The 1978 commercial says “ We will sell no wine before it’s time”
The PDF business plan says “ We will announce no Apple before it’s time” And shows a man drinking wine who could be Orson Welles.
That being said, I've sat down with both and it's pretty clear both A) how very similar a significant chunk of the elements / components / systems are. And B) how much more advanced the Xerox system was from the Lisa one.
The argument isn't that Lisa (and Macintosh, by proxy) were a direct copy of the Xerox system. It's that by Apple's own arguments against Microsoft in court, the similarity to Xerox is even greater than that between Windows 1.0-3.1 and early Macintosh versions.
The context of the argument matters, it doesn't exist in isolation. It's not like one day people just decided Apple plagiarized Macintosh.
https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
see also: "Origins of the Apple Human Interface” (1997)
Again, the point isn't "I would sit down and accidentally think I'm using a Mac" (though, you certainly would more likely think that than Windows), it's "how much of this exists because of the other one, and how similar is it in concept".
As noted by deaddodo (thanks), I was merely referencing how Apple tried to sue Microsoft, raising eyebrows of Xerox who then called Apple out--who 'took inspiration' from who and how much all came out into public record. While we're at it may as well credit Douglas Engelbart for "The Mother of All Demos" (1968) for conceiving of such devices.
It's merely lighthearted amusement to see Xerox 'credited' on the docs. The Macintosh was the greatest thing to happen in 1984, I still remember reading and rereading my SciAm issue where I first saw it. I was already into graphics/gaming on the Atari but seeing WYSIWYG was something else. Xerox, Apple, Microsoft all get some credit for invention, refinements, and bringing it to the consumer masses.
Apple also took several people from Xerox PARC, including Larry Tesler (cut and paste, Object Pascal, Apple Lisa, Newton, etc.) who had demonstrated the Alto to Steve Jobs.
In 2017 Tesler recorded a demo with the Computer History Museum on their restored Alto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z43y94Dfzk
And of course Charles Simonyi went from PARC (Bravo) to Microsoft (Word).
Apple licensed many technologies from Xerox that were used to make Mac OS and other applications.
Mac OS was a copy of Smalltalk the same way an A380 is a copy of the Wright Flyer.
The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was about perfect for me, but when I finally had to look for a replacement there weren't any running Windows, so I had to move up to a Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (which interestingly, its replacement seems to use the same case).
> In September 1981 InfoWorld reported—below the PC's announcement—that Apple was secretly developing three new computers "to be ready for release within a year": Lisa, Macintosh, and "Diana". Describing the last as a software-compatible Apple II replacement
The Canon Cat was a further development of this idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
I can't find any demo or screen shots of the Canon Cat system in use, but I imagine it to be somewhat along the lines of the HASCI concept, which had been brewing around the same time.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n404/...
HASCI actually shipped on the USA version of the Epson QX-10 as "Valdocs", an integrated document management system.
There's an advertising video on YouTube showing it in use for text editing
That video is great, a VCR tape collection of corporate demos by Jef Raskin's company, apparently for investors and resellers.
YouTube suggested a short, informal demo posted only 10 years ago, about 6 minutes:
https://youtu.be/jErqdRE5zpQ?si=A1kK2FhR9-LhoZIU
A bit less familiar with it so a quick and dirty video I suppose but a great demonstration of what it would be like to use one now.
Essential history! Thanks!
If only I could convince mobile browsers to enable the onscreen keyboard in web-based emulators...
For instance, Infinite Macintosh has an explicit "Keyboard" that I should trivially peek at. It has a different problem mapping the iOS keyboard to ancient computers. Hmm.
Has anyone figured out a way to work around this?
The 1981 design also had significantly lower resolution graphics (384x256) than Macintosh released with (512x342). Any idea when this was changed?
“In the beginning of 1982, the original 68000 design was more than a year old, and the software was nowhere near finished, so Burrell was afraid some of the trade-offs of the original design were no longer current. He used the expansive canvas of a custom chip, where additional logic was almost free, to update the architecture. The most important decision was admitting that the software would never fit into 64K of memory and going with a full 16-bit memory bus, requiring 16 RAM chips instead of 8. The extra memory bandwidth allowed him to double the display resolution, going to dimensions of 512 by 342 instead of 384 by 256. He also added bells and whistles like a fancy, DMA-fed sound generator with four independent voices. This was the fourth version of the Macintosh design.”
https://www.folklore.org/I_Invented_Burrell.html
Though, to be fair, he did name it:
https://www.folklore.org/Bicycle.html
and for an actual answer see:
I also like "Imagine two posters next fall, the first appearing In retail dealers and Sears"
No. No it is not.