Jack Goldman died this month. Mac? Windows? X11? You may think of visionaries who shaped technology as you know it. You might imagine that they were the original thinkers or visionary businessmen. You're wrong. The guy who laid the foundations started out trying to invent the electric car at Ford, before being hired to Xerox creating the legendary PARC labs that invented computing as we know it; he lived to see his prediction that "...any electric car produced in our lifetime will have to be a hybrid" come true.
posted by rodgerd on Dec 24, 2011 - 17 comments

"The Office of the Future" 40 Years Later - 40 years of Xerox Parc, the Palo Alto research group responsible for the desktop computer interface as we know it today.
posted by Artw on Sep 20, 2010 - 24 comments

Since SRI and Xerox invented the GUI and the mouse in the late 1970s, technology has leaped forward, but the way we interact with our computers has stood still. "10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way."
posted by Plutor on Oct 13, 2009 - 66 comments

guidebook is chock full of interesting historical GUI miscellanea, including a chart depicting the evolution of component icons in various operating systems from 1984 to the present, a 39-page 1984 Apple ad, and a 1981 article on the Xerox Alto Computer. (via Buzz).
posted by madamjujujive on Mar 27, 2004 - 3 comments