On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, Gary Moody wrote:
> The inventors of the whole concept of a GUI was invented at the Xerox Palo
> Alto Research Center (PARC), and Xerox actually made a machine based on
> these concepts, a large mini/small mainframe known as the Xerox Star. Xerox
> being the marketing collossus it is (it has been said that if Xerox bought
PARC carried on GUI research begun by others, and brought it further
along. They didn't invent the entire concept of the GUI. Although, they
did invent many other cool things, such as ethernet and the laser printer,
iirc.
> Kentucky Fried Chicken that they would market it as hot, dead chicken! :)
> ), the Star barely sold at all; it was a curiosity.
It was also very expensive, and actually marketed primarily to poeple
doing research.
> After the fiasco of the Lisa and falling out of favor with the Apple board,
> he ensconced himself and the Mac team in a metal building to complete the
> Mac development. They would fly the Jolly Roger over the building during
> the day (sound familiar?) and illegally raid the Lisa files at night. The
> result was the Macintosh. Gates saw a major competitive edge with the GUI,
> and started development of his own in reaction. The OS wars were born.
Yup. Bill Gates wrote a position paper, saying that by '85 he wanted
Windows to be a big thing. He wrote it on a Mac, of course :)
> But the point of it is, if not for a chance demo combined with Jobs vision,
A "chance demo" which included many people other than Jobs, and which
Apple arranged and paid $1m in stock for. Peope other than Jobs had been
working with simiar concepts before they saw PARC stuff, and were
interested in seeing what what was being done by others.
> we'd probably still be using some form of command-line architecture on small
> boxes, and the Newton with it's cool OS probably would never have existed at
> all.
That's an impressive statement. While I don't think thing would be as far
along as they are, many people before PARC had talked about the GUI and
done reasearch into the core concepts. THat wouldn't have gone away, and
woudl have been slowly moved forward.
gopi.
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