Thanks for all the replies. My notes are at home, from memory here are the
seemingly reliable bits:
The mouse was probably developed by Englebart at SRI in the mid 60's
(1965?). Someone said it was a cheap replacement for the lightpen which
had been in use for some time. By 1968 there were references to it elsewhere.
There follows a number of references to the ideas of using a mouse and a
GUI. Presumably the computers of the time were limited in power and
memory, limiting the usefulness of these interim projects. The other
innovations included icons, tiled windows, and later overlapping windows.
The STAR by the Xerox PARC folks was the first commercial system using the
mouse and other UI innovations but it has an enormous cost ($16000 was
quoted) and was never a hit. I believe they also created a computer called
Alto. By all accounts Xerox was unable to understand this market and never
made much money. I think they concluded that PARC was an experiment that
had run it's course without much fruition; they turned their back on
computers and closed PARC.
Steve Jobs of Apple is widely said to have based the OS used by Lisa on the
PARC work. The Lisa was also too expensive and did not sell well. Of
course the Macintosh and later lines sold fairly well (off and on).
Somewhere in here Microsoft Windows was launched. The first couple
versions were pretty primitive by today's standards but the 3.x line was
commercial success with wide software vendor support. Details are unclear,
but Windows seems to have copied a great deal from the Apple, at least in
terms of "look and feel". There are references to legal friction and deals
between Gates and Jobs.
Somewhere in there (1985 by one account) X was created at MIT. I haven't
found much info about the early motivations of X nor its intellectual
relations with other GUIs. Apparently Sun had a GUI SunView before X
existed. From the brief descriptions (e.g., discussions of 'window
managers'), it sounds like X was like the GUIs developed at Xerox PARC.
-Alan
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Alan D. Mead / Research Scientist / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Institute for Personality and Ability Testing
1801 Woodfield Dr / Savoy IL 61874 USA
217-352-4739 (v) / 217-352-9674 (f)
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