Macintosh - Computing: A Business History - page 37

"I created this method for moving objects and making selections after finding the Xerox
click-move-click method prone to error," writes Raskin. "Bill Atkinson [a former student of
Raskin's from the University of California, San Diego who had already developed Quick-
Draw and would go on to create MacPaint and HyperCard for the Mac] extended the
paradigm to pull-down menus. This all happened relatively early in the history of the Mac.
The way my insight got extended by Bill was typical of how things developed then. Sur-
prising as it may seem in retrospect, there was some resistance to my new way of using
a graphic input device and I had to repeatedly explain how drag worked and why it was
often easier to use than the modal click-move-click technique developed first (as far as I
know) on the Sketchpad system and then used at Xerox PARC. Some of the arguments I
used involved looking at the number of user actions and the time they took ... Bill was a
strong supporter of my ideas and at one session where I was explaining how drag worked
Bill, by way of amplifying how useful it was, said something like, 'And you can use it to
open menus, just put the cursor on the top and drag down to the item you want.'"
Raskin's recollection is confirmed by Apple engineer Bruce Horn. "I've been watching
the debate for more than a decade now about where the Macintosh User Interface came
from," writes Horn. "Most people assume that it was taken directly from Xerox, after Steve
Jobs went to visit. This 'fact' is reported over and over, by people who don't know any
better (and also by people who should!) This just isn't true - there are some similarities
between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differen-
ces are substantial. ... The difference between the Xerox system architectures and the Mac's
architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac's architecture and
Windows. Not surprising, since Microsoft was shown quite a bit of the Macintosh design
(API's, sample code, etc.), during the Mac's development from 1981-1984; the intention
was to help their programmers write applications for the Mac, but having this also gave
their system designers a template from which to start designing Windows. In contrast, the
Mac ... designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex-Xer-
ox people ... but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage
off our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think."
The same went for hardware and packaging. Bruce Horn: "The hardware itself was an
amazing step forward ... All-in-one design, 4-voice sound, small footprint, clock, auto-eject
floppies, serial ports, and so on. The small, portable, appealing case was a serious departure
from the ugly-box-on-an-ugly-box PC world, thanks to Jerry Manock and his crew. Even
the packaging showed amazing creativity and passion; do any of you remember unpacking
an original 128K Mac? The Mac, the unpacking instructions, the profusely-illustrated and
beautifully-written manuals, and the animated practice program with audio cassette were
packaged together tastefully in a cardboard box with Picasso-style graphics on the side.
Never before had a computer been delivered with so much attention to detail and the cus-
tomer's needs."