Oleg Zabluda's blog
Friday, October 14, 2011
 
Some people think that Apple/Jobs changed the way people communicate now. This calls for some history
Some people think that Apple/Jobs changed the way people communicate now. This calls for some history

Xerox Alto personal computer was conceptualized in 1972 and built in 1973. It came standard with a Ethernet and three(!)-button mouse-driven GUI. 2000 were built and used internally sold and donated to universities, including MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc. They were inspiration for Apple, Sun and Apollo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

By 1981 Apple was seriously flailing. 8-bit MOS 6502 based Apple II (built 1977) was way obsolete, Apple III were melting due to Jobs' insistence that There Be No Fan Or Air Vents. In 1979, Jobs saw Xerox Alto for the first time, went all ga-ga, ran back to Apple and told engineers to build a computer with GUI just like that, although he had no clue how. He called the project Lisa. That was failing (and eventually did fail, as well as a follow-up Lisa 2), and Jobs was kicked from that project in 1982.

By that time, Macintosh project, founded and leaded by Jef Raskin was under way (since 1979) with hardware design completed. Jobs kicked Jef from Apple over Jef's critique of Jobs' management and took over the project. Macintosh was released in 1984, 11 years after Alto. Macintosh initially was failing in the marketplace, Jobs was slow with fixing the problems, so he was removed from the project and 1 year later kicked out of the Apple, which was almost bankrupt. Unlike Alto, originally Macintosh-128K didn't have Ethernet, because Jobs was afraid of computer networking.

http://www.quora.com/Macintosh-128K/Why-didnt-the-original-Macintosh-128K-have-Ethernet

Later Apple did introduce proprietary networking called AppleTalk, now defunct, which was useless for inter-people communication.

Then, even without Jobs, the freak show continued. In 1988 Apple sued Microsoft for stealing GUI. Xerox sued Apple for same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation

Apple started shipping Macintosh with Ethernet cards installed in 1991 (20 years after Alto), with support for TCP/IP, presumably, at approximately the same time. For comparison, ARPANET was deployed in 1969, TCP/IP in 1972-1974, internet in 1982. Tim Berners-Lee already wrote the first graphic web browser in 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

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