|
By now it was already 1979, and we
found ourselves doing one of our many demos, but this
time for a very interested audience: Steve Jobs, Jeff
Raskin, and other technical people from Apple. They had
started a project called Lisa but weren't quite
sure what it should be like, until Jeff said to Steve,
"You should really come over to PARC and see what
they are doing."
The machine used was the Dorado, a
very fast "big brother" of the Alto. Larry Tesler
gave the main part of the demo with Dan sitting the copilot's
chair and Adele Goldberg and I watched from the rear.
One of the best parts of the demo was when Steve Jobs
said he didn't like the bit-style scrolling we were using
and asked if we could do it in a smooth continuous style.
In less than a minute Dan found the methods involved,
made the (relatively major) changes and scrolling was
now continuous! This shocked the visitors, especially
the programmers among them, as they had never seen a really
powerful incremental system before.
Steve tried to get and / or buy the
technology from Xerox (which was one of Apple's minority
venture capitalists), but Xerox would neither part with
it nor would come up with the resources to continue to
develop in house.
[The rest is history since Steve Jobs
and Apple Computer went on to create the first commercial
operating system to employ the graphical user interface.]
|
