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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

The point is that none of what Apple brought about in the last decade was "significant" in the same way that sanitation, ..., public health are. They primarily brought combinations of things we were already doing in slick and usable packages. They produced a bunch of great products, no doubt, but I cringe whenever someone calls an iThing "revolutionary".

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The GUI is a revolution from the command line. The personal computer is a revolution from the mini-computer and the mainframe. Apple invented both of those. The touch interface is revolutionary, compared to plastic buttons, and Apple invented that. I find it amazing that people can claim, with a straight face that Apple "combined things were were already doing in slick and usable packages" about things that did not exist before Apple invented them. Its like you hate Apple so much you have to rewrite history to make them less significant. There was no personal computer before the Apple I and Apple II. There were no GUIs before the Lisa. There was not touch UI before the iPhone. AT worst you could point to the crappy windows tablets of 2003 and say that the "iPad didn't invent the tablet market", but that's the same as saying google didn't invent the search engine... which, while true, completely ignores that page rank is a genuine innovation.

Parent and grandparent, take some deep breadths and relax. Please don't quibble. Then watch this rather insightful video titled 'Everything is a Remix' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg

And pardon me, for coming off as arrogant, but I hate to see trivial fights here when you are missing the bigger picture.

GUI: No. [3] Touch: No. [1][2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#History [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...

If you want to disagree with what I said, you need to make an actual argument. Simply providing links is an automatic failure, because you're expecting me to go hunting for a counter argument to the statements I made, and none of those links were written in rebuttal to them.

That being said, your links are not authoritative, nor do they even address what I said.

You can't make statements like X invented Y and then add earlier versions of Y weren't Y because they were not as good as X's implementation of Y.

That is very much like believing in Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's logically irrefutable, but sounds absurd.

[Edit: Spell]

You're knocking down a strawman. Your argument is that the guy who invented the internal combustion engine didn't actually invent it because the guy who invented the piston is the one who invented it.

Xerox is known to be the inventor of GUI. Apple made it popular. There is a difference.

It's very much like how Apple invented PC but MS revolutionized and captured the market. I am giving due credit to all parties; you are omitting/trivializing all the conceptualization that went into an earlier concept - the ones that Apple's products were based upon.

>Xerox is known to be the inventor of GUI.

This is a lie that you really shouldn't be perpetuating. This isn't a question of opinion, but of historical fact, an you are telling a falsehood. There's no debating it.

Recall that the context of this article is innovations over the last decade. Both the GUI and personal computers are 35+ years old (and neither were pioneered by Apple; Xerox invented the GUI, and other systems like the TRS-80 and Altair 8800 were on the market in the Apple I/II era). Even direct-manipulation touchscreen interfaces predate this decade; I remember ordering at Arby's using such a system in the 1990s.

I'm no Apple hater. I just want to keep an appropriate perspective. They've made some VERY good products, but over the last decade, their focus has been more on "putting together a complete product in a slick, well-made package" than on "making life-changing leaps". There's nothing wrong with that, but don't mistake it for something it's not.

The context of this article is denigrating Apple by misrepresenting, using falsehoods, its contributions to the computer industry. When you claim that "neither were pioneered by Apple" you tell an outright lie. The Apple I was on the market before the TRS-80, and the Altair 8800 was a kit that didn't even produce a complete computer, it was not a personal computer. Xerox did not invent the GUI.

The idea that an arby's touchscreen means Apple didn't invent anything with the touch UI is so dishonest that it boggles the mind that you could say it in public with a straight face, seriously. The only motivation for doing so is either that you're really uninformed about this stuff and are just repeating what you've heard from Apple haters, or you're an Apple hater.

Seriously. This is Hacker News. This is not uninformed barely-computer literate consumer news. If we can't be honest about the major contributors to computer science here, then the site is completely lost.

There's an unreasonable amount of emotionally charged language in your post. This is Hacker News, not "call people uninformed barely-computer literate consumers and haters because they don't share your viewpoint news". Make your arguments in a civil manner, please.

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The Altair 8800 was a kit computer, which could also be ordered preassembled. The Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board, but still required assembly of other components. The TRS-80 and Apple II were both fully preassembled, and contemporary with each other. It's fair to say that Apple was an important player in the move toward personal computers, but I don't think it's fair to say they invented them.

AFAIK, Xerox was the first company to use an actual GUI, on the Alto (none of what Stanford did before would qualify as a "GUI", IMO.) Apple's Lisa was a big step forward for the GUI, adding things like window controls and menus. Again, Apple was an important player in the move to GUIs, and pioneered several specific GUI elements, but it's not fair to say they invented the GUI.

And, of course, both of these inventions are well over a decade old; when speaking about companies that "changed everything" between 2000 and 2010, they're not relevant.

Your references to "the touch UI" are confusing. I'm not aware of any product with that name. My best guess is that you're referring to some specific detail of iOS -- multitouch, perhaps? Without clarification, I don't really know how to respond to this particular point, or even if it needs responded to. Apple certainly put together a nice UI, and probably invented several specific conventions in doing so; I'm just not sure what in particular you think is revolutionary or needs to be acknowledged.

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