Red Hat & Gnome hacker Seth Nickell wrote an interesting article about the Macintosh revolution ini the human-centered UI design and the source of this revolution, the Xerox PARC innovations in the mid-70s.
Two Decades of the Macintosh revolution, a Reflection
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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why are they still calling this a revolution ?
why are they still calling this a revolution ?
Maybe cuz there’s still room for improvement? Human-centered design is an ongoing project I think. I’d rather have more guys like this than the myriad of self-involved programmers around the world.
“why are they still calling this a revolution ?”
Why are they still giving Xerox so much credit? They didn’t come up with the idea, nor did they do it well.
Why are you writing for nothing, chris?
“Human-centered design is an ongoing project I think. I’d rather have more guys like this than the myriad of self-involved programmers around the world.”
I’m with you there.
or is it just my browser not wanting to render the entire page?
Why are they still giving Xerox so much credit?
Maybe because xerox parc was the place where the idea of a 2d windowing system + mouse was first thought of? Do you have some extra information that the rest of the world doesn’t have?
… while intermittently and involuntarily farting and pissing all the way to the coffin.
I’d love to comment, but what are you talking about (i.e. referring to)?
It’s actually just a blog entry, which is long enough to be called an “article”.
I’d hate to have my blog posted on osnews, it’d be terrible embarrassing.
“Maybe because xerox parc was the place where the idea of a 2d windowing system + mouse was first thought of? Do you have some extra information that the rest of the world doesn’t have?”
2D windowing and the mouse were not thought up at PARC. Those concepts were around in the 50s. My comment was refering to what the article was about though, human centered UI development, which Xerox wasn’t very good at. Ever try using a STAR? In comparison to other projects of the time it wasn’t very user centered for a GUI.
“Maybe because xerox parc was the place where the idea of a 2d windowing system + mouse was first thought of? Do you have some extra information that the rest of the world doesn’t have?”
Nope, it goes way back to SRI in the late 60s where they came up with the “mouse” and that it could be used to interact with graphical abstractions of data in the form of objects, and yes windows.
Windowing systems go all the way back to things like the SAGE system and Sutherland’s Thesis work at MIT in the early 60’s.
So the actual concept of window/mouse interaction was there before PARC, and in fact if you check ACM, SIGGRAPH, and IEEE journals from the 70’s PARC were not the only ones working on the idea.
They however had a few people from SRI working there, and they produced one of the earlier (alhtough not the only one) products using the idea. They deserve credit, but not ALL the credit. There were plenty of graphical commercial systems that predate the Mac too….
2D windowing and the mouse were not thought up at PARC
Actually, the mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart who was a scientist at the Stanford Research Institute at the time.
The “Mac Revolution” was the bringing of an obscure, but extremely useful idea to the masses. The Mac wasn’t so much an invention, but rather a refinement of existing inventions, much like the Ford Model T wasn’t the first automobile, just the first one that useable for the masses. Unfortunately, we haven’t really ever evolved past the basic WIMP concepts, so there is definitely room for other revolutions.
“The “Mac Revolution” was the bringing of an obscure, but extremely useful idea to the masses. The Mac wasn’t so much an invention, but rather a refinement of existing invention”
Exactly. They were the first ones who got user centered UI design user centered enough for users. Teach computers about people instead of teaching people about computers.
“Exactly. They were the first ones who got user centered UI design user centered enough for users. Teach computers about people instead of teaching people about computers.”
Huh?
“Exactly. They were the first ones who got user centered UI design user centered enough for users. Teach computers about people instead of teaching people about computers.”
Huh?
All the poster means is Apple deserves credit for furthering the concepts of computer interfaces well enough that computer use started becoming more intuitive, and less demanding, for more “people”, not just “computer people”.
I found this quote kind of funny from your site. You typified Slashdot so well, in just one choice sentence:
If you don’t know what slashdot is, quick the link immediately.
“The “Mac Revolution” was the bringing of an obscure, but extremely useful idea to the masses.”
Oh, yeah, a computer that cost nearly twice as much as a PC 20 years ago was built for the ‘masses’. Even today, the Apple store has one computer for under a thousand dollars. Heck, their portable music player costs more than the computers I sell to local families who want a computer to get onto the internet.
Oh, yeah, a computer that cost nearly twice as much as a PC 20 years ago was built for the ‘masses’. Even today, the Apple store has one computer for under a thousand dollars. Heck, their portable music player costs more than the computers I sell to local families who want a computer to get onto the internet.
Those computers you are selling them are actually somewhat useful because of the UI concepts copied from Apple’s Mac.
“Oh, yeah, a computer that cost nearly twice as much as a PC 20 years ago was built for the ‘masses’.”
And look at the PC’s 20 years ago. Sure, it was cheaper, but it wasn’t for the masses. That was the point. The CLIs of the time required people to learn a lot about a computer just to get the simplest of tasks done. The Mac was the first one that had a GUI that was polished enough for average people to be able to use. That cheaper PC is worthless if you can’t get it to do anything. Price isn’t everything.
I remeber that the first Mac cost me just over $2000 and the IBM PCs were selling for around $4500.
:I remeber that the first Mac cost me just over $2000 and the IBM PCs were selling for around $4500.
Yes people forgot that during that time people a perimum price tag for the letters IBM why Atari,Commodore,Acorn and EVEN Apple was far cheaper and gave a bigger bang for your buck back then.
“I remeber that the first Mac cost me just over $2000 and the IBM PCs were selling for around $4500.”
Obviously you must have forgotten about the hundreds of clone makers that were selling PC-compatible machines for a fraction of that.
The Mac was expensive when it came out, it was expensive during most of the late 80’s and early 90’s to the point that there was almost no entry level machine in Apple’s lineup. That is why the original Mac was a relative flop in sales, and I am a Mac user.
Also the orignal Mac was very very very underpowered, sure it may have been intuitive. But most people prefered to spend less money and learn to use less glamorous tools like Visi-On, or Symphony, or 1-2-3, or WordPerfect… than having to swap 5+ floppy drives in order to run a word processor (am I the only one who has forgotten about the insane amount of floppies one had to swap to get early versions of Word or Works loaded?).
Name some clones that were available when the mac first came out… In my company, IT department would only buy IBM machines. Do you remember the thinking “if it’s not made by IBM, it’s not a real computer”.
:Obviously you must have forgotten about the hundreds of clone makers that were selling PC-compatible machines for a fraction of that.
During the mid 80’s unless you were in a city center it was next to impossible to get a white box IBM Compat as most of the main stores only carried the big name brands and didn’t sell whitebox clones.
:The Mac was expensive when it came out, it was expensive during most of the late 80’s and early 90’s to the point that there was almost no entry level machine in Apple’s lineup. That is why the original Mac was a relative flop in sales, and I am a Mac user.
I agree but you can say the same about the IBM.
:Also the orignal Mac was very very very underpowered, sure it may have been intuitive. But most people prefered to spend less money and learn to use less glamorous tools like Visi-On, or Symphony, or 1-2-3, or WordPerfect… than having to swap 5+ floppy drives in order to run a word processor (am I the only one who has forgotten about the insane amount of floppies one had to swap to get early versions of Word or Works loaded?).
As was the IBM clones, I still to this day don’t know why people even bothered even with white box knock offs, Amiga, Atari ST, and yes even the Mac was a generation ahead of the x86 at the time and the IBM wasn’t exactly user freindly.
It is really funny that the first desktop enviroment the x86 got was ported from the C64.
I have an original 400k floppy that has MacOS, MacWrite and MacPaint. It wasn’t until latter that one had to use multiple floppies.
The PC clone did not catch on for a while because they were not 100% compatible with the IBM PC.
I remember taking a class that my Boss at the time paid for, which taught basics in DOS such as formating a floppy, copying files, moving files, loading programs etc. When the Mac came out it was easy to do all that with a short lesson. I remember spending hours using MacPaint. It was truly amazing at the time. If you are not old enough to remember the transition from CLI to GUI you do not understand the revolution, but it was a big deal at the time. My only other computer experience before using a Mac was programing in basic using punch cards. The Mac interface was a revolution. Don’t look back at timelines and say other GUI’s came out first because the MAC was the first GUI that most people used or saw. If you weren’t there you don’t get it. Sorry.
How did you determine that? The orginal Mac was about 4Mhz 68000 and was competing with about 5Mhz 8086’s. It doesn’t take much of a comparison to notice that an 8088 is a 16/8 bit (ok 16/16 if you got an 8086) computer and the 68000 was a 32/16 bit computer. Apple never made a 16 bit Mac. At the time and until just a few years ago, most laser printers where running 68000 chips.
The first 68000 chip could handle about 24 megs of ram, the x86 couldn’t hanle that much ram until the 80286. Intel didn’t give us 32bit computers until the 80386.
I remeber that the first Mac cost me just over $2000 and the IBM PCs were selling for around $4500.
Of course, that $4500 PC probably came with a 286 processor, 256k of RAM, a hard disk, expansion slots, a colour screen and a printer…
Compared to the first Mac – a 68000, 128k RAM, no hard disk, black & white screen, extremely limited expansion and an actual pricetag of $2,495.
I think he ment in memory the first Mac shiped with I think 128K of memory and like the first Amiga you needed to upgrade your RAM before you could do anything useful with them as out of box the RAM was just to dinky for desktop OS
The first 68000 chip could handle about 24 megs of ram, the x86 couldn’t hanle that much ram until the 80286. Intel didn’t give us 32bit computers until the 80386.
The 68000 was a bit of a hybrid – 32 bit registers, 16 bit ALU, 24 bit address space.
286 based machines came out in 1984, the same year as the original Mac. Of course, 286-based PCs cost a lot more as well (competition for the original Mac was definitely the 8086/88-based XT and clones). The ‘020 was first used in a Mac with the Mac II, ca. 1987, about a year after Compaq released the first 386.
The 386 came out in 1985 and was a fully 32 bit CPU (machines started appearing 1986). Motorola’s equivalent would have been the ‘030, released ca. 1987, first used in a Mac in the IIx, 1988.