Correspondence

Memex in LIFE Magazine

Matthias Mueller-Prove wrote:

Hi Paul,

(…)

ACM interactions (March 96) covers the article from Vanneaver Bush: As we may think. (…) It is illustrated with a view of the Memex desk. (…) Do you know something about the origin of this images? What about the image in your Memex book (page 109)? Is it done by Bush himself or by the LIFE magazine?

(…)

all the best,
Matthias

From: Paul Kahn

Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1999 23:03:06 -0500
To: Matthias Mueller-Prove
Subject: Re: Memex

Matthias,

I wrote a long chapter in a book on Bush and Memex about this. See if you can find the book:

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/...

The image comes from LIFE magazine. It was not created by Bush. It was created by an illustrator based on his interpretation of the essay.

Paul

From: Janet H Walker

To: Matthias Mueller-Prove
Subject: Re: Concordia
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999

(…)

There was a paper however that expanded on some of the user comments about it from interviews with the writers. This was in an AERA conference proceedings (that an education research organization) from about the same time frame, maybe 1988 or 1989.

I am very pleased to hear that you have been looking at the Concordia interface. It was truly exceptional. One wishes it were possible to build something similar for wider use but the training issues are formidable because it requires taking on an engineering mindset, which is quite foreign to the standard technical writing culture. At least as it existed through the early 90's.

Best wishes,
Jan Walker

To: Robert Cailliau

Date: 11 July 2000
From: Matthias Mueller-Prove
Subject: Robert @ BBC
Cc: Charles McCathieNevile

(…)

A propos WWW9 - I was surprised that the UI perspective was nearly absent from the conference. The Web - especially if it comes to Web based Applications - lacks in my opinion of UI standards as they have been established for desktop UI for many decades. Just one example. If you click a button (Mouse Down) and became aware that you have changed your mind then a) move the mouse out of the button and release the mouse (deskop UI) or b) get a contextual popup wether you want to save the image of the button among a lot of other options that are not very helpful in this context (yes, this was the browser interface, you got it right!)

On the other hand there is a lot for me to write down into my thesis.

take care,
Matthias

From: Robert Cailliau

Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000
To: Matthias Mueller-Prove <mprove@acm.org>
Subject: Re: Robert @ BBC

(…)

I could not agree more! Maybe you should submit a paper on the subject!

Have fun,
Robert.

From: Austin Henderson

Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 20:43:09 -0800
To: Horst Oberquelle
Subject: Re: PARC activities

Horst:

How nice to hear from you.

I was at PARC November 1978 through November 1994.

I do have some PARC documents in a box under the house (but they are not really old - that is, in the earliest PARC years starting in 1970). Probably the mice have eaten them.

I also have some older MIT/Lincoln Lab/TX-2 documents from the mid 1960's.

Is Mattias looking for something particular?

All the best,

Austin
--
o=======================================o
| Austin Henderson
| Rivendel Consulting & Design, Inc.
o=======================================o

From: Austin Henderson

Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001
To: Matthias Mueller-Prove <mprove@acm.org>
Subject: Re: FYI: PARC activities
Cc: Austin Henderson

Mattias:

I DO remember. Nice to hear from you again.

What particularly are you looking for?

Austin

To: Austin Henderson
At 28.01.2001, Matthias Mueller-Prove wrote:

From: Matthias Mueller-Prove
Subject: Re: FYI: PARC activities

Hello Austin,

(…)

I wasn’t aware that you know Horst Oberquelle. It was his idea to ask you about your work at Xerox Parc. My thesis is entitled “Vision and Reality of Hypertext and the Graphical User Interface”. Right now I am working on the history of the GUIs. Sketchpad > Flex Machine > Dynabook > SmallTalk > Xerox Star. To come Apple Lisa and the Mac. It is a huge puzzle.
The principle of consistency in user interface design happened as a side effect of SmallTalk. Object oriented programming leads to an interface in which all applications share the same implementation of the window class for example. You get consistency for free. But someone must have discovered this value as important for user experience.
Instead of SmallTalk Mesa was used for Xerox Star. Ease-of-use must have become an intended value for the Star. Do you know (or remember) about the origins of the Star? It seems to be the SDD (Systems Development Division) at Parc being responsible for the development of the Star interface. A source mentions this division is located in Dallas??
There is a German Ph.D. that has a very good references section. I know Michael Friedewald by mail and he sent me the list as a TeX file. (Now online at www.mprove.de/visionreality/fried99refs.html) Although I haven’t read all the highlighted articles I will try to do so.

I am digging for the original ideas and concepts. Especially those that are forgotten nowadays. It was breathtaking to see Sketchpad on a video recording. It was exciting to see a SmallTalk document with graphics and text - both editable right in place. Apple has tried to do the same years later with OpenDoc - without success.
Even to sit in front of a microfilm projector to read Alan Kay’s Ph.D. and to take notes on my Powerbook -- a compelling bridge over 30 years of time.

Another train of thought. Bravo should have been inspired by [NLS/Augment]. And Laura is an early e-mail program. But I cannot find any hints that the idea of Hypertext has played any role at Parc. Am I right? But this will be the second part of my research. Memex > Xanadu > NLS > Concorida > Storyspace > World Wide Web.

My original idea is to bring this 2 worlds together. How would the graphical desktop interface look like if it had been designed with Hypertext/WWW in mind. How can it be fixed today? The Web should not only be an tool in the desktop metaphor. It needs to be integrated into the environment. Many usability issues would not exist any longer. Undo vs. History for example. It should be the same mechanism.

If this rings some bells in your mind I would appreciate it very much if you’d share your thoughts on this.

kind regards,
Matthias

From: Jeff Johnson

Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001
To: Matthias Mueller-Prove

[…]

At 17:17 Uhr +0200 04.04.2001, Matthias Mueller-Prove wrote:

I am not quite sure to what respect the Star is a product of PARC. It builds on top of the research results. Windows from Smalltalk, Icons from Pygmalion. WYSIWYG is a technology developed with the advent of the Alto. But all those influences for Star necessarily lack the characteristic feature of consistency. Is there any origin for this idea? Customer research conducted by SDD? Genious visions of David Canfield? There is a kind of gap in the documented history. If you could provide me with some details...

The short answer to your question is: Star's consistency arose out of a combination of: Dave C. Smith's desire for simplicity, the use of object/actions analysis to develop the conceptual model, and the use of a small set of generic commands for all objects.

However, another German graduate student asked me (and other ex-Xerox employees) very similar questions in 1999, and then wrote a book summarizing and building upon what we told him. So I refer you to his book, which I believe includes a very throrough answer to your questions. I'm away from my office at the CHI 2001 conference right now, and can't remember the title of his book, but I can give you his contact information: Michael Friedewald. [...]

Alles Gute,
Jeff Johnson, Ph.D.
UI Wizards, Inc.
Product Usability Consulting

From: David Curbow
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002

To: Matthias Müller-Prove
Subject: Re: History of GUIs

I wanted to correct one slight-misstatement in your paper:

A Xerox Star document can contain all datatypes collectively. Especially text and image can be freely arranged and edited in place. Unfortunately this advantage for the user causes a closed software architecture. It is a problem for third parties to develop programs that interact seamlessly with the existing programs and documents.

(I worked at Xerox on Star/Viewpoint from early '83 to '89.)
This was true of the first version of Star, but this problem was recognized very early, perhaps even before the first shipment of Star. A new project, known internally as Phoenix (although spelled "fnx") was designed to solve this problem. It drew from the Mesa Development Environment (known informally as Tajo) which originated on the Alto (I think first release was in 1977). The result was an open toolkit known as BasicWorkstation (desktop) and a compound document editor which had a "generic frame" mechanism. The Viewpoint Document Editor (as it was known) continued to use much of the Star code (including Traits), but reworked.

It was "closed" in that Mesa wasn't widely used in industry, although we gave several universities grants of hardware and software, the Xerox Development Environment (public brand of Tajo). Mesa was very similiar to Modula-3, and like any system with a large number of libraries (e.g. Smalltalk-80) it took months of learning before a programmer could be productive.

Interesting note about the wastebasket. When Macintosh came out Xerox bought a couple. I remember people being annoyed about this. I was told that an early design of Star included a trashcan, but it was decided that it was unnecessary in the version that was shipped. In Viewpoint (1985) we added a trashcan, but felt that we should use a "wastebasket" icon.

The document centric model (not knowing about applications, no quit) came from Star. In Viewpoint you had control over apps launching, but once launched they didn't quit. Most apps were launched at boot time -- hence the 3+ minute boot! As a result of this painfully long boot, a colleague (Makota Mita) invented a sleep/quick restart feature that took about 30 seconds to put the sytem to sleep and awake again after poweroff.

Star had "stationary" as well, although it didn't have the double-click-to-tear-off UI. Instead, users would open the Prototypes container (see icon in lower right of this image)

This prototypes container (labeled OSBU here because the photo was taken of someone's workstation who worked in the OSBU network) had one copy of every object available to the user -- blank compound docs, compound doc with lots of graphics examples, folders, networks (where you found printers, file servers, mail servers, address book/directory server), small database (aka record file), etc.

Note: I'm not saying that Xerox invented everything. I think Lisa and Mac introduced several ideas (e.g. the suspend/resume for each file in Lisa is a GREAT idea) that we didn't do, but there are more similarities than people sometimes think.

Dave

From: Matthias Müller-Prove <mprove@acm.org>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002

To: David Curbow
Subject: Re: History of GUIs

Hi David,

thank you very much for your insights. They are very much welcome as I am thinking about a 2nd extended edition of my thesis.

I also found your page at www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Office/7101/ very interesting. It containes material about Star that is pretty new to me. Thanks for that too. (The only drawback is the bad availiablitiy of geocities)

Your mail also helped me to finally understand the "prototypes container". It was a total myth to me.

cheers,
Matthias

From: David Curbow
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2002

To: Matthias Müller-Prove
Subject: More on GUI History

A couple of weeks ago there was some discussion of the history of GUIs on this list.
I don't want to start a long thread, but thought I'd pass along a couple of links some
ex-Xerox colleagues have traded recently on this subject.

• History of Human Computer Interaction
• History of HCI overhead

I don't think they give Lisa enough credit in these slides, but otherwise sound right.

• Personal Recollections of the Apple MacIntosh Design
• An Unofficial History of Advances in Computer Interfaces

I found one bug in this one.

Dave

From: Ivan Sutherland
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 22:53:56 +0100
Subject: Re: SEED + photo confirmation
To: Matthias Mueller-Prove

Clearly not me.

Ivan Sutherland

On Dec 8, 2006, at 9:15 AM, Matthias Mueller-Prove wrote:

Hi Ivan,

thank you very much - once more - for sharing your insights on leadership at the SEED summit in October. And for our brief chat on OpenOffice' strategy the following day.

Today I have a question, which is probably pretty easy for you to answer: Is it you or is it Timothy Johnson on the photo on the Sketchpad console at 3.1.2 Sketchpad?

sincerely
Matthias