[cctalk] Re: The Mac at 40

Apple didn't "steal" anything because Xerox received a tranche of pre-IPO Apple shares in exchange for allowing SJ and his folks to visit PARC for a bunch of demos and do whatever they wanted with what they saw. Nowadays you can also try out systems like Smalltalk-78, Xerox ViewPoint, etc. as well as the original Lisa and Macintosh systems in emulation -- and read papers like "Inventing the Lisa Human Interface," published in ACM Interactions 27 years ago -- to see just how different what SJ and his people saw at Xerox was from what Apple shipped in the Lisa and Macintosh 4-5 years after the visit. - The top-of-screen menu bar was an Apple invention. - Atkinson's "region" data structure to allow windows to update when partially obscured was an Apple invention. - Open/Save file dialogs were an Apple invention for Macintosh, because with 128KB of RAM it couldn't run both Finder and an application and thus couldn't use Lisa's "stationery pad" concept. I can't believe people still don't have a solid grasp of these things after 40 years of both journalism and academia covering them in rather exhaustive detail. -- Chris