GUI History Abridged
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer “What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user.” –- an IBM technician lambasting the Apple Lisa’s GUI "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 1 1930’s Vannevar Bush, American engineer. Worked on analog computing and on the Manhattan Project. Wrote of an adjustable microfilm viewer he called the "Memex," looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time.
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