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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fast Learner" data-source="post: 5582912" data-attributes="member: 649">I intentionally used the words "personal computer." The lowest-end Star was $20,000 (and you couldn't buy just the computer, you had to buy terminals and networking equipment and printers, resulting in $50-100,000 packages) and the Lisa was $10,000. Apple's innovation was, in part, producing a GUI personal computer and mouse at an affordable price.Moreover, the story of Apple taking the GUI from Xerox isn't actually true, though it's extremely common lore. There are a couple of key elements that aren't well known. The first is that Steve Jobs actually paid Xerox for an opportunity to see the Smalltalk IDE they were using -- not an OS GUI, just an IDE that used a mouse and had a small subset of the things in the Mac GUI (and even then the ones Xerox had didn't work well, e.g. windows didn't redraw when you moved or closed something in front of them, you had to click them to get them to do so). This was prior to the Star's release, and Apple didn't see the Star until everyone else did, when it was released. (Of interest only to extreme nerds like me, "Star" was the name of the software, the workstation was the Rank Xerox 8110.)The second is that a great number of the elements of what became the personal computer GUI were invented by the Lisa and Mac teams, including drag-and-drop file manipulation; direct manipulation of file, folder, and disk names; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; control panels; pull-down menus; and the clipboard. The Xerox Star contained none of these things, either.Still, not the first computer with a GUI, just the first personal computer.</blockquote>

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