Slashdot Mirror
The Sketchbook of Susan Kare
theodp writes "The Mac wasn't the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor, but it was the sketchbook of Susan Kare that gave computing a human face to the masses. After graduating from NYU with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare was working on a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel when she got a call from high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld offering her a job to work on the Mac. The rest, as they say, is UI history. Armed with a $2.50 sketchbook, Kare crafted the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing. BTW, just in time for holiday gift-giving, Kare has self-published her first book, Susan Kare Icons. So, could computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?"
The Plato IV protoypes used a plasma panel with touch screen in the late '60s, and had downloadable characters you could point to to activate different functions. Not a far reach to make those program and folder icons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
Susan Kare is very well known in the visual design world. She is the world's leading icon designer. Not only did she do the icons for the Mac, she did some of the icons for Windows. And Autodesk products. And PayPal. And Facebook.
(If the Linux crowd had someone that good, Linux on the desktop would probably be a success by now.)
"The percentage of top 100 CEOs who earned an M.B.A. decreased from 37% in 2003 to 36% in 2004, to 35% this year [2005]. The percentage of all S&P 500 CEOs who have an M.B.A. has increased from 37% to 39% over the past two years."
content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf
There are a lot of MBAs who successfully run large corporations, but I realize that its fun to hate on them here.
No. You cannot compare it with anything that "was just around the corner" - it didn't exist yet. I don't recall AmigaOS being much ahead of the Mac (not "Mac OS", it wasn't called an OS for another 10 years), though it did have some nice features and eventually, some nice tools. Apart from Smalltalk, on which you might have a point, none of those other things would have been usable on a 68000 processor. It's questionable whether any sort of OOP runtime could have run on it. You could argue that the CPU was too small for the job, but the software was well tailored to the architecture they chose, for better or worse. The point is, it was a very productive way to program for a while. I'm not saying it was anywhere near perfect, but calling it a piece of shit is to judge it by the standards of today, not 1984.