Re: Errors in a Microsoft Propaganda Book

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Charlie Springer wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:26:17 -0700, Michael J. Mahon wrote
> (in article <IPqdnRxsoODz-LfbnZ2dnUVZ_jWdnZ2d@comcast.com>):
>
>
> > 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.

Interactive "direct manipulation" compluter graphics was actually
pretty old even in 1967--I'd put Ivan Sutherland's 1963 Sketchpad at
the top of the list--but the concept of the "windowed", mouse-driven
interface that is recognizably "modern" was, I thought, pretty clearly
established as beginning at PARC, which brought together the amazing
text-based, mouse-driven work of Doug Englebart and his SRI team and
the bit-mapped graphics that PARC adopted to front-end xerographic
printers.

Like Sutherland with the TX-2, PARC had chosen to use relatively fast
(home-made) minicomputers to support interactive graphics, which gave
them enough horsepower to support a practical GUI.  In fact, didn't
PARC "invent" BITBLT, the fundamental raster GUI operation (Sketchpad
was vector graphics-based)?

I'd like to see Jef's thesis to see what he was thinking about.
He must have been familiar with Sutherland's work--I certainly
was in 1964, and I had just started writing interactive graphics
programs (vector-based, at the time).  (I probably would have done
*my* thesis on interactive graphics if my advisor hadn't had other
obsessions.  ;-)

In 1965 I had written two interactive graphics programs for analyzing
nuclear physics data, using a light pen and special keyboard.  Its
primary value was in using the light pen to select data on the display,
and it was obvious that operations on the data could be selected by
menus on the display, too, as well as for entering numbers (point at
the upper half of a digit and it counts up, lower half, it counts down).
The keyboard became vestigial.

In those days, the display was refreshed by the computer, not by a
frame buffer, so it was not only "natural" to make the display respond
to the light pen, so that things changed when the pen was pointed at
them, it was almost hard *not* to use the display to provide visual
feedback!  Menus that "flew out" (or "dropped down") were, in fact,
the *easiest* way to do things, since screen real estate had to be
conserved.

"Windows" didn't really become the norm until bitmapped raster graphics
became common (that's why virtually all "windows" are rectangular ;-).

And the mouse didn't really enter the picture until after Englebart's
famous December 9, 1968, FJCC demo of NLS.  I didn't see it live, but
I saw a movie of it later that month and was blown away!  It was clear
from that point on that interactivity had been taken to a new level!

-michael

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