Most of you people who keep mouthing this “rip off from Xerox” line have never, ever seen, much less USED a D*machine from Xerox.
I have. My wife used to work at Xerox, porting their s/w to Sun workstations and Unix.
Neither one of us think that the Xerox interface is remotely as clean or well thought out as Apple’s. Yes, the D machines were the first integrated GUI system, but there were very important differences. For example, Xerox D machines had 3-button mice.
Why? Their equivalent of the Finder didn’t use more than two. Why three?
Because their SmallTalk environment used three.
How many people here have programmed in SmallTalk-80? Probably not many. I’ve hacked around in it and while it is an elegant language, there’s nothing therein that I didn’t already have in Lisp, really.
Anyone who has shipped a product knows that there’s a whole lot of stuff that has to be done between having a great idea and a great product. Xerox has never been willing or able to do that work.
You sorta miss the point, but never mind.