Re: [NTLK] Father of the Mac dies

From: Alex Santos 100MB Neostrada Mail (izabella.misiewiczsantos_at_neostrada.pl)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 14:46:36 PST


Although, I did find this:

Horn is correct that click-and-drag methods were invented at Apple and
not at PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I know). I created this method for
moving objects and making selections after finding the Xerox
click-move-click method prone to error. Bill Atkinson extended the
paradigm to pull-down menus. This all happened relatively early in the
history of the Mac. The way my insight got extended by Bill was typical
of how things developed then. Surprising as it may seem in retrospect,
there was some resistance to my new way of using a graphic input device
and I had to repeatedly explain how drag worked and why it was often
easier to use than the modal click-move-click technique developed first
(as far as I know) on the Sketchpad system and then used at Xerox PARC.
Some of the arguments I used involved looking at number of user actions
and the time they took, an approach that was then or would soon become
the very useful GOMS model of Card, Moran, and Newell. Bill was a
strong supporter of my ideas and at one session where I was explaining
how drag worked Bill, by way of amplifying how useful it was, said
something like, "And you can use it to open menus, just put the cursor
on the top and drag down to the item you want."

I hired Bill for Apple, inviting him up from UCSD, where he had been a
student of mine. His close friend Bud Tribble, another UCSD student I
knew, joined us. Later still Bud was to lead software development at
Next.

Source: http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html
Recollections of the Macintosh project
This article is from: JefRaskin_at_aol.com
Unfortunately the email address will not yield any reply I imagine.

On Mar 3, 2005, at 9:11 PM, Brian Pearce wrote:

> "Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive
> aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and
> the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker
> processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been
> obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than
> 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring
> dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing."

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