Maybe not the ones listed above, but Xerox PARC's Interlisp-D is another matter.

kragen · 2024-09-07T21:00:32 1725742832

i feel like even interlisp-d, especially the 01970s version, has a pretty different style of interaction than smalltalk and the macintosh. i know a lot less about the perq

_19qg · 2024-09-07T21:52:07 1725745927

Definitely. Interlisp and Smalltalk were early on mostly driven by research (Interlisp -> everything AI, Smalltalk -> UI research, OOP, AI) and specific early applications. The Mac UI was early on more direct manipulation oriented.

One thing to keep in mind: the UI state of the Art was fast evolving and applications under some of these systems might have UIs different from the underlying operating system. That would also be true on the Mac: HyperCard had a look&feel very different from the underlying Mac OS.

For example Xerox developed "The Analyst" in Smalltalk 80 for the CIA: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...

I would think that NoteCards (written by Xerox in Interlisp-D) had similar customers and that there might also be some joint UI influence.

kragen · 2024-09-07T22:31:36 1725748296

yeah, ui stuff was changing extremely fast. shneiderman's keynote where he introduced the term 'direct manipulation' wasn't even until 01982. his canonical examples of what he meant by 'direct manipulation' were, in order, emacs, visicalc, zooming in and out of gis data or a conceptual 2-d information space with a joystick, pong, missile command, space invaders, light-pen-driven cad/cam systems (into which category he shoehorns newspaper page layout and process control dashboards in continuous-flow plants), driving a car, recording and replaying robot motions, zloof's 01975 query by example, and finally, at the end, “advanced office automation systems” like the xerox star and ibm’s pictureworld

in this context, it's amusing that p.6/36 of that scan you linked cites user interface uniformity as a key advantage of smalltalk: 'the environment's window facilities consistently adhere to a small number of user interface conventions that are quickly learned by casual and experienced users alike.'

[39]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2092.2093 "The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation, by Ben Shneiderman, originally presented as the Keynote Address at the NYU Symposium on User Interfaces, 01982-05-26–28, then published with numerous typographical errors in 01982, Behaviour & Information Technology, 1:3, 237-256, DOI 10.1080/01449298208914450"