50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum
A profile of the Xerox Alto and the people behind it.
Link tags: xerox
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This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 | continent.
From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:
The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.
At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer — Carl Tashian
A look at the ubiquitous computing work that Bret Victor has been doing over the past few years at Dynamicland.
A bit of a tangent, but I love this description of reading maps:
Map reading is a complex and uniquely human skill, not at all obvious to a young child. You float out of your body and into the sky, leaving behind the point of view you’ve been accustomed to all your life. Your imagination turns squiggly blue lines and green shading into creeks, mountains, and forests seen from above. Bringing it all together in your mind’s eye, you can picture the surroundings.
An oral history of the hamburger icon (from the people who were there)
From the days of Xerox PARC:
In your garage organization, there’s always a bucket for miscellaneous. You’ve got nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and then, stuff, miscellaneous stuff. That’s kind of what the hamburger menu button was.
Same as it ever was.
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages (PDF)
Alan Kay’s initial description of a “Dynabook” written at Xerox PARC in 1972.