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by justin66 3291 days ago
From the article:

First, it’s worth understanding that many people (perhaps even a thousand or more) had seen live demos of the Alto and Smalltalk before Steve. This is because Steve showed up in 1979, and the Alto and Smalltalk had been running for 6 years (starting in the first half of 1973), and we were a relatively open lab for visiting colleagues and other interested people (like Herbie Hancock and Al Gore).
1 comments
notburnt 3291 days ago
Yeah, I read that: seems to support my point. Basically: they had been doing it for years, but Jobs saw what was missing to make it actually usable.

Could be wrong: I wasn't there :)

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alankay1 3290 days ago
Yes, you are wrong. Do a little more work and reading, and you'll readily find out a bit more.
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justin66 3290 days ago
You're wrong because the system already had users, and was by definition usable.

Jobs was throwing off first impressions, not deep or well considered insights. The question is why a person would go negative in such a situation.

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steego 3290 days ago
He's also wrong because Jobs never assembled a team to create a desktop PC that was as powerful, simple, extensible and well thought out as the full Alto stack.

Even when they started NeXT, they still didn't fully realize the full potential of full dynamic, late bounded, messaged based object-oriented programming system.

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