Re: Errors in a Microsoft Propaganda Book

[Jorge <R2DThree@gmail.com>]

On Apr 22, 8:12 am, Charlie Springer <R...@regnirps.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:26:17 -0700, Michael J. Mahon wrote
>
> > Both PC efforts were catalyzed by the same Xerox PARC work that led to
> > the Mac.
>
> False. Jef Raskin's thesis on computer GUIs was titled Quickdraw and was
> written in 1967. His Apple employee number is in the 20's or 30's and he
> created the Mac project. I know this goes against popular published third
> party accounts, but I worked for him for a long time and a good friend was
> his assistant from before his company was folded into Apple.
>
> -- Charlie Springer

"Strangely, by misattributing everything to PARC, the true
contribution of PARC (insofar as we can evaluate it at such a small
historical distance) is also diminished. A blanket "everything" often
leaves the impression that what you see on the Mac and Windows is the
sum of what PARC did. (...)"

"(...) In the late 1960's I had come to realize the importance of what
is now called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) displays. (...)
at a time when hardware character generators were universal (...) I
published a proposal that argued that computers would have to be built
without them. A few years later, in the early 70's, the researchers at
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) came to the same conclusion
independently (...) If Stross or Levy had gone back and read the works
I had written before PARC was founded, or even interviewed the people
I had known at PARC, they would have learned that many of the Mac's
key concepts had had an independent genesis."

Jeff Raskin, "Holes in the History".

<http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.html>

--R2D3