The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 96

THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE

Steve Jobs and his team at Apple bought a new IBM PC as soon as it came out. They wanted to check out what the competition looked like. The consensus was, to use Jobs’s phrase, “It sucked.” This was not simply a reflection of Jobs’s instinctive arrogance, although it was partly that. It was a reaction to the fact that the machine, with its surly c:\> prompts and boxy design, was boring. It didn’t occur to Jobs that corporate technology managers might not be yearning for excitement at the office and knew they couldn’t get in trouble for choosing a boring brand like IBM over a plucky one like Apple. Bill Gates happened to be at Apple headquarters for a meeting on the day that the IBM PC was announced. “They didn’t seem to care,” he said. “It took them a year to realize what had happened.”107

Jobs was aroused by competition, especially when he thought it sucked. He saw himself as an enlightened Zen warrior, fighting the forces of ugliness and evil. He had Apple take out an ad in the Wall Street Journal, which he helped to write. The headline: “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.”

One reason Jobs was dismissive was that he had already seen the future and was embarked on inventing it. On visits to Xerox PARC, he was shown many of the ideas that Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, and their colleagues had developed, most notably the graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced GOO-ee), which featured a desktop metaphor with windows, icons, and a mouse that served as a pointer. The creativity of the Xerox PARC team combined with the design and marketing genius of Jobs would make the GUI the next great leap in facilitating the human-machine interaction that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had envisioned.

Jobs’s two main visits with his team to Xerox PARC were in December 1979. Jef Raskin, an Apple engineer who was designing a friendly computer that would eventually become the Macintosh, had already seen what Xerox was doing and wanted to convince Jobs to look into it. One problem was that Jobs found Raskin insufferable—the technical terminology he used for Raskin was “a shithead who sucks”—but eventually Jobs made the pilgrimage. He had worked out a deal with Xerox that allowed the Apple folks to study the technology in return for allowing Xerox to make a million-dollar investment in Apple.

Jobs was certainly not the first outsider to see what Xerox PARC had wrought. Its researchers had given hundreds of demonstrations to visitors, and they had already distributed more than a thousand Xerox Altos, the expensive computer developed by Lampson, Thacker, and Kay that used a graphical user interface and other PARC innovations. But Jobs was the first to become obsessed with the idea of incorporating PARC’s interface ideas into a simple, inexpensive, personal computer. Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.

On Jobs’s first visit, the Xerox PARC engineers, led by Adele Goldberg, who worked with Alan Kay, were reserved. They did not show Jobs much. But he threw a tantrum—“Let’s stop this bullshit!” he kept shouting—and finally was given, at the behest of Xerox’s top management, a fuller show. Jobs bounced around the room as his engineers studied each pixel on the screen. “You’re sitting on a goldmine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”

There were three major innovations on display. The first was Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe for creating local area networks. Like Gates and other pioneers of personal computers, Jobs was not very interested—certainly not as interested as he should have been—in networking technology. He was focused on the ability of computers to empower individuals rather than to facilitate collaboration. The second innovation was object-oriented programming. That, likewise, did not grab Jobs, who was not a programmer.

What caught his attention was the graphical user interface featuring a desktop metaphor that was as intuitive and friendly as a neighborhood playground. It had cute icons for documents and folders and other things you might want, including a trash can, and a mouse-controlled cursor that made them easy to click. Not only did Jobs love it, but he could see ways to improve it, make it simpler and more elegant.

The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC. Until then, most computers, including the Apple II, would merely generate numerals or letters on the screen, usually in a ghastly green against a black background. Bitmapping allowed each and every pixel on the screen to be controlled by the computer—turned off or on and in any color. That permitted all sorts of wonderful displays, fonts, designs, and graphics. With his feel for design, familiarity with fonts, and love of calligraphy, Jobs was blown away by bitmapping. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” he recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

As Jobs drove back to Apple’s office in Cupertino, at a speed that would have awed even Gates, he told his colleague Bill Atkinson that they had to incorporate—and improve upon—Xerox’s graphical interface in future Apple computers, such as the forthcoming Lisa and Macintosh. “This is it!” he shouted. “We’ve got to do it!” It was a way to bring computers to the people.108

Later, when he was challenged about pilfering Xerox’s ideas, Jobs quoted Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He added, “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” He also crowed that Xerox had fumbled its idea. “They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management. “They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.”109

In fact, neither explanation does Jobs and Apple justice. As the case of the forgotten Iowa inventor John Atanasoff shows, conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution. Jobs and his team took Xerox’s ideas, improved them, implemented them, and marketed them. Xerox had the chance to do that, and they in fact tried to, with a machine called the Xerox Star. It was clunky and kludgy and costly, and it flopped. The Apple team simplified the mouse so it had only one button, gave it the power to move documents and other items around the screen, allowed file extensions to be changed just by dragging a document and “dropping” it into a folder, created pull-down menus, and allowed the illusion of documents piling on top of each other and overlapping.

Apple launched Lisa in January 1983 and then, more successfully, Macintosh a year later. Jobs knew when he unveiled the Mac that it would propel the personal computer revolution by being a machine that was friendly enough to take home. At the dramatic product launch, he walked across a dark stage to pull the new computer out of a cloth bag. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play, and the word MACINTOSH scrolled horizontally across the screen, then underneath it the words insanely great! appeared in elegant script, as if being slowly written by hand. There was a moment of awed silence in the auditorium, then a few gasps. Most had never seen, or even imagined, something so spectacular. The screen then flicked through displays of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, a chess game, spreadsheet, and a rendering of Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh by his head. The ovation lasted for five minutes.110

The Macintosh launch was accompanied by a memorable ad, “1984,” that showed a young heroine outracing the authoritarian police to throw a hammer into a screen, destroying Big Brother. It was Jobs the rebel taking on IBM. And Apple now had an advantage: it had perfected and implemented a graphical user interface, the great new leap in human-machine interaction, while IBM and its operating system supplier Microsoft were still using curt command lines with c:\> prompts.