1) And Apple didn't have "resize window from any edge" until Lion (who cares!). The major invention is the paradigm, not continuous improvements of the same.
2) Ironically, the trash-can constitutes a paradigm-break. Normally, you dont have trash cans on your desk. (Nor do you eject disks by throwing them in the trash bin -- You do however move objects around, cf. drag-and-drop).
3) If the Mac was popular, so were Microsoft tablets early 2000. Yet, we all know how the arguments go when it comes to that.
4) No, I'm not kidding you. Win 95 is a major milestone as far as GUI goes; its constitutes the turning point. From thereon, GUI was
the paradigm. And, its success was certainly unparalleled at the time too. All of this is widely accepted. No idea why you're refuting it.
5) But it wasn't the first one. People liked the stuff Xerox pushed too - the fact that Jobs got blown away by it should be evidence enough around here.
6) I never mentioned Hertzfeld and Atkinson; how could i have claimed that they did nothing?
7) Far too long to read, i did skim through it though. Not sure why you asked me to read it:
Booch: Let's hear the real truth.
Hertzfeld: The most interesting thing, really, is how much we got from Xerox Park.
[--]
Atkinson: So, I said at '68, the windows and mouse were invented by Englebart, and I actually went to visit Englebart. It was a wonderful visit, and I think he gave a really good argument which was that when you design for the beginner, sometimes you shortchange the experienced user. If you were designing only for a walk-up-and-use-it experience, you would never design a bicycle because it takes a while to learn to use a bicycle, although it gives you good power. So, he was designing more for a professional knowledge worker, and he's willing for people to learn this five-key chord thing and lots of new ways of working with stuff. In 1973, with Alan Kay and the Smalltalk Project at Xerox Park was where another big boost of user interface development happened. In 1979, when the Lisa team went to visit, we got to see the Alto and the Smalltalk System and I think the Bravo text editor. What people misunderstand is that we didn't just copy what we saw. It gave us great inspiration and gave us great confidence that, yes, we did wan to do windowing, but then we had to go incrementally, evolutionary-wise and develop this user interface a piece at a time by a lot of trial and error and a lot of stupid mistakes.
Hertzfeld: There was probably one before that. There was this guy at Xerox was making mice for Xerox before then. I think they had a ball.
Atkinson: Was it a ball?
Hertzfeld: Yeah, but his mouse was an order of magnitude more expensive. Hovey-Kelley did
the first one that was mass producible, I would say. I think they had a ball.
[---]
Hertzfeld: By the time of the Xerox visit, I bet you there were twice that many, maybe about a dozen. I think the best story I know about the Xerox trip is something Bill thought he saw but didn't actually see which was drawing behind Windows. They had overlapping windows but once windows overlap you have a non-rectangular area for the ones that aren't on top. And Bill was sure he saw drawing into the irregular area.
[---]
Hertzfeld: And so Rich Page started that 68,000 transition in around the summer of '79 and it was kind of completed around the fall as I remember, so you could say Lisa had a false start. It went for a year before the 68,000 transition happened. The Xerox PARC visit was shortly after that, so there was a first year of just kind of feeling out what to do. But then by the end of '79, the two main things – the 68,000 and the adoption of the mouse with the PARC-like interface, windows – all happened around the end of '79. By the middle of '80, we actually had Lisa prototypes and you were programming the Lisas on Lisas. And the Mac, of course, was developed using the Lisa as the development machine.
So, yeah... why, really? By the way, did you read that part about PARC having overlapping windows? If not, do. Also, read their line about doing incremental, evolutionary, work. My point exactly.
Naturally, and evidently, the GUI as we know it has evolved since the early days. No one is disputing that. What is disputed is the tendency among some to give Apple way more credit than they deserve. Two reasons for this: a) it takes away from the individuals that actually did the work (regardless of where they worked) b) it takes away from the important institutes that did the ground breaking work that Apple and others today build on.
As a fellow scientist i find this to be truly disturbing. That said, Apple has done great things. Microsoft too. Some of the colleagues (by discipline) i hold highest have at some point worked at Microsoft and/or Apple (and, naturally, PARC too). Still, stay true to facts and give credit where credit is due.
Addendum:
The "invented jack" was with regard to the desktop metaphor, specifically "Apple invented the default look for all the upcoming GUI OS's basically..". Like stated in the quoted post, they certainly did good things. Plenty of them. While i acknowledge poor wording on my behalf, i blame in part bad reading on your end.. :- )
Hey! Your pig looks just like my pig! Not cool!
