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Xerox is responsible for most of the GUI features and for the application of those features.

Also, the general arrangement/look of today's common GUI first appeared in Xerox machines, although this arrangement is somewhat obvious, and, probably, would have appeared somewhere, eventually.



Can you be a little more specific? What exactly in terms of "implementation of the Xerox vision" did Apple "create?"

Again, there were several other versions of the GUI being sold to the public years prior to Apple's GUI, and there were others who were releasing their GUIs having more refined "looks" almost simultaneously with Apple's first release, so it is difficult to imagine how anyone can claim that most followed Apple's lead.



I have to strenuously disagree.

Here is a 1982 video about the Xerox Star: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw

The first screenshot appears at 00:32. The presenter demonstrates icons, scrollbars, window headers, and window header commands. At 04:10, we see a contextual window (called a "property sheet"), with menu buttons (menu contents appear below in the window). The video also shows floating/overlapping windows, and the Star also had drag-&-drop. The features and configuration are almost identical to what we have today, but with a more primative styling.

By the way, at 06:36, note the font on the window header and on the keys of the keyboard. Remind you of a default font from another, later OS?

Other GUI features that we commonly use today appeared in other pre-apple GUIs, such as the dock (from the Perq), and drop-down menus (from Visi On, which had its first demo at the 1982 COMDEX).

Furthermore, the meaning of the term "Mac-like" is highly subjective. Fanboys with no sense of design history tend to see everything that has a decent aesthetic as "Mac-like," derived from Steve Jobs and Jon Ive. Every so often, a fanboy will apply the term to something that he/she doesn't realize existed prior to Apple:
TOURIST: "Wow! Look at the the Giza pyramids. They have such an elegant design.
CLUELESS FANBOY: "Yeah. Good thing that the pyramid builders decided to make them 'Mac-like!'"

People have been creating items with simple, superb design since the beginning of time. Even computer companies were hiring industrial designers, long before Apple existed. Apple wasn't, isn't and will not be the only company with decent design.

To me, BP's gulf oil well is very "Mac-like" (a catastrophic engineering failure from company that uses marketing to hide the true issues).

And if anything is "like" something else, surely, Apple products are "Braun-like": http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-...

Edited 2010-08-02 22:04 UTC