
Busy Being Born - Someone
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.txt
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MCRed
I mention this because I keep running into people who have never heard it, but
the "infamous" Apple visit to Xerox resulted in a licensing agreement where
Xerox was paid in pre-IPO stock for a license to use the elements that they
had developed. (Xerox had not developed a "GUI" but had certain elements. AS
this article documents, there were 6 years of work that led to the first GUI
in the Lisa, though of course some of the innovations were licensed from Xerox
most of it was not.)

By the way- When Apple did go public, it was a massive event, and big news. It
was the biggest, most successful IPO of all time. It was bigger, for its day,
than Google's or Facebooks were. (Though of course coming much later those
were bigger in absolute terms.)

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jakobegger
I find the evolution of the menu bar fascinating. It's really interesting that
the menu bar kind of started as command buttons attached to the windows.

It's interesting that over the last 30 years the Mac has been evolving back to
the old version. Almost all apps now have toolbars that replace the functions
of the menu bar. People have stopped using the top menu bar. As a software
developer, I regularly get feature requests for functions that already exist,
because there is no toolbar button to activate them, and people don't look at
the menus anymore.

The latest beta version of OS X, El Capitan, even has a setting to hide the
menu bar.

I've always thought that the menu bar at the top of the screen was so
fundamental to the Mac experience, but it seems we've gone full circle, back
to the original idea of command buttons attached to each window...

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mikeash
I wonder if some of the change is simply due to increasing screen sizes and
resolutions

The original Mac had a 9" screen. The menu bar was 20 pixels tall, about 6% of
the total screen height, and about a quarter of an inch tall. It was
necessarily close and obviously related to anything on screen.

I'm writing this on a 30" screen with a resolution of 2560x1600, and the menu
bar is _still_ 20 pixels tall. The menu bar is far away from whatever my
attention is on at any given moment, and it physically takes more time to get
the mouse cursor there if I'm going to actually use it.

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teddyh
NeXT fixed this problem by adding an extra mouse button (NeXT machines
therefore had _two_ mouse buttons instead of one like Macs) and moving the
menu to that button. Voila – the menu is instantly available at all times.
Note that the right mouse button was _not_ used for anything else, it was
exclusively reserved for showing the menu of the active program.

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melling
Bill still does a little programming. He's got an app in the App Store:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photocard-lite-by-bill-
atkin...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photocard-lite-by-bill-
atkinson/id356124208?mt=8)

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mavhc
Pity they dropped the proportional scroll bar, then everyone else copied them.
Not sure how they reasoned it would confuse people.

~~~
Someone
I would guess the confusion comes from this: the larger your document, the
smaller the drag part.

