The tenth anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs, served as an excuse for fanboys and columnists who want to win the approval of Apple insist on presenting him as the ultimate genius of the computer industry when, beyond a couple of relevant contributions that we mention in an article tonterior, he was not better, (nor worse) than most of his colleagues.
Anyway, the anniversary it is a good excuse to remember the true inventors.
Jobs did not invent them. Was they
Graphical interface and mouse
Many believe that the first computer to come with a graphical interface was the Macintosh. The truth is that, although it was the first massive product to have it, the idea came from long before. That is not an obstacle so that in the biographical film Bill Gates was accused of having stolen the idea from Jobs.
Apparently the story is as follows:
When Steve Jobs hired Microsoft to be the first third-party application software developer for the Macintosh, he demanded that the company not produce any third-party software that uses a mouse until at least one year after the first version of the Macintosh
By mid-1983, Microsoft had created usable prototypes of its business graphing and spreadsheet programs, Multiplan and Chart, and programmers from both companies chatted several times a week to answer questions and solve problems. But, from Apple they noticed that those of Microsoft were asking things that they did not need to know and began to suspect industrial espionage. They went to Jobs with their doubts, but he dismissed them saying that Microsoft was not capable of imitating Apple products.
In November 1983, Microsoft announced a new mouse-based graphical user interface environment called Windows and a mouse version of Microsoft Word.. Jobs flew into a rage and summoned Gates.
Gates' answer went down in history
Well Steve, I think there is more than one way to look at it. I think it's more like we both had a rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV and found out that you had already stolen it. "
Microsoft and Apple's Rich Neighbor
Xerox was a copier manufacturing company that in anticipation that electronic documents would replace paper, he decided to create a research laboratory that would allow him to lead in new technologies. Xerox PARC.
One of the first things they invented was the laser printer, this type of printer needed a graphical interface to properly prepare the documents. As there was no computer that had it, they invented it in 1973.
El Alto, such was his name, It had a screen that was the same size and orientation as a printed page, and it featured full bitmap-based graphics with a resolution of 606 by 808. Each pixel could be turned on and off independently. There was also a keyboard and a mouse with three buttons. The mouse cursor had the well-known diagonal-headed arrow shape that we know today, in addition to transforming into other shapes depending on the task at hand.
The file manager displayed the directory listings in two columns. What's more A graphical word processor, called Bravo, was developed that could display different fonts and text sizes on the screen at the same time, but had a slightly different user interface, with menus at the bottom rather than the top. There was also no lack of a bitmap graphics editor that worked much like Paint does today, but it also had its own different user interface.
They soon realized that they needed something more complex and developed SmallTalk.
Individual windows in Smalltalk were framed by a graphic border, and stood out against the gray pattern in the background. below them. Each had a title bar on the top line of each window that could be used to identify the window and move it around the screen. Windows could overlap one another on the screen, and a selected window moved to the top of the "stack." Simultaneously the "icons" appeared, tiny iconic representations of programs or documents that you could click to run or manipulate, and as if that weren't enough, that's where pop-up menus, scroll bars, radio buttons, and dialog boxes come from.