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From: blh@VLSI.CS.CMU.EDU (Bruce Horn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Origins of the Mac Environment
Message-ID: <1517@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 25 Apr 88 01:03:22 GMT
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Sigh.  I can't believe this discussion is continuining...

Neither the Lisa nor the Mac were designed by a single person, contrary to
what some people would like to believe.  There were quite a few Xerox people
who went to Apple (including me--I was the only one in the Mac group) who
contributed to the "look and feel" of the Mac and Lisa.  When I was at Xerox
(1973-1981) there was NOTHING that looked or worked like the Mac or Lisa.
The Star was quite different:  an improvement on the Mac in some ways, worse
in others.

Ideas are not stagnant--they evolve, improve, or get replaced by better
ideas.  The people from PARC who went to Apple didn't suddenly stop thinking
about how to do things better;  we just moved to a different company.

Yes, as a product of Xerox PARC I am proud to say that many, if not most of
the important concepts that system designers everywhere are using these days
on workstations were created or refined by my friends at PARC.  The
collective creativity and system design savvy on Coyote Hill Road and
Hillview was staggering.  However, it was the people at Apple who first took
the ideas (adding a few of their own) and put them to work on reasonably
affordable computers.

I wonder what the folks at PARC are working on now.  We're sure to see their
ideas on a production machine in a decade or two, and then when everyone
else is implementing them on their own machines we can argue about the
origins of the concepts again.

By the way, take another look at Oliver Steele's list of important concepts
and their origins, posted previously.  I believe it to be quite accurate.
-- 
Bruce Horn, Carnegie Mellon CSD
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