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Opinions on Leopard Folder icons


borisbadenov
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No one is denying that Apple where inspired by their brief trip to the XEROX, (as well as help from some of the engineers that jumped ship because the XEROX Alto project went nowhere). What few neglect to mention though, is that the work at Palo Alto was based on research by Jef Raskin from 1967, the father of the GUI and Apple Employee #31. In fact, the trip to Palo Alto was on the insistence of him with the intention of bringing his own concept into further development by Apple.

 

So yes, a lot of the concepts we use today were present in the early Alto, but lots of them weren't (overlapping windows was deemed "confusing" for end users by XEROX, opting for a tiled approach instead, no pull-down menus which were developed for the LISA etc.). So while XEROX certainly deserve some credit for developing some of the initial concepts, without Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson and Apple it is very likely that the GUI would never had won out as the primary interface for interacting with computers.

 

The constant parroting of "Apple stole from XEROX" is ignoring so many factors of user interface evolution and the fact that Apple did indeed ignite the modern computing revolution.

 

You keep going back in circles. So what if Jeff Raskin's worked at Apple, if he was involved with the XEROX Star Project and early GUI Research, the point remains, the work originated at XEROX, not Apple. The ideas, the influence, the drive to invest in the GUI and innovate which was considered a risk, was based upon what Jobs saw during his tour at XEROX and what Jeff experienced while working there. And KFC is right, Apple licensed some elements of the XEROX Project in exchange for Apple IPO.

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