The point is the often-repeated story that "Apple stole the GUI from Xerox." It's not true, because when Apple saw the Xerox Alto, it was almost a prototype. It wasn't a commercial product, and it had no standard UI. Different tools had different UIs, a lot in the "apps" was keyboard-driven, and the famous GUI part, the Smalltalk system, did not have a lot of things we today take for granted.
The Alto didn't have them because they had not been invented yet. That is because Apple invented them.
Apple's Lisa OS, and later Mac OS, invented things like title bars with standardised control buttons, menu bars and pull-down menus, graphical iconic toolbars, dialog boxes with standard buttons in standard places, desktop icons, graphical file managers representing files and folders with icons that the user can position, and so on.
Now, all GUIs have these. Later Xerox GUIs have these, such as the Star. But the Alto didn't, because the ideas hadn't been invented.
Xerox came up with the GUI and overlapping windows and graphical menus and things like that, but Apple refined it into something more usable by non-experts, and also simplified it so that it was usable with a single mouse button.
What Apple saw in the demos was indeed weird, which is the point of TFA.
The point is the often-repeated story that "Apple stole the GUI from Xerox." It's not true, because when Apple saw the Xerox Alto, it was almost a prototype. It wasn't a commercial product, and it had no standard UI. Different tools had different UIs, a lot in the "apps" was keyboard-driven, and the famous GUI part, the Smalltalk system, did not have a lot of things we today take for granted.
The Alto didn't have them because they had not been invented yet. That is because Apple invented them.
Apple's Lisa OS, and later Mac OS, invented things like title bars with standardised control buttons, menu bars and pull-down menus, graphical iconic toolbars, dialog boxes with standard buttons in standard places, desktop icons, graphical file managers representing files and folders with icons that the user can position, and so on.
Now, all GUIs have these. Later Xerox GUIs have these, such as the Star. But the Alto didn't, because the ideas hadn't been invented.
Xerox came up with the GUI and overlapping windows and graphical menus and things like that, but Apple refined it into something more usable by non-experts, and also simplified it so that it was usable with a single mouse button.
What Apple saw in the demos was indeed weird, which is the point of TFA.