forward thinking about the UI

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:46 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And Windows 95 is a Bizarro-ray clone of NeXTstep. (Which also became,
>> of course, that well-known Unix interface Mac OS X.)
>>
>
> I see little resembling NeXTstep in Win95.  What are you smoking and
> did you bring enough to share?  LOL

There are certainly /some/ resemblances - enough to say with
confidence that NeXTstep was one of the major influences on the Win95
Explorer GUI. (Which was one of the last genuinely innovative things
MS did with desktop OSs, but that is another argument.) Win95 aped
NeXT's "3D" appearance, especially the close/minimise/maximise
widgets, the look of scrollbars and buttons and so on, and the Dock
was probably a big part of the inspiration behind the Taskbar. Acorn's
RISC OS iconbar is closer in structure & function but MS techies are
more likely to have seen NeXTstep than RISC OS.

> And, you were partially correct about NeXTstep and Mac OS X.  NeXTstep
> was going to be to the next major Apple operating system, the idea was
> dropped though,

No, it wasn't. Mac OS X *is* NeXTstep, with a cosmetic revamp to give
it a modern liquid theme and a rather more Mac-like look & feel.

> The same goes for BeOS, which was another OS
> that Apple considered but ultimately decided against.  Some ideas from
> BeOS made it into Mac OS X also.

Such as? Apple did not buy Be and thus had no rights to any of its
ideas. As a BeOS and Mac OS X user, I am not aware of any particular
influence of BeOS on Mac OS X.

-- 
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