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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!seismo!rochester!henry
From: henry@rochester.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: DRI lawsuit
Message-ID: <12169@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 8-Oct-85 13:19:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.12169
Posted: Tue Oct  8 13:19:16 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Oct-85 07:26:36 EDT
Sender: henry@rochester.UUCP
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 31

From: Henry.Kautz

The Xerox STAR interface is quite different from the Mac/Lisa design.
For starters, there are no menus of any kind, only dialog boxes.  Icons
cannot be dragged.  Windows cannot be repositioned arbitrarily on the
screen:  the most you can do is shorten a window, or ask it to be near
the left or right edge of the screen.  (Can you say awkward?  Sure, you
can...)  Everything is done with a bunch of function keys.  Eg, to move
a icon:  you click on it; hit MOVE on the keyboard; a message comes up
which says "click on destination location"; finally, click where you
want it to appear.  Selecting regions is different; typing appears
after the region, rather than replacing it.  Typing special characters in a
document is a real tango:  you press the function key "KEYBOARD"; a
picture of keyboard appears; while holding the function key, you click
on buttons to get a special keyboard; finally, you click on the desired
key in the screen picture of the keyboard.  Changing font styles or
sizes is done in an entirely different way...  (Get someone else to
tell you about the STAR's drawing tools.  You can make pretty pictures
like MacDraw, but again, the manipulations are incredibly awkward.)

In short:  Apple was the first company to do a visual interface RIGHT.
(Possibly the world's worst visual interface is on the Symbolic's Lisp
machines.  $100,000+ per machine, and powered by nitroglycerin, but
every single systems program does windows, scrolling, menus , etc
differently!)

---- Henry Kautz
	:uucp:	{seismo|allegra}!rochester!henry
	:arpa:	henry@rochester
	:mail:  Dept. of Comp. Sci., U. of Rochester, NY 14627
	:phone: (716) 275-5766