On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 05:08 pm, Nick Arnett wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of William T Goodall Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 8:33 AM To: Brin-L Subject: Apple invented the mouse
...as we knew it for nearly two decades. The universal design of a
rubber-coated ball-bearing, orthogonal pinch rollers, and optical disk
encoders was developed by Apple for the Lisa and Macintosh projects and
has little resemblance to Englebart's mouse, or the Xerox mouse.
Even if this is true in some sense, it is hardly the point of a mouse, which
I suspect the vast majority of people, including far too many UI "experts,"
don't understand.
What about "great artists ship"? - the Xerox mouses cost $400 each (in 1980 money) and the Xerox Star cost $20,000 each or so. Nobody was going to change the world with those products. Without Apple (and Microsoft for that matter) the mouse would have remained a laboratory curiosity.
<snip>
Unfortunately, a great many GUI features have been copied by people and
companies who have no real understanding of *why* they were invented in the
first place.
But is it Microsoft or Linux that is worst?
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
