Desktop Metaphor

[Rick Bensene]

Liam Proven wrote:

<snip>
>On the one hand, the cosmetics. *Every* Unix desktop out there draws
>on Win95. 

I take exception to the "*Every*" in Liam's statement above. 
 Replacing "Unix" with "Linux" would make the statement more correct.

X-Windows-based desktop metaphor UI's existed within the Unix world long before Win95 came on the scene.
The whole desktop metaphor UI existed long before Windows 95 in non-Unix implementations by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) with the pioneering Xerox Alto, introduced in 1973,  which implemented  Alan Kay's concepts for the desktop metaphor that were postulated in 1970 using Smalltalk as the core operating system.

Windows 95, and the earlier versions of Microsoft's desktop metaphor UI's, were patterned after these implementations.   Microsoft simply took concepts that already existed in the world of UI design, and made their own implementation based on those concepts.

-Rick
--
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com