71–79 of 79 posts
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If you want more modern early GUIs investigate Plan 9, also by Rob Pike. Rio is like Blit and ACME is like Oberon.
While the pedigree does stretch back a bit, I wouldn't call Acme "early". The paper came out in '94…
Ah, early GUIs. For comparison, take a look at Xerox' Cedar and Smalltalk, or Wirth's Lillith and Oberon, all from pretty much the same era. The Lilith systems are often overlooked. They predate the Blit, are programmed in Modula-2, translated to bytecode. Oberon is a bit more well-known, but still not as much as both the language and the OS deserve. Lilith demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc Some…
I got a smile out of the Cedar demo talking about documents as user interfaces. Arguably the concept of the web as a user interface pre-dates the web!
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I'm surprised AT&T didn't sue the hell out of apple because BLIT is clearly older than the Macintosh. BLIT is actually from 1982 as is shown in the video at 3:50 and in the copyright notice some seconds later. The wikipedia article also claims it's 1882.
He was being sarcastic... unless you're being sarcastic too? Newsflash. Sarcasm on the Internet does not work unless you use tags!
God , here we go again. Yet another example of companies stealing from Apple. This is clearly similar enough to the Macintosh (1984) that I'm surprised Apple didn't sue the hell out of AT&T. They certainly sued the hell out of Microsoft[1], so AT&T must have been lucky. Around the same time, Myron Krueger had the gall to demonstrate pinch-to-zoom[2], nearly 23 years before Apple patented it. So many people piggy-back…
When did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom? This video is from 1988. Are you saying Apple patented it in 2011? First of all in 2006, before the iPhone came out, I saw Jeff Han from NYU demoing much more than just pinch-to-zoom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ And secondly, I thought Apple bought the pinch-to-zoom patent! I don't know much about it, but I am curious about the date.
God , here we go again. Yet another example of companies stealing from Apple. This is clearly similar enough to the Macintosh (1984) that I'm surprised Apple didn't sue the hell out of AT&T. They certainly sued the hell out of Microsoft[1], so AT&T must have been lucky. Around the same time, Myron Krueger had the gall to demonstrate pinch-to-zoom[2], nearly 23 years before Apple patented it. So many people piggy-back…
The pinch to zoom patent is for single vs multitouch gestures on a touch screen. What Krueger is demonstrating is not a touch screen.
You could take the exact same software written for the touch table and feed it the touch sensor (again, not patented) input. Under the ruling this would be found to infringe.
Think about that. Software written before the patent in question fed data from a different device--infringement. It would be like me filing a patent for elements of the standard desktop gui running on an LCD instead of a CRT, and suddenly getting a free pass against all prior-art.
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I'm fairly confident that many (most?) of the gui elements you listed were invented by Xerox and willfully copied by Apple. Certainly stacking resizable movable windows, pull-down menus, and manipulable desktop items. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
Please read this article[0] and educate yourself. The amount of misinformation surrounding the Apple-Xerox relationship is dizzying. edit: this article[1] is a bit briefer, and provides much of the same information. [0] http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st... [1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
The amount of misinformation surrounding how much of the modern computing experience Apple independently invented is also dizzying.
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I'm fairly confident that many (most?) of the gui elements you listed were invented by Xerox and willfully copied by Apple. Certainly stacking resizable movable windows, pull-down menus, and manipulable desktop items. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
Xerox Star User Interface (1982) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
Yeah right. By all accounts Steve Jobs was a weasel.
Of course, all those accounts could be wrong.
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The first paragraph of Rob Pike's write up: The Blit* is a graphics terminal characterized more by the software it runs than the hardware itself. The hardware is simple and inexpensive (Figure 1): 256K bytes of memory dual-ported between an 800x1024x1 bit display and a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor, with 24K of ROM, an RS-232 interface, a mouse and a keyboard. Unlike many graphics terminals, it has no special-purpo…
This looks like more hardware than a contemporary Macintosh, so I have to ask: inexpensive compared to what? A VAX?
Even assuming the RAM is the most expensive component, by definition, the materials cost no more than twice the cost of the original Macintosh. (~2500USD in 1984)
Of course, the Blit is just a terminal pulling applications down from a Unix host over the serial port; when you consider that the Blit is just a display, it does indeed seem a bit pricey.