Desktop Metaphor

[Mark Green]

The desk top metaphor goes back to at least Doug Englebarts work in the 1960s. There were no icons, but the basic metaphor was there. 

You need to be careful when you talk about Smalltalk since there were several quite different versions of it. The early versions were far more interesting and experimental than the later ones. Unfortunately most of the existing documentation is on Smalltalk 80 which was an attempt to take the language main stream. I do seem to recall that the earlier implementations had icons and the full desktop metaphor. They may have been dropped as being to radical for the time. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 22, 2018, at 9:38 PM, Curious Marc via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> As they used to say, Windows95 = Mac 1984. Which is pushing it a bit but has some truth in it... Maybe Mac 1990. Curiously, the Xerox Alto has quite advanced GUI and object oriented programming (including the smalltalk windowing environment), but no desktop metaphor or icons that I have seen. I believe desktop metaphors appear later in the Alto commercial successor, the Xerox Star, and in the Apple Lisa, which bears strong Xerox influences. Xerox’s desktop metaphor pushes the object concept a bit far, while the Lisa got what would become the modern ubiquitous version of the concept almost dead on. Did I get this approximately right? Are there any other GUI desktop metaphors that predates this?
> Marc
> 
>>> On Oct 22, 2018, at 2:19 PM, ben via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 10/22/2018 10:57 AM, Rick Bensene via cctalk wrote:
>>> 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.
>> 
>> That may be true but DOS/WINDOWS and APPLE II all had TV display output formats, now it is WIDE SCREEN ONLY. From what little I have seen about the Alto, you had a full sized 8x10? page format. The printed page
>> DOES matter for graphic displays. Try and find a printed page size PDF
>> reader, or one a tad smaller. Reading a PDF on a KINDLE DOES NOT WORK.
>> I suspect a good PDF reader, a not tablet, is needed often for all the
>> online doc's at places like bit savers to get the knowledge close to a
>> classic computer.
>> 
>> I hate GUI's,because I hate ICON's. I see a little hand popup, is a mouse pointer,stop that sign, or play feel the naked photo.
>> 
>> Ben.
>>