Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Macintosh
"The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My
job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at
bay."
- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple
Urban legends persist because - despite being untrue - they represent stories that are just
too good to let go of. Such is the case with what is widely viewed as a key moment in the
history of the development of the Macintosh computer. In a nutshell, the story goes like this:
Steve Jobs visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1979, there saw what
Xerox was doing with the development of graphic user interfaces (GUIs), and then lifted the
idea (plus several Xerox engineers) for the Mac.
Not true. Jobs did indeed visit Xerox PARC in 1979, but at that time the Macintosh GUI
was already very well along and - coincidentally - better than that which was on hand at Xer-
ox. (The Apple paradigm included the "click and drag" method of one-button-mouse-driven
function, not a part of the Xerox approach.)
The progenitor of the Macintosh at Apple was Jef [sic] Raskin, a longtime advocate for
graphical user interfaces. ("My thesis in
Computer Science
," he recalls, "published in 1967,
argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators
and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should
be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations
of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before
PARC started.")
During the early 70's Raskin served as professor and computer center director at the
University of California, San Diego, and was also Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). He as well did a stint as visiting academic at Xerox PARC.
Raskin had already done much thinking on the design of the user interface for com-
puters, and was delighted to find people at PARC who were on "the same user-interface
wavelength." As soon as Raskin joined Apple in 1978, however, he immediately stopped
visiting PARC, such visits no longer being appropriate.
Raskin had already known Jobs and Wozniak for two years by the time he was hired as
Apple's employee number 31. Raskin, in turn, hired engineer Larry Tesler, one of several
PARC veterans to be lured to Apple in the coming months. But far from imitating PARC
approaches to GUIs, the new Apple team improved on them dramatically, starting with the
invention of the simple one-click mouse as opposed to Xerox's three-click mouse, which of-
ten led to confusion and errors on the part of users. Other innovations came rapidly.
