Replies

You said — “You mean like the interface that Apple stole from Xerox?”

An old wive’s tale that is perpetuated through comments like this... LOL..

Apple was in development with the Lisa and the Macintosh, with each of their respective UIs *before* Apple ever made a trip out to Xerox. And in addition to that, Apple paid Xerox millions of dollars in stocks for the visits that they had negotiated with the headquarters of Xerox. This was done *after* both the Lisa and the Macintosh had been in development and was already quite far along in their own UIs.

You see, the “truth” is always less fun than making up stuff... :-)

In 1979, Jef Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple. He identified a need for a computer that was easier to use than anything developed to date. Both the Macintosh project and the Lisa project were works in progress prior to Apple’s infamous visit to Xerox. Apple and Xerox were in simultaneous development of a GUI. Apple was aware of Xerox’s work because the founder of the Macintosh project, Jef Raskin had lectured at Xerox on the topic prior to joining Apple. Jef Raskin was something of an authority on the subject at the time. He had written his Master’s thesis on a WYSIWYG graphical interface back in 1967. Likewise, many of the same ideas that fueled Xerox’s effort originated from the creator of the Macintosh project.

[ http://technicalconclusions.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/history-of-gui/ ]

You’ll notice that Jef Raskin was known for this kind of UI *before* Apple or Xerox had anything going on with it. And he lectured over at Xerox on the subject. And of course, he worked for Apple.

—

An article written by Andy Hertzfeld about Bill Atkinson’s work on the UI...

The Macintosh User Interface wasn’t designed all at once; it was actually the result of almost five years of experimentation and development at Apple, starting with graphics routines that Bill Atkinson began writing for Lisa in late 1978. Like any evolutionary process, there were lots of false starts and blind alleys along the way. It’s a shame that these tend to be lost to history, since there is a lot that we can learn from them.

Fortunately, the main developer of the user interface, Bill Atkinson, was an avid, lifelong photographer, and he had the foresight to document the incremental development of the Lisa User Interface (which more or less became the Mac UI after a few tweaks) with a series of photographs. He kept a Polaroid camera by his computer, and took a snapshot each time the user interface reached a new milestone, which he collected in a loose-leaf notebook. I’m excited to be able to reproduce and annotate them here, since they offer a fascinating, behind the scenes glimpse of how the Mac’s breakthrough user interface was crafted.

See the whole article at — http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date

—

And then, an article from Bruce Horn about the idea that Apple took the UI idea from Xerox... (written in 1996)

For more than a decade now, I’ve listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This “fact” is reported over and over, by people who don’t know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn’t true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial.

Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.

See the whole article at — http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date

Try not to perpetuate old wives tales...