Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

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Hum, usual confusion of what the Alto and what the Xerox Star was.

(The Alto was an experimental development system and did not have a consistent user interface. Many of the innovations at PARC were eventually consolidated by Xerox SDD into the Xerox Star, which provided a consistent interface, metaphor and 'persona' of the computer. The Star was a commercial computer and highly impressive for its time, but not a success. The famous Apple visit comprised a tour of the Alto, but not of the Star. According to their own word, Apple developers like Bill Atkinsons had not seen or experienced the Star. On the other hand, they had read papers from PARC even before the visit and had been influenced by them.)

It may be also worth mentioning that Xerox hired a substantial amount of the talent floating around the ARPANet community. (Bob Taylor, founder of PARC's CS department, had previously headed ARPA IPTO.) Rather few projects emerged genuinely at PARC, many ideas existed already previously and people were hired because of these ideas. (Possible video, "How Xerox Ripped Off the ARPANet Community"? /s)

Excellent, I can't find anything to correct, and I was there :) This is also an old video.

Maybe a note expanding on "Bill Atkinsons had not seen or experienced the Star." That's because in Dec. 1979 there was nothing he could see. It was introduced in May, 1981 and barely worked even then.

I have all the facts about Inventing the Future, including the lightning storm that took down the Ethernet: Jan. 5, 1978. Maybe on the 45th anniversary this Jan. 5 we'll have another networking disaster with the big storm.

https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future

I knew about the ARPANet connection, but I don't have a list of names. Eric Harslem, my boss, was on RFC 39 and 40.

Regarding "Bill Atkinsons had not seen or experienced the Star": This was more aimed at the use of icons (esp. desktop icons) and drag&drop interaction on the Lisa, which emerged only late in development, when the Star was already released (introduced in April 1981). However, this was apparently a parallel development, compare this talk [0] by Bill Atkinson at 48:22. (Similarly, just before this, Atkinson mentions the very same background raster alignment problem for desktop icons, the Star had to solve. Compare "Designing the Star User Interface", cited in another comment.)

[0] Bill Atkinson, video talk, Carnegie Mellon University, Feb 04, 2019: https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

P.S.: I guess, realistically there would have been a chance to demo some preview of what became the Star interface in December 1979 (16 months before the official introduction), but this is not what was shown at the (in)famous Apple PARC tours. I guess, I'll have to buy your book, though… :-)

> I'll have to buy your book

Why, yes, I guess you will. You're an excellent scholar.

Actually in my book I mention the Smalltalk prototype of Star, which was done in 1978 or so. This was not kept up to date and I'm sure he did not see that.

At the end of a talk at the EE380 course in Stanford with L Peter Deutsch, Allan Schiffmann tells a story about being at the launch of the Xerox Star. As more and more things were demoed, the guy behind him kept cursing very loudly. Allan got fed up with this and turned to tell the guy to be quiet - it turned out it was Steve Jobs.

The April 1982 issue of Byte magazine had a very detailed article about the Xerox Star: "Designing the Star User Interface" by Dr. David Canfield Smith, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, B

I have this in my book (not the cursing part). I was worried that only Dave Liddle even knew about Jobs being there, so now I feel better.

It's possible I talked to Jobs without knowing who he was! I talked to a lot of people.

Dave Smith wrote the foreword to my book, and that's his son on the cover, "playing" MazeWar. There's a guy in Seattle with two working Altos in his basement, and that's the real software.

> The April 1982 issue of Byte magazine had a very detailed article about the Xerox Star: "Designing the Star User Interface" by Dr. David Canfield Smith, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, B

Ooooh. Found it here: http://billverplank.com/CiiD/XeroxStar.pdf

Or here, p. 242

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-04/page/n243/...

I'm kinda disturbed by the notion that Xerox took anything from Arpanet. by the time I was involved, people like Lixia and Steve were really core members of design group - and I always considered their participation and willingness to host meetings a huge boon to the community.

This was more a snarky remark aimed at those "how X stole from Y" narratives, not a serious criticism.

(Progress is always a combination of ideas floating around and brilliant people who sharpen these ideas and make them happen. And one of the ways to identify those people is listening to their ideas, which is in turn, why and how these ideas spread…)

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