Genuine question.
I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?
I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there’s always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.
They took the GUI that Xerox invented and made it so ubiquitous that other companies copied it from them (GEOS, Windows, Amiga, etc. etc.)
They took the Bubble UI that Palm invented, and the PalmOS driven Handspring cell phones, and turned it into a full blown mobile operating system.
What’s “Bubble UI”? I searched it up and couldn’t find anything.
The bubble ui is using little circle icons to do anything.
I don’t think anything beginning with “They took” answers what OP is asking
What do you think “improved” means in the OP?
When paired with “innovate/innovation”, not “taking” something.
Taking a thing and then improving it to the point that it has massively larger appeal has value, innovative or not.
But if it’s not innovative, then it’s not innovative, which was the question in the post title, lol
Every innovation is built on top of other ideas. All of them.
You’re getting hung up mostly on the word “took”. They could have said “started with”. But what was built was successful both by being innovative and well-executed.
That and other people were already working to use what PARC had developed.
But I’ll give Apple the credit for being the first to implement a personal computer that made computing much more approachable, with the MAC.
It was years before Windows had anything close in Windows 3.1, which frankly wasn’t actually all that close.
NT 3.1 is probably the first Windows OS that had the consistency of Mac OS, with modern (non-DOS) underpinnings.
And the reality is it was heavily influenced by the DEC Alpha system because MS had hired much of the Alpha team from DEC. Technet Mag had a great article about it circa 1996.
3.1 was a kludge, 3.11 was a disaster. Windows didn’t come close to Mac like usability until Windows 95.
Pretty much every other GUI was ahead of Windows until 95.
Agreed on the GUI.
NT 3.1 at least had modern underpinnings, and using the Norton Desktop on it instead of the Windows Shell made it much like what we got with “Chicago” - the 95/Win2k UI.
Wow, you got me thinking about that stuff and remembering Norton Desktop. I’d forgotten ever using it on NT back then. Gonna have to go look for a copy now.