In this interview Charles Simonyi told the origin of the acronym WYSIWYG in the context of his work at Xerox PARC on the Bravo word processor, see page 21:
I'm curious about Xerox 1980s office workstations like the Star and their document centric systems. And besides I'm a sucker for that black and white aesthetics, so I'm checking out the Dwarf Mesa emulator.
Here the ViewPoint 2.0.5 desktop environment is running in Dwarf under Crostini Linux on my Chromebox. The system is really intuitive and capable, even by today's standards.
The documentation of the desktop environments of early Xerox office workstations such as the Star describe a kind of modal GUI element, the "property sheet". This is what later came to be more widely known as a "dialog box" or just "dialog".
The papers in this anthology, published in 1984, describe the technologies and vision Xerox had for its office workstations, user interfaces, software, development environments, networks, and peripherals.
With the ease of creating versions of text that ChatGPT brings, whoever invents a system that can easily allow you to compare and merge or rewrite or swap out text by the chunk will do really well! Does any such product exist?
1973 #Ethernet as one of the defining information technologies in modern communication was developed at #PARC by Chuck Thackers for #Alto#Computer s. What Bob Metcalf, Butler Lampson, and Dave Boggs built for the #ARPAnet is connecting us all today— via the #Internet, & @fediverse.
"Next, we are going to steal... a Sun Microsystems server! And once the server is mine, I will have access to all of the world's data. I will be able to control the global economy, the stock market, and even the nuclear launch codes. I will be the most powerful sys admin of all time!"
Offen für alle, aber Details verschweigen – zum Tod von John Warnock
John Warnock war einer der Gründer von Adobe. Als "Vater" von Postscript veränderte er das Druckwesen erheblich. Nun ist er im Alter von 85 Jahren gestorben.
Does anybody have anything to say about #Epson printers as a whole? I had a nice 7 year old workhorse of a Canon printer whose Obsolescence Chip gave up the ghost today. Looking into it, Epson seems to be the only home office calibre manufacturer that still lets you use the same universal ink cartridges instead of a dozen different non-interchangeable and non-refillable ones?
The invention of the GUI, especially in the form of windows, icons, menus, and pointer (WIMP), controlled by a mouse, occurred at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, on the Alto, a computer with a bitmapped graphics display designed to be used by a single person, i.e. a “personal computer..
They used the #JBIG2 image format’s lossy “pattern matching & substitution” method that substitutes previously-encoded characters if they look enough like the one currently being encoded.
This is a great analogy to how #LLM-based “#AI” works.
today also checked out the drive box that my friend had bought at the same state sale. That "A" drive can only seek one way, "B" drive seems to work. We didn't undertake any major corrective action today (especially as he doesn't have a computer to hook it to) just put it back together and made a mental note.
we also figured out that probably the disks he's interested in archiving (or at least inspecting) are double sided, which is incompatible with all our drives 😢
I've successfully copied disk images from my Xerox 820 to a Linux PC using some custom CP/M software!
I did it by writing a program in C(!) on my linux computer, transporting it over by xmodem, and then running it to transport the image data in a slightly customized ihex format over the serial port.
「 Broadly speaking, the PARC researchers set out to explore possible technologies for use in what Xerox had tagged “the office of the future.” They aimed to develop the kind of computing hardware and software that they thought could be both technologically and economically possible, desirable, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, profitable in about 10 to 15 years 」
— Spectrum IEEE
@jbzfn
It was fun while it lasted, but the folks at Xerox proper didn't seem to know what they wanted to do. Read Paul Strassman's book for a view of the situation from Rochester.