Bruce Horn's Recollections
After creating posting the Raskin letters I got an email from Bruce.
From: Bruce Horn
To: "Matt Mora"
Mime-Version: 1.0
Hi Matt,
I was just wandering around and found your webpage about origins of the
Mac. You can find both of my original articles at MacKiDo.
http://www.MacKiDo.com/Interface/ui_history.html
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.
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Feel free to post a pointer to MacKiDo, or copy my articles to your
website.
Hope this helps!
Bruce
So I'm posting his letters too.
Matt
Copyright 1998 Bruce Horn
These articles are from www.MacKiDo.com
Any number of people will
try to tell you about the origins of the Macintosh, but
Bruce Horn was one of the people who made it happen.
From 1973 to 1981, Bruce was a
student in the Learning Research Group at Xerox, where
Smalltalk, an interactive, object- oriented programming
language, was developed. While there, he worked on
various projects including the NoteTaker, a portable
Smalltalk machine, and wrote the initial Dorado Smalltalk
microcode for Smalltalk-76. At the Central Institute for
Industrial Research in Oslo, Norway, in 1980, he ported
Smalltalk- 78 to an 8086 machine, the Mycron-2000.
At Apple (1981-1984), Bruce's
contributions included the design and implementation of
the Resource Manager, the Dialog Manager and the Finder
(with implementation help from Steve Capps). He was also
responsible for the type Framework for documents,
applications, and clipboard data, and a number of
system-level design decisions.
Since then, Bruce consulted on a
variety of projects in the late 1980's at Apple and
received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon
University in 1993. He continues to work as a computer
science consultant with Apple and other companies.
Where It All Began
For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate
about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most
people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs
went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This
"fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know
better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it
just isn't true - there are some similarities between the
Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems,
but the differences are substantial.
Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the
Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse
selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa
group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas
combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk
demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a
significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.
Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really.
Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group,
along with many other unique concepts: resources and
dual-fork files for storing layout and international
information apart from code; definition procedures;
drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and
creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document,
disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the
clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk
accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa
group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down
menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw,
the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable Software.
Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in
contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse.
Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had
to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs
couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson
did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of
QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly
draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows
brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a
Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing
with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for
his Gypsy editor at PARC.
As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox
system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge;
much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows.
It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the
Macintosh design (API's, sample code, etc.) during the Mac's
development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help
them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their
system designers a template from which to design Windows. In
contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own
architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people
in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these
machines was so different that we didn't leverage our
knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think.
The Hardware itself was an amazing step forward as well.
It offered an all-in-one design, four-voice Sound, small
footprint, clock, auto-eject floppies, serial ports, and so
on. The small, portable, appealing case was a serious
departure from the ugly- box-on-an-ugly-box PC world, thanks
to Jerry Manock and his crew. Even the packaging showed
amazing creativity and passion - do any of you remember
unpacking an original 128K Mac? The Mac, the unpacking
instructions, the profusely-illustrated and beautifully-
written manuals, and the animated practice program with
audio cassette were tastefully packaged in a cardboard box
with Picasso- style graphics on the side.
Looking Back
In my opinion, the software architectures developed at
Xerox for Smalltalk and the Xerox Star were significantly
more advanced than either the Mac or Windows. The Star was a
tremendous accomplishment, with features that current
systems haven't even started to implement, though I see
OpenDoc as a strong advance past the Xerox systems. I have
great respect for the amazing computer scientists at Xerox
PARC, who led the way with innovations we all take for
granted now, and from whom I learned a tremendous amount
about software design.
Apple could have developed a more complex, sophisticated
system rivaling the Xerox architectures. But the Mac had to
ship, and it had to be relatively inexpensive - we couldn't
afford the time or expense of the "best possible" design. As
a "little brother" to the Lisa, the Macintosh didn't have
multitasking or protection - we didn't have space for the
extra code or stack required. The original Macintosh had
extremely tight Memory and disk constraints; for example,
the Resource Manager took up less than 3,000 bytes of code
in the ROM, and the Finder was only 46K on disk. We made
_many_ design decisions that we regretted to some extent -
even at the time some of us felt disappointed at the
compromises we had to make - but if we had done it
differently, would we have shipped at all?
The Past and Future
In many ways, the computing world has made remarkably
small advances since 1976, and we continually reinvent the
wheel. Smalltalk had a nice bytecoded multi-platform virtual
machine long before Java. Object oriented programming is the
hot thing now, and it's almost 30 years old (see the
Simula-67 language). Environments have not progressed much
either: I feel the Smalltalk environments from the late
1970's are the most pleasant, cleanest, fastest, and
smoothest programming environments I have ever used.
Although CodeWarrior is reasonably good for C++ development,
I haven't seen anything that compares favorably to the
Smalltalk systems I used almost 20 years ago. The Smalltalk
systems of today aren't as clean, easy to use, or well-
designed as the originals, in my opinion.
We are not even _close_ to the ultimate
computing-information- communication device. We have much
more work to do on system architectures and user interfaces.
In particular, user interface design must be driven by deep
architectural issues and not just new graphical appearances;
interfaces are structure, not image. Neither Copland nor
Windows 95 (nor NT, for that matter) represent the last word
on operating systems. Unfortunately, market forces are
slowing the development of the next revolution. Still, I
think you can count on Apple being the company bringing
these improvements to next generation systems.
I'm sure some things I remember as having originated at
Apple were independently developed elsewhere. But the Mac
brought them to the world.
This is Bruce's response to the Jef's essay.
Jef Raskin's perspective on the origin of the Macintosh
was very interesting. While Raskin doesn't actually
contradict anything in my article apart from the origins of
the internationalizable Software (Joanna Hoffman in the Mac
group), I still feel that there are several corrections that
need to be made.
My intention on writing the article was not to give
individual credit to people for coming up with particular
ideas. Rather, it was to show that the Mac was a different
beast than the Xerox systems, a point that I believe I made
clearly.
Raskin does have a few errors in his history and
incorrectly quotes me as follows:
Horn is correct that
click-and-drag methods were invented at Apple and not at
PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I know). I created this
method for moving objects and making selections after
finding the Xerox click-move-click method prone to error.
Bill Atkinson extended the paradigm to pull-down menus.
This I did not say that in my article at all.
Xerox had click-and-drag in menus and for moving
graphical objects long before Apple even existed as a
company. In particular, Smalltalk-76 pop-up menus were click
and drag. In my article I was talking about dragging files
for file manipulation and drag & drop. PARC was a large
organization with many groups doing research; it is not
surprising that Raskin, as a visitor, did not see everything
being done at PARC.
Horn makes it seem that
the selection-based editor came with Tesler from PARC. It
may have been a case of convergent evolution, since we
already had that paradigm at the Mac project. In this
case it dates at least back
Again, modeless selection-based graphical editing was in
Tesler's Gypsy and Smalltalk-76, and predates Apple as a
company. It is quite unlikely that Raskin's system at
Bannister & Crun had much in common with the Smalltalk
text editor.
When Bruce Horn discusses
the Hardware, and attributes the overall concept for the
design to Jerry Mannock (who indeed did a world-class job
on the final design of the box). Horn is unaware that the
requirements for a small footprint, unique aesthetic,
built-in Sound, etc. were all part of the project specs
from the very beginning, long before Mannock joined the
team.
I didn't attibute the overall concept to Jerry Manock,
and I was indeed aware of Raskin's contribution. In my
article I wasn't interested in attributing every innovation
to an individual person. Jerry Manock and his group created
the Mac look which is what I was discussing.
Horn and many other people
who joined Apple long after the Mac and Lisa projects
were well under way never knew the genesis of many of the
ideas the
The Mac and Lisa both changed dramatically during the
time I was at Apple. Many, if not most of the innovations
that I mentioned were developed during that time.
Raskin also mentioned that the Star was "incredibly slow
and somewhat clumsy to use..." I did have an opportunity in
1986 to try a Star and agree with his observations. However,
when I said in the article that the Star was advanced I was
indeed talking about the underlying system and ideas that
went into the Star. The ideas have persisted and the
architecture, while not visible to the user, was still quite
sophisticated. I believe that to have a sophisticated and
usable interface, the system has to be well thought-out
also.
In addition to Raskin's list of articles that he has
written about user interface, readers might be interested in
looking up the Canon Cat, a computer of Raskin's design that
was developed around the same time as the Mac. While it
embodies many of Raskin's ideas, it bears almost no
resemblance to the Mac at all. The Rolling Stone article
(April 4, 1996) says that for the Mac, "Raskin was opposed
to a mouse and a graphical user interface...and favored a
squat design." It is clear that quite a bit happened after
Raskin's departure from the Mac group.
I was very careful to attribute to Xerox and Apple only
those innovations about which I felt reasonably certain I
knew the origin. Raskin certainly is to be credited with the
creation of the Macintosh concept; however, I believe that
the details of the Mac implementation were developed after
his departure. Raskin's commentary adds an interesting
perspective on a very complex and interwoven time in
computer history.
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