Jef Raskin warns that many of the reported facts in the history of the PARC and Macintosh development are inaccurate, distorted or even fabricated, due to the lack of usage by historians of direct primary sources. A list of the improvements made by Apple, beyond the PARC interface, can be read at. However, the Apple work extended PARC's considerably, adding manipulatable icons, and drag and drop manipulation of objects in the file system (see Macintosh Finder) for example. Apple engineers visited the PARC facilities (Apple secured the rights for the visit by compensating Xerox with a pre-IPO purchase of Apple stock) and a number of PARC employees subsequently moved to Apple to work on the Lisa and Macintosh GUI. Screenshots of first GUIs of Apple Lisa prototypes show the early designs. These prototype GUIs are at least mouse-driven, but completely ignored the WIMP ( "window, icon, menu, pointing device") concept. There is still some controversy over the amount of influence that Xerox's PARC work, as opposed to previous academic research, had on the GUIs of the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, but it is clear that the influence was extensive, because first versions of Lisa GUIs even lacked icons. Apple revisited the document-centric design, in a limited manner, much later with OpenDoc. The Macintosh, in contrast to the Lisa, used a program-centric rather than document-centric design. A desktop metaphor was used, in which files looked like pieces of paper, file directories looked like file folders, there were a set of desk accessories like a calculator, notepad, and alarm clock that the user could place around the screen as desired, and the user could delete files and folders by dragging them to a trash-can icon on the screen. The comparatively simplified Macintosh, released in 1984 and designed to be lower in cost, was the first commercially successful product to use a multi-panel window interface. The Lisa, released in 1983, featured a high-resolution stationery-based (document-centric) graphical interface atop an advanced hard disk based OS that featured such things as preemptive multitasking and graphically oriented inter-process communication. The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers during the late 1970s and early 1980s, notably the Three Rivers PERQ, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, and the first Sun workstations.īeginning in 1979, started by Steve Jobs and led by Jef Raskin, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple Computer (which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas. It was not a commercial product, but several thousand units were built and were heavily used at PARC, as well as other XEROX offices, and at several universities for many years. It had a bitmapped screen, and was the first computer to demonstrate the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI). In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto personal computer. Several people went from SRI to Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. It was so-called The Mother of All Demos.Įngelbart's work directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. So, the design was based on the childlike primitives of eye-hand coordination, rather than use of command languages, user-defined macro procedures, or automated transformation of data as later used by adult professionals.Įngelbart publicly demonstrated this work at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)-Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968. Much of the early research was based on how young children learn. Engelbart had been inspired, in part, by the memex desk-based information machine suggested by Vannevar Bush in 1945. This computer incorporated a mouse-driven cursor and multiple windows used to work on hypertext. In the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation of Human Intellect project at the Augmentation Research Center at SRI International in Menlo Park, California developed the oN-Line System (NLS). The concept of a multi-panel windowing system was introduced by the first real-time graphic display systems for computers: the SAGE Project and Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad.Īugmentation of Human Intellect (NLS) Some early cathode-ray-tube (CRT) screens used a light pen, rather than a mouse, as the pointing device. 2.1 Windows 95 and "a computer in every home"Įarly dynamic information devices such as radar displays, where input devices were used for direct control of computer-created data, set the basis for later improvements of graphical interfaces.1.18 Microsoft Windows (16-bit versions).1.17 Applications under MS-DOS with proprietary GUIs.1.16 MS-DOS file managers and utility suites.1.10 GEM (Graphics Environment Manager).1.6 Apple Lisa and Macintosh (and later, the Apple IIgs).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |