounded corners', since apparently they were the inventors of these very important concepts

In a computing context, they were actually :

"Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.

Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. When he added the code to LisaGraf, he named the new primitive "RoundRects". Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable"

Normally I don't create new parent posts when there's already a lot of response, but I feel like just about everyone else who has posted has missed the mark. I'm a pretty hard-core Mac user. I'm certainly not an Apple fanboi - I'm quite unhappy with their new direction and I don't own an iPhone :P. Still, it has been pretty clear for at least a little while that iOS "computers" are Apple's goal. If you read the stories from the original Macintosh development team (check out some here), it's pretty clear that this is what Steve Jobs has wanted forever. His original dream of the Mac was an appliance, everyone having identical models that suit their needs in a generalized, mass produced way. Home computers running something resembling iOS are pretty damn close to that. And to be honest, as much as the prosumer in me screams in rage at it, it makes sense.

Just about everyone I know that went off to a state school after high school either already had or bought an Apple laptop. I know a ton of people that got MacBook Pros, for no reason other than they're middle class and have money. Most of them won't use the resources of that computer for anything even resembling its capabilities. For a large majority of the computer-using populace, an iOS-like operating system is much better suited to their use cases than any of the typical desktop OSes. I know the slashdot crowd hates to accept this, but the average consumer-level computer user clicks the same three or four shortcuts every day: web browser, music player, email client/instant messenger, and piracy software. Bringing a tablet or smartphone-style OS to their home computer is less of a reduction in as opposed to a better targeting of capabilities. The walled garden model provides a huge boost to security (I know people will cry bullshit about that but face it, less attack vectors means less attacks) and makes things drastically easier to use. I hear a lot more about people's grandmothers figuring out how to use iPads than how to use computers.

People in this thread have been talking about a reduce in hardware capability. Personally I wouldn't see that as a given. As hardware has evolved, so has software. Modern OSes and runtimes quite obviously have drastically higher overhead than of years ago. Again, personally I feel that in terms of efficiency operating systems have taken many steps backward. Regardless, MacBook Airs aren't by any definition low-end hardware, and the iPad 2 (and presumably iPhone 5) has an incredibly powerful processor for a handheld device.

I defined myself earlier as a "prosumer." I base that definition off the fact that I make heavy use of the Mac OS X and iOS development tools, in addition to Logic and Adobe software in freelance and hobbyist work. It troubles me greatly that very likely, the consumer Mac OS will soon lack the capabilities that I have always loved it for. My personal theory is that there will be a paid "Pro" upgrade to the next version of Mac OS X, ala editions of Windows. Hell, it'll probably be available on the Mac App Store like the Mac OS X Server upgrade is now. Although I certainly don't like where Apple (and personal computing as a whole) is heading, it really makes a lot more sense.

Which Microsoft wound up w/ and used as the ``inspiration'' for VisualBASIC:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBasic.txt

Rather a shame that AppleScript Studio in XCode went away w/ Snow Leopard.

William

Funny, though, those 'open' Macs only appeared after Jobs was gone!

Funny? I'm have trouble finding citation but, as I recall, one of the points of friction between Jobs and Scully at the time of Job's departure was over whether to open up the Macintosh. Jobs was against it. Despite putting slots in the NeXT cubes, I think he still prefers Macs be closed. The first Macs to show the Jobs influence after his return to Apple were the iMacs. Closed again.

Here is a nice story told by Andy Hertzfeld (The main software developer for the macintosh's os) which clearly states that jobs did not want to have any expansion slots in the macintosh (funny read):

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagnostic_Port.txt

Quote from that page:

Jef Raskin had a very different point of view. He thought that slots were inherently complex, and were one of the obstacles holding back personal computers from reaching a wider audience. He thought that hardware expandability made it more difficult for third party software writers since they couldn't rely on the consistency of the underlying hardware. His Macintosh vision had Apple cranking out millions of identical, easy to use, low cost appliance computers and since hardware expandability would add significant cost and complexity it was therefore avoided.

Funny, though, those 'open' Macs only appeared after Jobs was gone!

Funny? I'm have trouble finding citation but, as I recall, one of the points of friction between Jobs and Scully at the time of Job's departure was over whether to open up the Macintosh. Jobs was against it. Despite putting slots in the NeXT cubes, I think he still prefers Macs be closed. The first Macs to show the Jobs influence after his return to Apple were the iMacs. Closed again.

Here is a nice story told by Andy Hertzfeld (The main software developer for the macintosh's os) which clearly states that jobs did not want to have any expansion slots in the macintosh (funny read):

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagnostic_Port.txt

Was totally adequate at the time, but started pining for that newfangled Apple Macintosh thingy when that came out.

For getting real work done at the time you were way better off with an Osborne or a Kaypro, or one of the many competitors. The typical software bundles shipped with CP/M machines at the time (word processor, database, spreadsheet, programming language, etc.), relatively easy telecommunications, wide choice of printers, and typical 2 disk drive configuration made them far more useful than the typical Macintosh configuration (unless you were doing graphics). The two advantages of the Macintosh were doing graphics, and general ease of use for the much more limited software that it had.

The Mac was certainly the way of the future, but the future took a long time to arrive with many bumps along the way. (But Steve doesn't want the Macintosh to be expandable!. MacBasic - Killed as sacrifice to Microsoft! And I won't bring up Apple losing the Hypercard source, of the one-floppy disk swap hell of the origunal Mac.)

Was totally adequate at the time, but started pining for that newfangled Apple Macintosh thingy when that came out.

For getting real work done at the time you were way better off with an Osborne or a Kaypro, or one of the many competitors. The typical software bundles shipped with CP/M machines at the time (word processor, database, spreadsheet, programming language, etc.), relatively easy telecommunications, wide choice of printers, and typical 2 disk drive configuration made them far more useful than the typical Macintosh configuration (unless you were doing graphics). The two advantages of the Macintosh were doing graphics, and general ease of use for the much more limited software that it had.

The Mac was certainly the way of the future, but the future took a long time to arrive with many bumps along the way. (But Steve doesn't want the Macintosh to be expandable!. MacBasic - Killed as sacrifice to Microsoft! And I won't bring up Apple losing the Hypercard source, of the one-floppy disk swap hell of the origunal Mac.)

Apropos of that, see http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Tell_Adam_Hes_An_Asshole.txt&showcomments=1#comments

      Jobs was a bit of a dick but, he was mostly right...

Oh that's why it is so intuitive to put a floppy in the trash to eject it. Hmmmm?

I agree, it's weird, and in practice it tended to confuse people, but it helps to understand the history behind it.

Way back in the day, the Mac ran entirely from floppy disks. In fact, the original Mac couldn't use a hard disk at all (unless I've forgotten about some obscure third party disks, which is possible). For many years, it was not unusual to encounter Macs that had to be run from the floppy drive, popular as hard drives became. IIRC, hard drives were not standard equipment on all models until probably '91 or '92.

Worse, most Macs only had one floppy drive. You could get another one (usually external, though some Macs, like the SE or the II had a second bay that could be used for a floppy drive) but they were a bit pricey, and as long as you're spending money, you might as well get a hard disk instead.

This meant that you had an icon-based system that had to allow people to copy data between two different floppy disks, only one of which was physically present at a time. Masochists could even try putting the OS, applications, and documents on different disks, and swap between them as needed.

The solution that was devised was that if you selected a disk icon on the Mac, and used the 'Eject Disk' command (remember, the Mac didn't use eject buttons on the drives), it would eject the disk from the drive, but leave it mounted in the OS, with its icon still visible but greyed out. You could then insert a second disk, and then do something like copy a file from the second disk to the first, and the OS would prompt you to swap them as needed. (For people who remember the infamous Disk Swap Tango, see this page by Steve Capps, who explains a bug he caused that made this worse than it had to be)

Along with the 'Eject Disk' command, which ejected but did not dismount the disk, there was also the generally-forgotten and poorly named 'Put Away' command, which would, if a disk was ejected, get rid of the greyed out icon, and if a disk was not ejected, would eject it and get rid of the greyed out icon. It could also do some other things depending on context, though my memory is no longer clear as to whether those functions arose in System 7 or were around earlier, and I'm too lazy to look through my old manuals.

During usability testing, this was all found to be fairly annoying. So a shortcut was developed: If you dragged a disk icon to the trash, it invoked the Put Away command on it.

As it happened, everyone wound up doing this instead, and the Put Away command was almost entirely forgotten. Then, once hard disks were commonplace, and people rarely needed to swap removable media in this fashion, the Eject Disk command was changed to completely eject and dismount disks.

I believe that Tog (one of the Apple UI bigwigs) once discussed having the trash icon change to an eject icon when a disk was being dragged, but that they couldn't figure out a way to do it elegantly, and there was some concern over how people would respond to the change in the UI. Then, when OSX was brought out, which really drew from the NeXT UI more than the Mac UI anyway, this was implemented. Drag a disk to the Trash on a Mac now, and the Trash icon will change to an Eject symbol.

It probably didn't help that symbols for things like 'Eject' were not really universal yet. As near as I can tell, the symbol now in use is derived from top-loading VCRs and cassette tape players -- many of which would just use text instead anyway.

Depends on your definition of design genius. You're thinking of the guys with pencils & sketchbooks, Jobs is the guy who told Woz to put the chips and slots into orderly rows, insisted the Macintosh II cases have sides at right angles (which meant more expensive mold tooling,) and convinced Bill Atkinson the significance of rectangles with rounded corners.

Stuff you never think of, but immediately notice once it's side by side with the competition.

...don't count Steve Jobs out. The dude is wildy sucessful at going against popular opinnion.

Shouldn't that be "wildly succesful at distorting reality"?

"Real artists ship." -- Steve jobs.

Apparently Steve Jobs for one:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Close_Encounters_of_the_Steve_Kind.txt

William

Guess we're two of those weird people who apparently can't see the point in round things when they're not needed.

Oh, but they're everywhere!

QuickDraw was actually written by Bill Atkinson, who was in a car accident. He said "Don't worry, Steve, I still remember regions."

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Still_Remember_Regions.txt

The actual story is here

So, they paid for the tour, and came back with copyright and code of of the GUI?? If not, they STOLE it, no matter how you want to paint it. Get over it.

It is not as simple as that.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

And don't optimize.

Here is a direct link to the article I was referring to detailing their GUI work on the Lisa:

On Xerox, Apple, and Progress

See, the idea that Apple stole the GUI lock/stock from Xerox and then accused Microsoft of the same thing is a massive myth. Have you even looked at the Alto/Star GUI? It used modal buttons along the bottom of windows; windows were tiled and could not overlap. Yes, the general concept of the GUI was developed at PARC, although that wasn't entirely original (see Douglas Englebart's 1960s demo. Apple made a huge contribution to modern GUIs. Check out the photographic record of the Lisa/Mac GUI development. Apple invented the pull-down menu whilst developing Lisa/Mac, they also invented the clipboard, and the idea of dragging and dropping files, to name just three things. All of these were totally copied by Microsoft, although they failed at it by replicating the menu bar at the top of every window, which some people like now, but was a total waste of screen space 25 years ago.

Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. They got to tour PARC with permission from Xerox's upper management and compensated Xerox with pre-IPO shares. What the Mac did with the ideas from PARC was very different from what Xerox did with the ideas out of PARC. This is also very different from Microsoft sending an employee to copy implementation details from Apple. Do go waving some out of context quote around without knowing the actual history of the situation.

That pretty much sums it up right there. I know its probably meaningless for most people in the world, but when those who claim to be "in the know" start taking sides between Apple and MS on "innovation," they really need to just check that right there.

You're buying into Bill Gates' bullshit. Apple didn't "steal" anything; they had an agreement with Xerox. Many of the guys who worked on the Mac were hired from Xerox.

Several conventions originated at Apple, such as the "File Edit View Window Help" menu or the phrase "cut and paste." Lisa was already in development when Apple visited Xerox to see what they were working on, so while they were influenced by what they saw, it wasn't an inspiration to go in some whole new direction.

Much of this is detailed at Herztfeld's site, including sketches and screenshots of their GUI work.

"Design" like his design influence in the Mac hardware? "...look at the memory chips. That's ugly. The lines are too close together"

This is the article at folklore.org that parent was talking about. Pretty amusing.

It has been mentioned a few times here in /., but http://folklore.org/ has a great collection of short stories about MacPaint. Worth the reading for every geek out there

This is not really about Nokia, its about Apple. Old rod-style antennas are ugly and cumbersome, I would trade that for slightly worse internal antennas, if that's the trade-of. As I said Steve Jobs has form for design related issues that can backfire, this has been covered at www.folklore.org a site written by people who know and have worked closely with Jobs. Having said this I would rather have a CEO like Jobs, I don't want to fault the man for caring about his products.

He's the guy that told Steve Jobs "You're full of shit". http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Close_Encounters_of_the_Steve_Kind.txt

Show me a "new idea" in software and I'll show you some no-account who claims he "thought of it first" but didn't have the motivation or skills, either to implement it right, or to successfully bring it to market.

Sure there are occasional examples of some freeware widget being copied and made into part of the OS, but more often than that, they just buy the relevant IP from the guy who created it. However if you think Apple is the only company to ever reimplement a "good idea" independently, without the blessing of some "inventor of the idea," then you're delusional and just have an axe to grind with Apple on some holy-war grounds.

Let me guess, you think Apple "stole" the desktop metaphor, mouse, etc. from Xerox PARC... but Microsoft was just using an obvious evolutionary idea when they suddenly developed Windows after examining the Mac prototypes they were given.

Apple (and Jobs) are no saints. But they've been on both sides of those battles, and are no worse than any other tech firm when it comes to originality. There are just not that many whole-cloth brand new ideas in our industry! The best things are refinements of other things. Think about it--Apple didn't invent MP3 players, and Microsoft didn't invent CP/M. In both cases, the concept of something crappy was taken, improved upon, and released as something less crappy (iPod, and MS-DOS).

I found this to be incredibly enlightening.

It basically explains exactly how Jobs is able to hold contradictory views.

To him, whatever he believes now is exactly what he has always believed, even if he believed the exact opposite mere moments before. Also, you'd better not come up with a good idea and share it with him alone, because in the next staff meeting it will suddenly be his idea and you had nothing to do with it. I don't think he does it on purpose, I think he really believes he comes up with all the stuff he thinks he comes up with.

Real artists ship.

This is wholly inaccurate. The only reason the Mac didn't have decent sound was because Burrell only put a single-voice DAC into the Mac and Burrell and Hertzfeld didn't have a lot of time to write a decent mixing routine. More details here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Sound_By_Monday.txt

Jam Session and Studio Session by Bogas were able to mix up to six voices realtime, so decent sound was possible through software.

Yes, Jobs owned NeXT (Which became OSX) but I assume GP was referring to all the OS stuff Apple bought/'borrowed' from Xerox PARC (Which became MacOS/NeXT). And Xerox PARC had fuck all to do with Jobs.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

TLDR version: things were seen during the visits to Xerox (which, btw, was paid for in Apple stock options, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)#Adoption_by_Apple ), and some ideas did have influence. However, the impact was much less than most people assume. In most areas Apple actually exceeded Xerox's GUI accomplishments. For example, apparently the system Apple people saw was primitive enough that it couldn't draw to partially obscured windows as there was no facility for masking drawing operations with an arbitrary shape. You had to bring a window to the front in order for it to update. The folklore.org article also goes through a bunch of other innovations in the Apple GUI.

However, in terms of software architecture, PARC was far better. The compromises Apple made to get the Mac working with just 128K RAM, 64K ROM, no hardware address virtualization, and a single 400K floppy drive for permanent storage were legion, and eventually came back to torment Apple in the 90s.

Basically, even though Apple even had some ex-Xerox people, the design points were too dissimilar for a lot of cross pollination to take place. Xerox was building cost-no-object ($75K to get the base system, $16K per additional workstation according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star ) tech for the future, Apple was building something intended to sell in mass quantities to the general public at a relatively affordable price. Ironically, of course, that was a recipe for Apple to have far more lasting influence than Xerox Star.

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