That Xerox PARC GUI

Factual Questions
1

I know you folks have read innumerable threads that either started out as or degenerated into a Mac-vs-PC debate, and in which first the Macintosh partisans state that Microsoft stole the GUI that was invented by Apple, followed by the counterargument from the PC partisans (the ones who aren’t dissing all GUI’s at least) that Apple had already stolen it from Xerox, which first deployed that kind of GUI on a box that I think was called the PARC at their Palo Alto research division, but never marketed to the general public.

Questions, for those of you who have seen (or even used, now that would be cool) the Xerox and its GUI–

a) What was the Xerox interface like? Is it fair to say that the Mac, Amiga, Windows 3.x, Unix-X, NeXT, Windows 95/98/etc, Mac X, Linux Gnome, Linux KDE, and other GUIs are all descendants of the Xerox concept of GUI?

b) Especially for those of you familiar with the Amiga Workbench GUI: The Amiga GUI interface just feels different from Mac and Windows. Maybe it is the mouse-arrow, which except for color inversion is an exact replica, angle and size wise, between those other two; maybe it is the icons and the way windows behave. So is the Amiga any less like the Xerox GUI than the Mac GUI and the Windows GUI? Or, to put a different spin on it, consider the GUI interfaces of the Xerox machine, the Macintosh, the Amiga, and the Windows PC: which of these GUIs have the most in common, and which are the most esoteric / different from the others, and how?

c) Especially for those of you with familiarity with NeXT and/or X-Windows interfaces who also know the Mac and Windows: I gather that the “close” buttons for windows–the most un-Maclike doodads in the Win95+ interface–bear a strong resemblance to the GUI traditions of X-windows and/or NeXT. OK, which features of the Windows GUI would you consider most unique? Give Microsoft credit for things they did first, e.g., copycat GUI elements in the Mac OS X Aqua interface should not detract from the singularity of a new element or behavior originally proposed in a MS GUI. I am particularly interested in the right-click-on-an-icon behavior and wondering if this originated with Windows.

d) For dedicated DOS-heads and other CLI/textUI advocates: feel free to rip apart claims to originality usually advanced on behalf of a GUI. I myself have seen DOS apps that had menus that dropped down, including hierarchical menus, even if they were limited to text for their appearance. I distantly recall seeing a PC with a mouse that worked under Excel for DOS that would let you drag to select. What else?

2

I have seen old footage of the Xerox GUI. First off PARC is not a machine, it’s the recearch center (Palo Alto Research Center). PARC showed Steve Jobs a demo of this technology and he took it back to Apple, there was no stealing. In fact the same day, Steve was also shown laser printing and Object Oriented Programming but Steve was only intrested in the GUI. Xerox invented all of these technologies. Xerox gets credit for the point and click interface, pulldown menus, and general what you see is what you get. As far as how X windows, Mac OS and MS Windows differ, they all make inovations and the other two copy them.

3

I could be wrong, but I remember hearing that X-Windows (the kind that works with Unix) was mostly based on the GUI that came out of PARC; this was according to one of my programming instructors, although it might have been he meant that X was derivative similar to the old Mac OS as well.

I know this isn’t entirely related to the questions you’ve asked, but for some info on the PARC - Apple connection, visit http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/index.html and look at set 6 and set 12.
Xerox got some Apple stock in exchange for the knowledge. MS was not as kind to Apple when they first copied the interface.