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[Floid]

It stands to reason that my long and heartfelt eulogy would be eaten by a collusion of imperfect software... and yes, there really was one, I'm nowhere near clever enough to have found such a fitting memorial on my own.

Please see Slashdot; we'll miss you, Jef.

[asian1]

Hi
The inventor of GUI, Mouse etc is a team of scientist at Xerox PARC lab:

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/gui.html

Taking the visions of Engelbart, and their new visionaries like Larry Tesler and Alan Kay, these began work on a new type of computer. They decided that its operating system would do away with the arcane command-line interface and instead would emulate the simplicity of a user's desktop, where papers overlapped each other and were moved at will while actions were performed on them without complex commands to type. In only three years, there machine was created.

[Floid]

asian1 wrote:
Hi
The inventor of GUI, Mouse etc is a team of scientist at Xerox PARC lab:

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/gui.html

Taking the visions of Engelbart, and their new visionaries like Larry Tesler and Alan Kay, these began work on a new type of computer. They decided that its operating system would do away with the arcane command-line interface and instead would emulate the simplicity of a user's desktop, where papers overlapped each other and were moved at will while actions were performed on them without complex commands to type. In only three years, there machine was created.

Well, you can't have it both ways -- if Englebart and team invented the mouse, why do you want to ascribe it to PARC?

See this article, and Jef's clarifications. You can see he was trying to figure out what exactly he could honestly take credit for, since he'd been on the same page since day one, but it perhaps took Xerox's work (and demonstration to Apple at large) to prove he wasn't nuts.

PARC dropped the ideas into Silicon Valley's lap. Apple, for better or worse, wound up in fairly tight with PARC. With Apple having been "the" most successful PC vendor previous to IBM, it stands to reason that people would've picked up on what they were doing -- and basic extensions to the PARC ideas, like drag'n'drop, are only 'hard' to pick up if you sweat the science and testing, which Raskin, bless him, did (hence spending the rest of his life trying to 'undo' or surpass the effects of releasing what became the single dominant interaction model)...

So I think, in retrospect, it's more than fair to say that all those people brought "UI" (and, sure, groan, "user friendliness") to the forefront out there. Meanwhile, this was a little bit before the ARPANet grew up and gave us the likes of Amiga.org, so all these ideas had to ride down a convoluted grapevine, or suffer independent reinvention/rediscovery when each project progressed to the point of being able to do this stuff. Even within the Fruit Cult Compound, there was limited contact between the Lisa and Mac and II teams, until Fearless Leader came by and moved your desk.

...

Remember, the Mac, for better or worse, was Apple's own game console that grew up... at this guy's urging. For that reason alone I'd say he was batting on 'our' team, even if the project quickly ran away from him. (The Canon Cat really does seem closer to what he wanted the Mac to be... and if you think that wouldn't have flown, look what Jobs is marketing now.)