----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 24 August 2001 18:06
Subject: Re: Self-publication -- a costing.
| Hm ... Think both Jobs and Gates ripped this. Who "invented" the iconic
| environment?
It was developed at XeroxPARC and like many things developed there not
greatly developed after going further than anyone else - it seems they did
the same with genuine networks years before anyone else, developed the idea,
prototyped it, ran it, dropped it
I bet the iconic idea could be traced back into prehistory; but I think
Xerox were the first to demonstrate the electro-mechanical nous to actually
produce one... 20 + years ago
I once (89 - 92 or 3) had extended use of a Xerox Documenter of unknown age
which is one of the most wonderful machines I have ever used, a dedicated
machine, producing high quality camera ready prints. I was told that it
would take weeks to learn but managed to pick it up in a few hours, not out
of cleverness but because it was so like the basic Mac - this was in an
otherwise PC environment and I was the only one who had used a Mac
It was way beyond the PC and the laser printer / photocopier produced copies
better than anything I have ever seen - It was eventually thrown on a skip
by a Director of I.T. who bought WordPerfect over WfW because he was told
that WP was the best wordprocessor in the world by ...er... WordPerfect
But that's what happens when you promote salespersons on the basis of their
patter
The only thing bad about it - the Documenter - was its slowness. It took a
long long time to boot and fully load; and it seemed to me that the files
were more or less serial so that one character change required the whole
thing to be rebuilt, & very slowly. Apple always says that it did its own
coding to achieve the effect it had seen at PARC but time efficiently - and
it was object oriented from the start I think - and my little experience
would bear that out. The first and many versions of Windows were always
hamstrung because of the hardware and software they were running on
It was the iconic concept coming from PARC that holed the "look and feel"
suits
since which there have been endless interviews in which one or other of the
many involved in the many teams says "Ah yes but we invented fluffy menus"
etc
One of the big guys, Wozniak perhaps, said he always thought graphics should
be part of it; but the fact is that Xerox did it first
I think with Apple it was the design qualities which attracted them to the
desktop environment and with MS it was the money-making (I'm thinking of the
apparently true stories of Gates & Co persuading the makers of Altair that
they had a BASIC for the machine before writing a line of code and buying
someone else's code to be the first version of DOS - the apple people talk
of always wanting to do it better, more elegantly. I think it's Wozniak who
said if he could build a board with 200 chips that just made him want to
make one with 100 chips... I never get that kind of feeling out of Gates. I
think with him it's the one upmanship that gives him the buzz and the love
of machines is a consequence of that warp
L
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