Apple’s greatest innovations came from relentless creativity, unconventional thinking, and an obsessive drive to make products feel magical to ordinary people. Early inspiration came from Xerox PARC, where Steve Jobs and his team saw a graphical user interface with fonts, graphics, a mouse, menus, and overlapping windows. Jobs directed his team to reproduce those ideas for the Lisa. Bill Atkinson recreated the interface from memory, but overlapping windows were difficult because the system did not have enough memory and power to instantly reveal background windows. After weeks of work, the solution enabled the overlapping window experience that made the interface practical and compelling.
"Apple followers know that in 1979, there was a famous visit by Steve Jobs and some of his lieutenants to Xerox PARC. That's the Palo Alto Research Center, a think tank where they were developing next-generation computer products. That's where Jobs and his team saw an early version of the graphic user interface: black lettering on a white screen with fonts and graphics. There was a mouse. There were menus listing the commands. You didn't have to memorize the commands. And there were overlapping windows."
"To Jobs, this was clearly the future of computing, and he told his team, "We've got to reproduce that for our upcoming new computer called the Lisa." For Bill Atkinson, the star programmer, it was a matter of recreating what he'd seen at Xerox PARC from memory. And the one thing he struggled to imitate was this business of overlapping windows."
"Apple's greatest innovations came not just from technology, but from relentless creativity, unconventional thinking, and an obsessive drive to make products feel magical to ordinary people."
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]