Bill Atkinson: Polaroids Showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI [video]

To anyone who thought Apple simply copied what they called at Xerox Parc, check this one out.

The Xerox influence was real but limited - Apple's team iterated extensively as shown in these polaroids, adding crucial innovations like drag-and-drop, pull-down menus, and the desktop metaphor that weren't in the original Alto/Star interfaces.

In context those are just tweaks ... Xerox designed the entire WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) UI concept, including the bitmapped display it is based on, first commercial mouse, ethernet networking ...

Xerox's invention was visionary and pioneering. Apple's was just engineering iteration.

It's as if one company designed the automobile and you want to give outsized credit to someone else who added turn indicators.

That is basically how cars have progressed though..

Sure - there's a lot of value that can be added though iterative refinement and enhancement, but let's give credit for innovation where it is due.

The desktop metaphor absolutely was in the Xerox Star and that was copied by the Lisa team (and carried over to the Mac) after they viewed it when Star was first announce. That’s well documented. The Star also had limited pull down menus mostly a single menu item on the top right of every window that was hamburger-like in design that had items in it.

The Xerox Development Environment (TAJO/XDE) was more windows like where windows were processes and shrunk down to the bottom of the screen when closed. Star was developed using Tajo but are completely separate systems with very different user interfaces. For example Tajo used cut/copy/paste and any window could be set overlapping where as Star use a MOVE, COPY where use selected the object pressed the verb action button, and then selected the destination (use that was modal!). Also Star choose to have non-overlapping tiled windows (except for modal dialogues & style sheets.) The windowing was changed in later versions to allow any window to overlap.

What’s even more confusing is that Xerox had lots of systems including smalltalk, interlisp, star, Cedar & Tajo at the time Lisa was released. They also had lots or prototypes systems including Rooms and the Alto for that matter.

Apple absolutely also did their own research and design that was unique. And in cases the duplicated earlier research but came to a different conclusion (for example the number of buttons on a mouse.)

I think Apple did more with direct manipulation than others did taking it to more extremes — but you can still see that in other earlier systems.

The part so-often left out of this story (that Apple "stole IP from Xerox") is that the C-suite at Xerox got special considerations during AAPL's IPO, in exchange for access to their engineers in Palo Alto. From the POV of these former salesmen-turned-executives, it was fiscally worthwhile (they generally despised/misunderstood PARC engineers).

Xerox, of course, almost immediately liquidated their AAPL holdings (doh!).

Recalled from reading Dealers of Lightning at Xerox PARC (my favorite non-fiction book of the past few years).

[0] amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer-ebook/dp/B0029PBVCA/