Bruce's account is pretty much true. He is too modest to mention that 
he and Steve Capps did the Mac Finder (it originally wasn't going to 
have a GUI like the Lisa) all by themselves in a really short time. 
Bruce was only 19 or 20 at that point. (He started in my group at 
PARC when he was 12, and did the Dorado microcode for ST-76 when he 
was 16.)

I think he might have missed Smallstar, the prototype of the Star UI 
that was done in Smalltalk by Dave Canfield Smith and Dan Halbert. 
This was really nice. Larry Tesler did know of it and would have 
brought some of these (and perhaps some other Star) ideas with him to 
the Lisa.

I think he also missed Bob Sproull's D-LISP Alto client (for 
Interlisp running on the MAXC mainframe). This not only used the 
Smalltalk overlapping window idea (and Dan Ingalls bit-blt to paint 
the screen), but Sproull also did the first non-rectangular clipping 
so that windows did not have to be refreshed manually, and that 
allowed painting of partially occluded windows to be done safely. 
Quite a few years later Bill Atkinson came up with a very pretty and 
elegant way to compute this using a technique with some similarities 
to the "Warnock math" at U of Utah in the 60s.

One influence on these various UI designs that isn't mentioned enough 
was the spatial data management system (SDMS) of Nicholas Negroponte 
and Richard Bolt at MIT's ARCMAC group. This has my vote for the 
"best all around and most beautiful" UI of the 70s -- too bad it was 
just a demo -- but what a demo! Andy Herzfeld has said he was 
influenced by it, and I think of the Lisa/Mac UI as the combination 
of PARC, ARCMAC, and the Lisa/Mac folks.

Cheers,

Alan

At 9:37 PM -0200 2/9/04, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
>On Monday 09 February 2004 16:36, Alan Kay wrote:
>>  Heh, heh. Don't believe everything (or much) that was made up by a
>>  publicist ....
>
>Drats, I had been so pleased to learn that Steven Wozniak had created
>the Mac ;-)
>
>On a related topic, there is now a new site (http://www.folklore.org)
>telling the story of the original Mac and Bruce Horn made some comments
>on Smalltalk (in 1996, before Squeak) at the bottom of this page:
>
><http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium>
>
>-- Jecel


--