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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

People always seem to forget that Xerox borrowed a lot of ideas themselves.

Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute gets credit for many innovations, including the mouse. The infamous "mother of all demos" can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rKUf9DWRI

Going back to the early 60's, there was an equally famous GUI demonstration at MIT, using a light pen instead of a mouse as a user input device for rudimentary CAD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o

Finally, anybody who claims that the Mac or Windows was nothing but a copy of the Alto has never seen an Alto in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H79_kKzmFs

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Almost all ideas can be traced to something else.

Icons were Dave Smith's invention. He came from SRI, so one could easily find someone there who inspired him.

Apple and Microsoft both made significant contributions and Mac/Windows were in no way a "copy of the Alto." In fact, Star itself was not a copy of the Alto; that was the problem it had to solve! The Alto's programs all had different interfaces.

"Direct manipulation with the mouse" was what wowed Jobs, and what he saw was Smalltalk, which had a different interface than any of the stuff I mentioned.

Interestingly, Bill Atkinson was sure he'd seen something cool at the demo that he liked, so he implemented it. It turned out that he hadn't actually seen it.

> Interestingly, Bill Atkinson was sure he'd seen > something cool at the demo that he liked, so he > implemented it. It turned out that he hadn't > actually seen it.

In a little more detail: the Smalltalk MVC (model-view-controller) GUI had an overlapping windows scheme, but only the topmost window is active. Since it is topmost, it isn't partially covered by any of the others and updating it is trivial. Clicking any other window brings it to the top and only then is it updated.

Switching between windows was a lightweight operation which gave Bill the wrong impression that even background windows were being updated. That would have required clipping graphics operations by arbitrary shapes, which Smalltalk didn't do.

Bill spent a while figuring out how to do that and as a side effect could easily implement non rectangular windows, like the rounded corners that Steve Jobs wanted.

Thanks. I do recall beginning GUI programmers being flummoxed by "repaint this rectangle" calls. All they knew how to do was repaint the entire window, which was not at all what was wanted.

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