Real Kato Blog: Apple Watch: 30th Birthday

Apple turns 30 years old on April 1st.

I found an interesting article on news.com today. It's a set of photographs by Andy Hertzfeld, an Apple engineer who was largely responsible for the birth of the graphical interface on the Lisa, and subsequently the Macintosh.

If you were a computer user in the 1980s, you might remember screens with fixed 40x25 or 80x24 character displays, each character being a fixed-width 8x8 pixel representation. There were various oddities to this representation: for example, descenders (like the bottom of a 'g' or a 'y') didn't go far enough below the line. "M"s and "W"s were squished.

The only on-screen menus you ever saw were things like "Press F2 to save, F3 to exit". The cursor was a square block that highlighted one of the characters on the screen. There was no on-screen boldface or italics. There was no mouse. You couldn't have multiple windows showing. In most applications, you couldn't scroll text backwards. If you could find a copy-and-paste command, it was cryptic and limited. You couldn't display graphics and text at the same time. And when it came to printing, you were happy if you get the pages to break at the right places on your continuous-feed paper.

The interesting thing about that series of photographs is that they show clearly just how much of the stuff we take for granted today was invented by Apple in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I know, everyone thinks Apple stole the idea for the GUI from Xerox PARC. (A silly myth.) But look at the photos. Although Apple and Xerox both employed bitmapped graphical interfaces, Apple developed such things as scrollbars, tool palettes, pop-up menus, movable and resizable windows, a copy-and-paste system that worked with both text and graphics... Apple's work was nothing short of revolutionary.

And by the way, don't forget the LaserWriter, the product that made desktop publishing possible.

If you're still in the camp that believes in command-line interfaces, because you're so proficient at Unix or DOS and you're so much faster with typed commands than you are with a graphical display... I challenge you to bring up an unfamiliar command-line system and find your way around. Try logging into a Cisco router without a manual, or a Nortel DMS-100, or an AT&T 5ESS. (The telecom industry is still primarily mired in command-line interfaces... it's where the rest of the computing world would have been if not for Apple.)

And then try drawing a picture with set of typed commands.

The computing world owes an enormous debt to Apple. But that's still not why I buy their products. I buy their products because they simply work better.

There's speculation about new product announcements this weekend (or Monday, perhaps) to coincide with Apple's birthday. The rundown:

Intel iBook: 75% probability.
12" and 17" Intel MacBooks: 60% probability.
Video iPod: 40% probability.
iPhone: 30% probability.
Tablet computer: 10% probability.
"iGame" handheld gaming device: 5% probability.

What's next for Apple? I'm beginning to think there's a radical announcement in the works. Would Apple perhaps license DirectX/Direct3D from Microsoft, to make it easier to port PC games to the Mac? Or might they create their own cross-platform game development framework?

My thinking is this: Apple does not want to run ALL Windows applications on the Macintosh; that would kill most of the incentive for a developer to make Mac-specific applications. We would end up with a hodgepodge of ugly and poorly integrated applications, providing a bad user experience on the Mac as compared to Windows. But games are different. They're self-contained entities with their own control interfaces; they don't need to be consistent with other applications in appearance or execution. And Windows PCs currently have a clear advantage over Macs when it comes to gaming. So I think Apple would have nothing to lose by sharing a gaming framework with Microsoft.

One final thought about Apple: at some point, Steve Jobs will retire. I wonder, who else has Jobs' vision? Who else has the ability to invent entirely new industries and keep a company single-mindedly focused on innovation and design? Who else is so passionate about making great products that they'd sacrifice market share and shareholder value to do it... and then get away with it?

Hey, Apple, if no one else wants the job, I'll give it a shot. I might not know much about CEO'ing, but I do at least know what keeps Apple's heart pumping. If you find a guy who says he wants to turn Apple into the next Microsoft or the next Dell, I suggest you politely turn him away and keep looking. But if you find a guy who appreciates the innovation that went into the Lisa and the Macintosh and the iPod, and who is looking for a similar way to turn the world on its head... that might be the guy you want to hire.

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