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Now I get it. You don't understand how any of this stuff works. To you, it's just "magic." To me, it's just evolutionary advancements of ideas that had already been implemented elsewhere. Printing WUSIWUG is no great difficulty. The essence of every early graphics system is pixel based graphics. Essentially just contiguous locations in memory. If you can draw it, you can print it. Methods of drawing new, neat little things, are just a question of style, not one of brilliant development. (Again, style over substance.)

You are an idiot if you think I think it is "Magic" . . . I was one of 100 High School Students in the United States in the mid 60s selected by Bell Labs to participate in some of their projects such as making our own transistors. . . and then later participate in voice creation via electronics. Don't talk to me about me thinking things are "magic," when you try to tell me that converting vector shaped graphics into EDITABLE text is a trivial evolution of 8x8 grid ASCII code text. It certainly is NOT. . . and no one else was able to do it except Apple in 1984. Even the Lisa did not have that function.

Of course, they are plotted as mere dots on a raster screen, but I really do not think you know the complexities involved in maintaining an EDITABLE, contextual TEXT as a vector graphic. YOU are the one who thinks that's magic. . . just a simple series of easily calculable vectors. . . but now put those on a screen and make them EDITABLE with a keyboard as TEXT, and maintain kerning, spacing, proportion, at all sizes possible. That is not an easy task.

Other computer companies could not do it. You are an asshat if you think they just by-passed the capability because they wanted to make only business computers. Bull SH!T. The make excuses because they could not. Steve Jobs and Apple found a way to do that because Steve Jobs insisted on it. . . he drove it. They could have compromised and made a text only system like Xerox did. They did not. As a result all computers today use the system Steve Jobs forced into existence.

Vector graphics were being used all over the place. Remember the game "SpaceWar"? 1977, vector graphics

. . .

Spacewar 1962. Vector Graphics.

You STILL DON'T GET IT. Easy child's play compared to what I just described.

You don't even understand the acronym of WYSIWYG, a extremely well known term in computers. . . you misspell it "WUSIWUG," and claim it is no great difficulty, when getting a one-to-one relationship to what one sees on a computer screen and what is printed on the output of a printer, much less a high-quality offset four or six color ink Printing press is NOT AN EASY THING to do, nor trivial.

Frankly, even Apple was not perfect at doing it. . . because the early MacIntosh had to use some "screen fonts" to represent some commercially available printer fonts. . . instead of the ones it could draw as vector graphics, because the fontographers who made them, did not provide the vector graphic files for screen display Apple used on their own fonts.

You mentioned the Amiga computer by Commodore. I used a piece of software written by one man, Deron Kazmeier, that eschewed screen fonts entirely, embracing vector fonts completely, and it actually provided the BEST WYSIWYG I have ever seen. . . and could produce documents from the size of a postage stamp to a bill board. . . That software was available for the Mac as well.

No one is saying that Steve Jobs invented vector graphics, nor is anyone saying that Steve Jobs invented Calligraphic Fonts. Both of course predated computers by a long time. What Steve Jobs did was realize that computers were an ideal device to use to display, edit, and even print documents using calligraphic fonts for creating documents in an interactive environment in REAL TIME, in a way that the person doing that creative act could EDIT them as see how they looked on a virtual page without printing them, wasting time, effort, and resources. Jobs made it happen when no one else realized it was even possible.

That is no trivial thing and is the very essence of innovation and invention, regardless of how many people Jobs involved in making it happen. YOU could not have done it, and YOU would not have thought of the idea. . . and no one else in Jobs' milieu thought of it either. That is what made his contribution revolutionary.

And they thought of it first! :)

No, they did not. . . It's a walkie-talkie.

Dick Tracy's 2-way Wrist TV circa-1964, by Chester Gould

But that is STILL FICTION and a long stretch from FAKE to a working product that changes the world of smartphones and how they work, the user interface, their shapes, and even their colors. . . all thanks to the vision of one man, Steve Jobs.

The IBM-PC with a single floppy drive and no monitor when it came out was $2499. Happy?

Who would have wanted one of those? They sucked. I wouldn't have been interested in one of those if they had given it to me. Graphics was always my thing, and IBM graphics deliberately sucked in 1980. They didn't come out with anything remotely interesting until around 1990.

No, in 1977+, the best hobbyist computer was the Apple II. Others came out, many of them quite good, but none could match the advantages Apple had from being first and biggest. IBM was crap during this era. It was great for keeping records, or word processing, but I never had any interest in Data Base or that sort of green eyeshade crap.

Um, no. The Apple II was not the biggest nor best hobbyist computer. That would have been the Commodore C64, was entered in the Guinness Book of World records at 17,000,000, while Apple only made around 6,000,000 of the Apple II, including around 1.5 million of the Apple IIgs. Priced at $695, the C64 was more affordable than the Apple so more hobbyists could afford it. There was more affordable software and more free software as well. I programed for both.

That is not vector graphics, or any sort of graphics at all.

Don't talk to me about me thinking things are "magic," when you try to tell me that converting vector shaped graphics into EDITABLE text is a trivial evolution of 8x8 grid ASCII code text.

And it's statements like these that make me think you have no idea how any of this works. Your statement can be taken two ways, and both of them indicate you are ignorant on this subject.

In one interpretation, "editable text" means editing the text characters. Yes, this could be done by bit banging the character generator rom, in character generator type systems. It can be done more easily and on the fly in any memory based pixel system. IT IS A BIG NOTHING.

In the other interpretation, "editable text" means "word processing, which was also big nothing.

What do you think a vector based text system does? It simply fills in memory pixels based on the vector directions given in the character description. The end product is a pattern in graphics memory. I was drawing objects (sprites) and resizing/rotating them on a TRS-80 back in 1977-78.

No, I think it's pretty easy. Especially when most of the work has been done for you two decades earlier. Again dude, I draw all sorts of crap with graphics displays all the time. It is really not so incredibly advanced as you seem to think it is.

Other computer companies could not do it.

Correction. DID NOT BOTHER TO DO IT. They probably thought it was trivial too. The only people who wanted that sissy stuff were women, poetry writers, educrats, and various other assorted left wing style over substance types. Newspaper and Magazine people fall into this category as well.

The make excuses because they could not. Steve Jobs and Apple found a way to do that because Steve Jobs insisted on it. .

Another statement that indicates you do not know how any of this stuff works. No dude, there was no great secret or "brilliance" to developing vector fonts. I think most people in the industry at the time simply thought their usefulness wasn't worth the degree of effort which would be required to implement them in that era.

If I was trying to build a first class computing machine back in those days, I wouldn't be worrying about the trivia of how pretty the fonts can be made to be. I would be trying to get my operations per second up, or increase memory access speed, better storage, better graphics, anything but stupid fonts. That crap appeals to little girly minds who like playing with "my little pony", not to serious men.

I remember in the early 1980s when people were talking about that Post script stuff. I thought to myself at the time that the whole thing was just D@mn silly, and grown adults ought to have better things to do than diddle around with curlicues and embellishments. If you are going to worry about such superficial crap, you might as well "bedazzle" everything.

I thought the efforts in this direction were mostly worthy of contempt. It was a lot of effort put forth on something that really did not matter. It was beyond trivial.

But yes, it appealed to all the girly minds out there to the same degree as the latest makeup and fingernail polish. Those are successful businesses too, and in the area of fonts, there is probably a very large overlap with makeup.

Silly crap. If you are doing a graphics memory dump, you don't need to be worrying about fonts. It's just pixels at that point. Changing it into fonts just makes the process messier and more complicated.

DUMP THE MEMORY.

That is no trivial thing and is the very essence of innovation and invention, regardless of how many people Jobs involved in making it happen.

No, I think it was pretty trivial, and very much akin to coming out with a new shade of fingernail polish or mascara.

No, they did not. . . It's a walkie-talkie.

Yeah, like the Iwatch, which the Dick Tracy cartoonist thought of decades before Steve Jobs.

I guess Jobs got a lot of his ideas from cartoons and movies. :)

And the only thing Steve Jobs had the mental acuity to produce were FAKES. He couldn't do the engineering. He couldn't make anything himself. He could point at cartoons and movies and then tell his engineers, "Make one of those or I will yell at you and threaten to fire you!"

Steve Jobs was a spoiled little rich boy who could get in other people's faces and say "That's not good enough! I want something cooler, something better, something super duper stupendously fantastic!"

And he could keep pushing his spoiled little rich boy act until the people who did the real work could produce something that satisfied the little spoiled brat.

Um, no. The Apple II was not the biggest nor best hobbyist computer.

It certainly was from 1977 to 1982. What, did you think it was gonna last forever?