floobydust wrote:
As for the Mac interface, that was done by Xerox Research Parc... and Jobs was able to leverage it for the Mac... job well done (pun intended).
This trope is old and tired. Basically suggesting that Apple drag and dropped the Xerox tech and stuffed in to in a small, beige box.
Apple was working on the Lisa before they visited PARC. The kernel of the GUI ideas were based off of a demo of the Smalltalk system, which is extraordinarily crude - especially compared to either the Lisa or the Macintosh. ST was basically windows, text editing, a mouse pointer, pop up menus, and a scrollbar. Certainly innovative at the time. But just the most base of systems.
Certainly there are common elements, but the suggestion of Apple just lifting it is misplaced. They did a boat load of work. At minimum, they just had whatever notes they took from what they saw from both the early ST systems, and the Altos. They didn't have code. They didn't have architecture. They had "B&W display, and this mouse thing with windows".
After that, they had to craft everything up from scratch. Mac OS's biggest failing was simply that it came too early before memory protection and was burdened by legacies of that through it's entire life time until it got replaced by NeXTStep.
Apple left Xerox with nothing more than ideas (ideas they paid for), and pushed them far off on their own direction. We still would have had a Lisa even if they never went to PARC to see the Alto. (Whether it would have become a Mac, who knows.)
Modern GUIs (desk top and mobile) are far, far more indebted to Apple's work than Apple was to Xerox's.