Smooth Operators

Posted at: Tuesday 13th July 2004 by Ben Hardwidge

In the early 1970s a group of scruffy computer bums sank into their beanbags at Xerox PARC and devised an OS with bit-mapped graphics, scrollbars and pop-up menus. Sound familiar? Ben Hardwidge finds out where Windows first started

This is, to a certain extent, understandable. Computer programs had been very basic up until that point, and it would be unfair to let people patent what were essentially logical laws. But now, of course, everyone has wised up to the fact that computer programs have a lot more in the way of individual design, as well as mathematical code, and you're allowed to patent them. In fact, Robson even suggested that 'too much software is patented these days'. So although the law progressed, it was too late for PARC to license any of the ideas it implemented in Smalltalk.

How would things be different without PARC?
But that's not to say PARC's work has been forgotten. In fact, if it wasn't for PARC, computers today could well be completely different, although it's difficult to say exactly how. PARC came up with a template for a user-friendly operating system, but whether this is actually the best way for people to interface with a computer is debatable - and who knows what firms such as Apple and Microsoft would have come up with if they hadn't seen Smalltalk.

Is a system with a mouse, cursor and windows the natural way? Dave Robson thinks it might be. He explained that 'there are a lot of smart people who have worked on how interfaces would look if they didn't look like the common GUI, but they still always look a lot like windows on the screen. There are those who say, "This is a user interface built around the Web instead of around a PC", but there are still some forms of windows used to navigate between different things'.

He went on to admit that 'there's no question that the windows-based GUI would have been discovered by somebody in the end, but it would have been many years before it was developed if it hadn't been for the work at PARC. Without our work, it could have been another ten years before we saw an operating system like Smalltalk, or at the very least, it would have been delayed by around four or five years'.

But even then, while we might have a windows-based system, would we still have the same menus, scrollbars and hourglasses that we know today without Smalltalk? We'll never know, but Robson reckons that operating systems would actually look 'very different' if Smalltalk hadn't been created. He also pointed out that while computers would still have 'advanced user interfaces that look different from those in the 1960s, they certainly wouldn't look as they do today. The reason I say that is because there were definite points where things could have gone in several different directions in terms of looks. Of course, they went in the particular direction they did because that's what our earliest work looked like, so everything was built on that. But there were several branches of evolution in the early stages that could have changed user interfaces forever, so if it hadn't been for PARC I think something else would have happened'.

Three decades later
PARC may have failed to cash in on one of the most important discoveries in IT, but the company's employees are still proud to have influenced, in such a fundamental way, how we use computers. Many of PARC's programmers also went on to work for both Microsoft and Apple. One exception is, of course, Dave Robson, who still works at Xerox, but even he feels a 'personal sense of satisfaction to have worked on something that touches many people's lives'.