[ashleyn]

It wasn't until relatively recently that software engineers took the opinions of artists and designers seriously. Apple was probably the original and first to do so, with Jobs' own background in artistry. It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you.

[netbeef]

"It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you."

I'm sorry, but it's not Steve's artistry, it's his ability to "steal like an artist". Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price.

[robbrown451]

While I don't think it was his artistry per se, it was, to a good degree, his taste. And I don't think he was so much stealing as he was hiring the very people who produced the Xerox Star, so their work could see the light of day. And it improved pretty dramatically under his management as well.

[Taniwha]

It wasn't just the price of the software - video ram was still expensive, the idea of wasting a whole bit on each pixel was still something you had to decide you could afford, plus you needed to be able to afford hardware that was fast enough to make a GUI work fast enough to be usable

The hardware behind the Mac arrived at prices where this was doable (at $2400 1984 $$ still really high), the Lisa bombed largely because of its much higher price

[tinus_hn]

CDE has the same features. Do you think they borrowed them?

[acdha]

> Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price.

You might want to learn more about the history: the work at Xerox PARC was enormously influential but it wasn't happening in a vacuum:

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

“Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab.”

In particular, pay attention to the details about how much work went into things which might have started somewhere like PARC but required significant work developing affordable and reliable designs, coming up with design metaphors and concepts to make the GUI consistent and appealing to use, etc.

Bruce Horn wrote a nice summary years back on all of the refinements which went into things we now take for granted:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Similarly, look at something as basic as dragging which took time and better mouse hardware to mature:

http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Retrospective...

Again, this is not to dismiss the work which the Xerox team did but simply remember how much was left between an amazing prototype and a mainstream product. Our field is very prone to not taking UI work seriously and it's resulted in a lot of allegedly superior products being passed by.

> At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price.

This is similarly incomplete: cost was a huge factor but you also forget how hard it can be to recognize the benefit of a big change like the GUI. That exact attitude was not uncommon dismissing things like bitmap graphics and sound as frills which distracted from important business. When I got started in the 90s you could still find people complaining about GUIs being slow, etc. and otherwise ignoring the difference in how many more people could use a GUI or how long it took to learn a new task.

[lokedhs]

The first version of OSX looked horrible. The horizontal lines over the menus made them almost impossible to read.

Over the next several major releases the lines became less and less pronounced until it wasn't terrible anymore around 10.5.

Also the unbearable sluggishness of the OSX interface during those days, mainly caused my Apple trying to do too much with too weak hardware, made the system objectively worse than CDE.

CDE may have been ugly but it was usable and faster.