forward thinking about the UI

[Michael Haney]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 5:57 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Can't argue with that.  The Windows UI hasn't change all that much
from the days of Win95 except for Windows 7 which seems to borrow a
lot from Mac OS X's Dock.

>> 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.
>

I was aware that Mac OS X was BSD.

>> 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.
>

I should have said some Mac OS X technologies were "inspired" by BeOS.
 There was a book that detailed a lot of this but I can't remember the
title.  It gave the history the Macintosh computers from their first
incarnation to the first Intel-based Mac OS X systems.  Its where I
learned Steve Jobs had a hand in developing NeXTstep before returning
to Apple.  BeOS was considered before NeXTstep was if I remember
correctly.

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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