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Alan Kay answers “What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?”
- cabaalis 9y agoI thought it was interesting that 2 objections raised by Steve Jobs so he "could feel in control" are actually normal UX items and have been ever since. (smooth scrolling, selecting text being an outline) Maybe this is a difference between someone totally focused on feel and experience versus pure computer science.
- blackguardx 9y agoI haven't seen many systems that use an outline for selection. Alan indicated that their original version inverted the selection (he uses the word "complement") as do most systems today.
- stevenwoo 9y agoBased on Alan's answer and Alan's reading/knowledge of Steve Jobs, Steve's questions were just more ad libbed challenges to try to appear to be the alpha smart person in the room.
- alankay 9y agoYou missed the story and the history, and who knew what. Many of the GUI ideas had been around in the ARPA community before Parc, including scrolling. The bit-map display on the Alto brought a few more possibilities -- such as the overlapping windows, and "display any image". We had done both smooth scrolling and outlined text selection years before (remember that Steve's visit was in the 6th year of the Alto working). We used the line by line scrolling in Smalltalk in '79 in part because it was easier to read during the movement, and because a list would always show the whole top line). There was plenty of compute power to do either. What Steve was reacting against is the normal way we portray selections today, namely highlighting (not at all what you said above). We found the highlighted selection to be more discernable than the outline. I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pupppet 9y agoAfter more or less six years of running this demo, a designer (Steve) steps in and makes a couple suggestions that very much improved the experience, suggestions that took only a few seconds to implement in Alan’s own words. Alan seems to poopoo Steves’s visit but it highlights exactly why the computer industry needed Jobs.
- copenja 9y agoDo you feel that the value of Steve Jobs is underappreciated? In the mainstream media he has received perhaps more attention and praise than anyone else in the computer industry. He is widely considered to be a genius and given nearly sole credit for a wide range of innovations. I think it's okay for the guys who invented the GUI to also get a small fist bump.
- pdpi 9y agoIn mainstream media, Jobs is a god amongst men. In technical circles, he's demonised. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle, and the HN audience in particular is one that probably needs reminding that he did have valuable input to contribute.
- blackguardx 9y agoI'm not sure what you mean. There are plenty of people here that recognize Jobs' positive contributions. In fact, most HN threads about Jobs devolve into acolytes fighting detractors.
- mehrdada 9y ago> The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle I have found [irrespective of this case] that this statement is just not true. Often, the truth is not in the middle but at one of the extremes, or even beyond them.
- michaelmrose 9y ago"The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle" This statement ticks me off to an unreasonable degree. The truth is complicated. Any clear spectrum drawn between 2 points is an artificial construct. There is no reason to suppose that the truth would just happen to lie in the middle of an artificial spectrum. In fact if it did on average it would be incredibly strange. Further the world is full of morons who espouse clearly ridiculous things and the truth doesn't lie somewhere midway between sanity and insanity. Jobs is a great businessman who excelled at turning other peoples ideas into piles of money not at making the world a better place. People like kay changed the way people interact with computers. Jobs isn't halfway between god and demon hes just not that important.
- tyingq 9y agoMore detail on changing the system while running, and a comment at the bottom from Alan Kay retelling this same story: http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-rewriting.html http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-r... "Dealers of Lightning" also a has a chapter on Job's visit: https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/dp/0887309895 https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer... Try the "look inside" for "Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell".
- rdiddly 9y agoHe complains no one asked him until now, but the question is a bit like asking John Lennon "Wow what's it like to work with Ringo?" Well it's like busting ass writing most of the songs, and Ringo shows up and records the drum part and smiles, and becomes everybody's favorite Beatle. This analogy is not guaranteed. No refunds.
- rdiddly 9y agoYour downvotes prove my point. Popularity is a hell of a drug.
- pcunite 9y agoWhat is amazing to me is that the "invention" of the computer used the already established norms of our physical reality as it's guide. From the second image description: "once windows are created they overlap on the screen like sheets of paper" As we turn computers into android robots, its clear that the credit never belong to man himself. The Wonderful idea was already known by God, who gave man the sense to emulate a good thing.
- lostlogin 9y agoThe finder is proof that there is no god.
- timthelion 9y agoBut overlapping window managers are hardly the best and only solution. I prefer tiling window managers. Did god invent tiling as well?
- coldcode 9y agoThat's why it takes two types of people to make something successful and lasting. One to come up with and do the invention, and someone to take it and make a product that affects the world. Neither does much without the other. Xerox had all the amazing tech and did absolutely squat with it. Jobs saw a demo and made it an actual thing you could use, whoever many errors he made in the process. Same is true with Steve and Steve, one did the tech and one made it a company. Rarely can one person do both and be successful.
- hkmurakami 9y agoThe one example I know of where the two skills were founded in the same person was Satoru Iwata of HAL/Nintendo. Brilliant programmer/hacker, tech/User experience visionary, and a corporate operator chief.
- michaelmrose 9y agoPretending that apple is as important as PARC seems to me to be poorly thought out. It's mistaking was is visible with what is important.
- flavio81 9y ago>Jobs saw a demo and made it an actual thing you could use, Xerox systems were complete and readily usable, but too expensive. Jobs simply tried to make something similar but cheaper. First, Jobs failed as well (Apple Lisa), then the Mac was easier to sell due to being lower priced. But the Mac also didn't sell well at the beginning; it started selling well after Jobs was fired, paradoxically.
- pcunite 9y agoRarely can one person do both and be successful Agree, but that doesn't sell as many books or movies I guess.
- protomyth 9y agoThe Smalltalk used in this demo was my personal favorite (-78) Is there a document that shows the differences between The Smalltalk-78 and Smalltalk-80, and what made Smalltalk-80 worse?
- pavlov 9y agoI think Smalltalk-80 was adapted to be portable to non-PARC systems: only standard ASCII, only Unix-style file system, etc.
- abecedarius 9y agoWish I knew! One difference is that -80 had metaclasses. (They weren’t in -76 but I’m not sure about -78.) I’d say metaclasses are more complication than they’re worth.
- fragmede 9y agoIf you are interested about this era of computing, I recommend The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal which covers a lot of the ground of getting to the famed Xerox Parc GUI demo, though that's barely more than a footnote in the context of the rest of the book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/
- throw-away-8 9y agoSo how did we get from infinetly flexible live GUI to html / CSS / JS / npm / framework du jour / a herd of transpilers / webpack current mess?
- Animats 9y agoI got the tour of PARC in 1975, years before Jobs. Smalltalk wasn't really working yet, but some Altos and Ethernet were running. Kay described Ethernet as an "Alohanet with a captive ether". They had a file server and a laser printer starting to work. So what they had was the beginnings of an office environment of the 1990s. Kay's point at the time is that this was what you could do if you were willing to spend a large amount of money per user on hardware. It wasn't cost-effective yet. Someday it would be. Xerox was willing to spend the money, so when the hardware became available, they'd own the market. This wasn't the first GUI. They'd downsized the 1968 Mother of All Demos to a machine that sat alongside a desk.[1] When Engelbart did that, it required a room-sized mainframe, a video link from the mainframe to the demo site (a very big deal in 1968), and a sizable crew of support people to keep it all running. All to support one user. This technology reached production with the introduction of "workstations". The first was the Terak, in 1977, which ran an interpretive environment called the UCSD P-System. This was a byte code interpreter for Pascal. Fast compile, slow execution, basic graphics. Perhaps the ancestor to Turbo Pascal for DOS. PDP-11 technology underneath. I used one briefly. 1979 brought the Three Rivers PERQ, which was a lot like an Alto and sold as a commercial product. It had another 16-bit CPU inside, from ICL in the UK, and was another interpretive Pascal system. I never saw one; it was considered something of a dud. When the Motorola 68000 came out, it was clear to a lot of people that there was finally a big enough microprocessor to build a workstation. At last, a 32-bit address space. (Or at least 24; early machines didn't use the high byte.) The Apollo Domain, in 1980, was the first of those. That was the first real workstation. It had its own OS, its own networking (a coax token ring), its own file system (exclusive use locking across the network worked, unlike UNIX), and its own GUI. Apollo had their own MMU and their own paging system, which was really hard due to the M68000 not handling page faults properly. It was way ahead of anything else at the time. But the small organization behind it just had too much work to do building all that software and hardware. When I used one, it was clear this was the future, but it wasn't there yet. Then came Sun, and a whole slew of UNIX workstations. UNIX was really the wrong tool for the job, but it was available and cheap. (Not yet free.) Meanwhile, Apple was trying to get a low-end workstation working. The Apple Lisa (1983) was the result. It was sort of a cost-reduced Apollo - its own OS, its own MMU (a whole board, which ran the price up), and its own GUI. Also its own disk drive, the one time Apple tried to build a hard drive in house. That didn't go well. The Lisa was impressive and useful, but it cost too much to go mass market. The real UNIX workstations came with big screens, and the Lisa had a dinky screen like DOS-type computers. Meanwhile, IBM was eating Apple's lunch, replacing the obsolete Apple II with dumb DOS machines. No GUI, but enough compute power to run a spreadsheet and, importantly, a hard drive. Now people could do basic business work. Apple's response, the Macintosh, was the world's greatest toy computer. It shipped in 1984 with 128K of RAM, one floppy drive (you needed two to get anything done), an operating system with no CPU dispatcher, no memory protection, and a nice GUI. But no hard drive. It was really slow and spent most of its time reading floppies and displaying an hourglass "wait" icon. It almost killed Apple. Sales were very low; Apple had planned to sell about 47,000 units a month, but only sold about 5,000. What saved Apple was the first desktop laser printer, the LaserWriter, in 1985. (PARC had a laser printer in the mid-1970s, but it was based on a big copier engine and bigger than a desk.) In 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus, which could, at last, support an external hard drive. That was the first successful product in the line, and launched the desktop publishing industry. In parallel to all this, there was another line of technology, now forgotten - "word processing". Wang and IBM were the big players in this. This started with typewriters with some memory, around 1971, and by 1977, Wang had the Wang Office Information System. This involved many semi-dumb terminals connected to a shared unit with a CPU and file server. Those could in turn be networked, and documents sent around the system. Very cost-effective, because each terminal was cheap. This was a huge win for offices which did a lot of document preparation, and Wang was, for a while, a very successful company. So Xerox tried to move into that space with the Xerox Star, in 1981. This brought the Alto technology into an office environment. Worked fine, cost too much. Like the Wang system, it was very closed. This was deliberate. Word processing and office system were used by secretaries and clerks. They had to Just Work. Exposing end users to the internal complexity of the system was considered a bad idea. The cultural change which brought system administration to the masses wasn't seen coming. It was inconceivable in the early 1980s that clerical people and small business operators would have to worry about what was going on inside the box. But as the DOS-type machines got more powerful and moved into offices, for about two decades everyone had to become a sysadmin. Apple tried to hide more under the covers, but it didn't really work all that well in the early years. Today, of course, the complexity has mostly been put back in a sealed box, and you can give a Chromebook type tablet to a 5 year old and they'll be able to work it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos