[torgoguys]

1. Jobs' suggestion of outlining text is not the norm today.

2. Pixel by pixel scrolling is, but that it was done line-by-line on the Xerox computer could have been a deliberate performance concession for this 70s era hardware. Redrawing large sections of the screen over and over (for every pixel of scroll) was very slow by modern standards and not redrawing every pixel was often preferable on those systems even if you could do it.

[timthelion]

Pixel by pixel scrolling was so hard, that one of the parts of the original MSWindows drawing api was "shift up/down by one pixel" for the purpose of scrolling and this was to hardware accelerated on systems that supported it. The API was otherwise completely low level.

[alankay1]

See my comments above. And if you take a look to see what the Alto could really do graphically, and even more so the Dorado, you would not worry about speed. The decisions were for other reasons.