[Pipet Devel] an historical diversion

J.W. Bizzaro bizzaro at bc.edu
Wed Jul 28 23:12:50 EDT 1999


Greetings.

Since graphical user interfaces are of some importance to this project and a
special interest of mine, I thought I'd share a couple pics I came across today.

If you are familiar with the history of personal computers, you know the
importance of the work done by Xerox.  If you are not, you may be surprised that
Apple did NOT invent the GUI.  It is in fact well known that the Macintosh (and
the Lisa) GUI's were "ripped off" from the Xerox Alto.  Here is a pic of the
Alto from circa late-1970's (yes, the 70's):

    http://www.best.com/~curbow/xerox/alto.jpg

A sobering picture is that of the Xerox Star, which was introduced in 1981, 18
years ago!!!

    http://www.best.com/~curbow/xerox/1/p10-lg.jpg

And of some interest to us, here is a picture of the Xerox Elixir desktop from
1990 (the pic is actually printed on a t-shirt).  Notice the "process flow"
system, represented by icons connected with lines.  Look familiar?

    http://www.damer.com/pictures/elixir/products/shirt1m.jpg

Nine years ago.  Hmmm.



:-)
Jeff
-- 
                   +------------------------------------+
                   |                                    |
                   |           J.W. Bizzaro             |
                   |      jeff at bioinformatics.org       |
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                   |       THE OPEN COLLABORATORY       |
                   |    FOR MOLECULAR BIOINFORMATICS    |
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                   |     http://bioinformatics.org/     |
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