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Regarding his complaints about computers not allowing for creativity, I disagree. Social media has done more to advance mass narcissism than anything else in our history. Never before have we been more entertained by creative idiots online.

That's hardly what he has in mind.

I agree with your main point: design patents based on form, rather than function are a mistake. it's worth 15 minutes to read the 1968 Kay paper that still inspires many people (including me): A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages; and as published academic research, it fits every reasonable definition of prior art for the functionality of a tablet computer.

[I]f the underlying technologies of the web had been patented by Sir Tim (or similar) and licensed then we wouldn't be posting on Slashdot right now because nobody outside of large multinationals would even be *using* the web for anything.

Case in point: Hyper-G/Hyperwave. It was developed at about the same time as the WWW. It was technically pretty solid (renaming documents didn't break links, integrated search engine, powerful authoring tools) and even didn't use an abbreviation that took longer to pronounce the the full name.

AFAIR it soon moved out of the academia and was turned into a commercial product, so it basically did what the WIPO head suggested.

These days it doesn't even have an Wikipedia article anymore. According to its homepage, it found a niche for corporate intranets and now competes with SharePoint.

There are plenty of other early hypertext systems comparable to the WWW (going back to the 60ties). I seem to recall that Douglar Engelbart's NLS was heavily patented, though I cannot find a reference for this right now. (Though partially these systems certainly failed because of insufficient technology and lack of a target group. You can't blame everything on patents).

If you want to find out what the hell he's talking about, it's in his books -- "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" and "Literary Machines". Unfortunately they're rather hard to find. There's a summary here,

Apple pioneered the use of overlapping windows, ... and the overall desktop metaphor

I think you are mistaken.

The foundations for the present form of graphical user interfaces were in the 1960s and 1970s. This thesis recalls the invention of the mouse by Doug Engelbart and Bill English, overlapping windows and popup menus by Alan Kay, and icons by David Canfield Smith. -- http://www.mprove.de/diplom/text/5_synopsis.html

Take a look at this picture of a Xerox Star desktop and tell me again that Apple invented overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor. Those icons in the bottom right look like Manilla folders. One of the icons is titled Blank Canvas. There's an in-tray at the top right of the picture. It's without doubt an implementation of the desktop metaphor, which had been proposed in academic papers as far back as the 60s. I recommend this excellent history of the GUI.

Uh, yeah, or do you think it's a coincidence that your Windows and Linux apps all have a "File Edit View Tools Window Help" menubar, your desktop has a trash can of some sort, a control panel of some sort, unified print and save dialogs, cut-and-paste (even the term "cut-and-paste" itself), your windows have a close and maximize button, and on and on and on and on...

I think you have misunderstood the point that was being made. There is no dispute that the Mac UI was influential. The mistake is in thinking it was revolutionary. The Mac UI was an evolutionary improvement based upon decades of work by Bush, Engelbart, Kay and others. I don't think you can successfully argue otherwise.

I thought this. I basically equate Dali programmers with Kai Krause

The wastebasket was in the version of the OS that Apple saw on their "visit" to Xerox's HQ. They took it out before the Star's launch.

From someone who worked at Xerox:

(I worked at Xerox on Star/Viewpoint from early '83 to '89.)
This was true of the first version of Star, but this problem was recognized very early, perhaps even before the first shipment of Star. A new project, known internally as Phoenix (although spelled "fnx") was designed to solve this problem. It drew from the Mesa Development Environment (known informally as Tajo) which originated on the Alto (I think first release was in 1977). The result was an open toolkit known as BasicWorkstation (desktop) and a compound document editor which had a "generic frame" mechanism. The Viewpoint Document Editor (as it was known) continued to use much of the Star code (including Traits), but reworked.

It was "closed" in that Mesa wasn't widely used in industry, although we gave several universities grants of hardware and software, the Xerox Development Environment (public brand of Tajo). Mesa was very similiar to Modula-3, and like any system with a large number of libraries (e.g. Smalltalk-80) it took months of learning before a programmer could be productive.

Interesting note about the wastebasket. When Macintosh came out Xerox bought a couple. I remember people being annoyed about this. I was told that an early design of Star included a trashcan, but it was decided that it was unnecessary in the version that was shipped. In Viewpoint (1985) we added a trashcan, but felt that we should use a "wastebasket" icon.

The document centric model (not knowing about applications, no quit) came from Star. In Viewpoint you had control over apps launching, but once launched they didn't quit. Most apps were launched at boot time -- hence the 3+ minute boot! As a result of this painfully long boot, a colleague (Makota Mita) invented a sleep/quick restart feature that took about 30 seconds to put the sytem to sleep and awake again after poweroff.

Star had "stationary" as well, although it didn't have the double-click-to-tear-off UI. Instead, users would open the Prototypes container (see icon in lower right of this image)

This prototypes container (labeled OSBU here because the photo was taken of someone's workstation who worked in the OSBU network) had one copy of every object available to the user -- blank compound docs, compound doc with lots of graphics examples, folders, networks (where you found printers, file servers, mail servers, address book/directory server), small database (aka record file), etc.

Note: I'm not saying that Xerox invented everything. I think Lisa and Mac introduced several ideas (e.g. the suspend/resume for each file in Lisa is a GREAT idea) that we didn't do, but there are more similarities than people sometimes think.

Dave

I realise that E17 is still a WIP, but...

Did anyone else see those screenshots and think "OMG! It's Kai Krause! Run for the hills!"?

As one artist once commented to me, you can envisage Spock with some alien's computer saying: "I'm sorry, Captain. I cannot work out how to use this. The interface appears to have been designed by Kai Krause."

He did great stuff in the 1970s inventing SmallTalk, developing graphics GUIs, a formulating the "Dynabook", the early PDA.

This stimulated Jobs and Gates to commercialize graphical computing and OOP-based OS's.

Kay... missed "industrial-strength" OOP

Here's what Alan says about C++: "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

Here's what Alan says about Java (he really has a lot to say about Java).

It seems to me that "industrial-strength" OOP missed the whole point of the OO.

Kay... missed the significance of the Web

Kay... missed the significance of ... PDAs

Kay... missed... cellphones

The Gore-Gates initative to make the Web available in every school and library by year 2000 did far more for children computing access than SmallTalk and eQuariums.

Lets see if the moderators can distinguish a contrarian opinion from troll-bait.

Oh, and if you're actually interested in what Kay has been up to, watch the video linked as Kay's Java comments. The man's been damn busy, and I hear that later this year there will be a public release of his current project, Croquet.