Re:Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed ...
by dalke on Thursday September 15, 2016 @07:45PM
(#12510803)
I have read through folklore.org but I never noticed that change in UI from 1979 to 1980. Thank you for pointing that out.
Now that I am paying attention to that, I see in Jan. 1980 Raskin wrote "A lightpen for graphic input is being considered" for the Macintosh. http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/bom/... .
In the link you pointed to shows that by summer of '80 there was no longer support for softkeys and there was support for a mouse. The primary documents at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/mouse0.html only start talking about a Macintosh mouse in spring of '80.
This fits well with a transition from Canon Cat UI to a PARC-derived UI, as you've described.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
The Lisa and Macintosh projects interfaces pre-Xerox visit were remarkably different from post-visit. The Macintosh pre-early-1980-Xerox-visit was based around soft keys. Yes it had a bitmapped graphical display, but it was not a mouse based user interface as we know it, it was more like what Raskin did later with the Canon Cat.
The office desktop with icons interface that shipped on the Lisa is very clearly influenced by the Xerox Star office system more than it is by Smalltalk. And the Mac copied the Lisa.