“While some people were disappointed that Apple did not introduce the iPhone 5, most pretty much missed the significance of the event and the fact that they were witnessing history,” Tim Bajarin writes for Tech.pinions.
“In 1984, when Steve Jobs introduced the Mac, he did something quite historic. He introduced the Mac’s graphical user interface. But he actually topped himself with the introduction of another technology-the mouse,” Bajarin writes. “In essence, he introduced the next user input device that has been at the heart of personal computing for nearly two decades.”
“What’s interesting about this is that he did not invent the GUI. That came from Xerox Parc. And he did not invent the mouse. Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse,” Bajarin writes. “But by marrying them to his OS he reinvented the GUI and OS and gave us a completely new way to deliver the man-machine interface through the mouse. Until that time all computer input was done by textual typing.”
“Then, in 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone, Jobs and team did it again,” Bajarin writes. “He created the touch user interface and this time married it to his iOS. He did not invent touch computing… But he integrated it within iOS and gave the world a completely new way to interact with small, handheld computers… [Apple] have even extended it to their core Mac portable computing platform as well. In essence, Jobs second UI act was to bring touch UI’s to mainstream computing.”
Bajarin writes, “Now, with the introduction of SIRI, integrated into iOS and a core part of the new iPhone OS, he and the Apple team have given to the world what we will look back on and realize is the next major user input technology-Voice and Speech.”
Read more in the full article here.
Scotty picks up the mouse, turns it over, and speaks into its underbelly, “Computer!” Gene was an extraordinary visionary as well.
One of my all-time favorite Star Trek scenes. Does life imitate art or does art imitate life?
Add Siri to the Mac – put the microphone in the mouse – mission complete.
“A keyboard… how quaint!”
The consumerization of AI and Semantic technologies.
A lot of pundits are confusing conversational voice control integrated into the OS with the simple voice command options available in current platforms. Siri is MUCH bigger!
And wait till Apple exposes an SDK for Siri. Imagine all the apps registering custom vocabularies/ontologies and enabling a real-world Man Friday.
Well stated and spot on.
Years later, all devices will understand human language. History will register that the first device that could do this by default was Apple’s iPhone 4S, and yes, this is one of Jobs’ innovations (maybe not even the last one, depending on what will be released in the nearest years).
Somewhere Bill Gates is grumbling.
And his iPhone dutifully sends off a memo to the board saying, as it’s sure it has heard correctly, “OK, let’s fire that Bozo already.”
Or not. He may be too busy trying to buy his way into heaven, like many robber barons before him.
“What’s interesting about this is that he did not invent the GUI. That came from Xerox Parc. And he did not invent the mouse. Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse,” Bajarin writes. “But by marrying them to his OS he reinvented the GUI and OS and gave us a completely new way to deliver the man-machine interface through the mouse. Until that time all computer input was done by textual typing.”
This can’t be right…the Xerox Star used a mouse before the Lisa/Mac.
Umm… No one said otherwise.
In fact, you even quoted this statement from the article:
“And he did not invent the mouse.”
Did you not even pay attention to the words you quoted?
Douglas Engelbart worked at PARC in the 70s and coincidently worked at SRI, who originally developed the tech that is now known as Siri.
Yes, the Star was first. But how many Stars have you ever seen, outside of a museum? (Me? One, in my department at University, in ’81 or ’82.)
“This can’t be right…the Xerox Star used a mouse before the Lisa/Mac.”
Yeah, “used” to “some degree”. Like it had something of a GUI. In both cases, I don’t think that was necessarily the primary mode of interacting with the computer. The GUI worked in some applications, and the “windows” were little more than contextual menus. The mouse could click on the options available. Again, the mouse was not the primary means of interacting with the computer’s OS.
So the article is accurate: Jobs saw the potential of both the GUI and the mouse input, and he embraced, extended and improved on both by integrating it into the Mac OS. Windows were made more movable and overlappable, the desktop metaphor was created with file and disk icons, etc.
The Mac OS team gets far too little credit for all they did to perfect the two concepts they saw that day into a whole new user input paradigm that we all use today. MS had access to Mac OS source code while developing Office for Mac, and still didn’t come up with Windows until some 10 years later.
Apple also has one of the biggest GUI inventions: the menu bar, which allowed to have multiple menus of big width showed when you click on it’s short name.
Without this Apple’s invention, the GUI would not be nearly as useful as it became.
Office came years later. They started with Multiplan and Chart that were then combined into Excel.
And early editions of Inside Macintosh docs were created for them to be able to accomplish that. Not to copy into M$ Windows!
Perhaps SIRI will let us talk to Steve in the near future….
I am so looking forward to trying out Siri when I get my iPhone.
——RM
You can see the progression here: smaller computers, more easy-to-use input devices. I’m betting that Apple’s long-term mission — established by Steve Jobs, of course — is even smaller computers and more efficient input devices. Maybe in a few years we’ll see the integration of a heads-up display projected into the lens of the user’s eyeglasses with voice commands … all linked by bluetooth technology.
Can’t wait to see what Siri will do when I say “…shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders…”
I really, really hope it’s available for the iPad2. If it’s held off until the 3rd generation, Apple shouldn’t get a pass on doing that.
And there will be 2 more interfaces: gesture-based (which Apple has already patented work on – think Minority Report) and then thought-based.
6 UI’s total:
Command-line
Mouse-based
Touch
Voice-recognition
Gesture-based
Thought-based
Steve will have brought us 4 out of these 6.