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From: ddev@wam.umd.edu (Don DeVoe)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Mac vs. Xerox (was Re: Amiga mentality cont'd)
Message-ID: <1990Apr11.235358.3542@wam.umd.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 90 23:53:58 GMT
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Reply-To: ddev@wam.umd.edu (Don DeVoe)
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In article <5562@sugar.hackercorp.com> karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
>In article <1990Apr11.182605.288@wam.umd.edu> ddev@wam.umd.edu (Don DeVoe) writes:
>>Please tell me how your comments are relevant to the power of a
>>GUI, and how you decided that Apple's GUI 'degraded' the power of the
>>Xerox GUI...without talking about OS concerns.
>
>OK, I will.  First of all let me make note that you totally sidestepped my
>major point which was that people did not have to copy the Mac to get GUIs
>and that, in fact, the Mac substantially copied Xerox's GUI.  Apple even gave

I agreed with you there. Nobody I know has ever claimed that Apple didn't
copy the Xerox GUI, to a large extent. There was no need to sidestep.

>credit to Alan Kay for GUI concepts when they launched of the machine, but
>that was the "old Apple", before Apple decided they invented GUIs after all.

I assume you are referring to the microsoft lawsuit issue? Many people seem
to forget that Apple has never claimed the GUI as their own, only their
particular implimentaion of it. 

>Now as to things in the Mac that are degraded from the Xerox GUI.  One.
>On the Xerox desktop, all objects are peers.  There is no difference between
>the garbage can and other programs that could have files dropped on them.
>That is, on the Xerox, you could drop a file on a program and the program
>would execute with that file as an input parameter.  On the Mac, all that
>is left of that useful concept is the trashcan.

That seems like a very useful attribute of a GUI. I'm surprised that it
doesn't appear in the Mac or Amiga GUIs. Does anyone know if Windows 3.0
will have such a feature?
>
>Two.  Pop-up menus.  On the Xerox the menu popped up where the mouse was.
>On the Mac it pops up on top.  This causes one to have to drive the mouse
>[...]
>a kludge.  I will acknowledge that this is kind of a judgement call, so no
>followups taking me to task on this single issue, OK?

OK. Personally I like the Mac's method.

>Three.  The Xerox had a three-button mouse and the buttons behaved consistently.
>The one-button mouse of the Mac was supposed to be an improvement, but that

It is a huge improvemant, in my mind. When I first started using a Mac, I was
put off by the single button. After getting comfortable with it, though, I
wondered why anybody would want more than one, except for a few special cases.
And before you ask, yes, I like seeing the menu bar at the top of my screen
all the time, without having to hit a special mouse button for it. It tends
to make me more aware of my options, especially in a program that I'm not very
familiar with.

>button has ended up having several multiplexed actions, one click, two clicks,
>three clicks, even five clicks for some programs.  I've tried dialing a phone

3-5 CLICKS??? Which programs demanded that? Tell me, so I'll know to stay
away from them!!!

>Speaking of lineage, the Amiga mouse has a menu button.  As the Xerox has one
>and the Mac doesn't, I would certainly trace the lineage of this Amiga feature
>to the Star and not to the Mac.

I would say that the Amiga's 2 button mouse differentiates it from other
systems.  It is a good compromise between the spartan simplicity of the Mac
and the somewhat confusing flexibility of 3 buttoned systems.

--
Don DeVoe
ddev@epsl.umd.edu