Re: Errors in a Microsoft Propaganda Book

[Charlie Springer <RAM@regnirps.com>]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:38:25 -0700, Michael J. Mahon wrote
(in article <E_udnfwlLtSbjLbbnZ2dnUVZ_gSdnZ2d@comcast.com>):

>> 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.

I don't know when it started. I'm just pointing out that Jef described 
QuickDraw and a GUI in 1967 and had no need to get it from PARC. In fact, he 
stayed away to avoid intellectual property conflicts since one of his former 
grad students was a prime mover on the Alto stuff.

later Jobs was invited to visit PARC without any disclosure restrictions. 
What his team saw that had not already been developed at Apple is unclear. I 
think Bill Atkinson made a remark that Xerox was doing pull down menus 
"wrong". That may be Jef's influence with his principles of monotony and 
modelessness. I think Atkinson was referring to the Apple way (his way?) of 
treating the menu bar as being infinitely deep in that you did not have to 
position the mouse in a rectangle, you simply "hit the box or the ceiling" of 
the menu bar item. Xerox required precise positioning. If that is the kind of 
differences being seen, then there was basically parity between Apple and 
PARC at the time. Jef's single button mouse demonstrations won out over the 
PARC style mouse.

> 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 used Vector General displays at Boeing with VAX's in 1971. I loved VG 
displays at the time for their 4096x4096 resolution. Talk about a great 
platform for Battlezone! Too bad it hadn't been created yet.

When I was back for a contract in about 198? the graphics room had an Alto 
and a Lisa side by side.

> 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.  ;-)

I don't know where to get a copy.  They may have it in his archive at 
Stanford.

> 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.

The VG had a light pen but it wasn't used much. Everything was assembly or 
FORTRAN. I wrote what amounted to a BASIC interpreter in FORTRAN in order to 
do interactive debugging and testing of a huge program.

> "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!

-- Charlie Springer