I understood that on-screen icons were invented by David Canfield Smith in
his dissertation work, Pygmalion, an icon-based programming language
written in Smalltalk-72.  David went on to be lead of the Xerox Star UI
Design team, didn't he?

Mark

>  Recently someone asked in one of our internal newsgroups at SDRC
>
>"Does anyone know how icons came to be known as icons? Why they are called
>that, who started it, etc?".
>
> I was thinking that ICONs may have been invented at PARC.  Probably
>someone on this mailing list knows the answer and I'd like to hear the
>real story.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
> - Steve


--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html