III. Software
1. Intuition Part 1
Workbench Menu running AmigaOS 3.5
Intuition is a part of Amigaīs system software and a program library providing an intuitive way of handling programs and data. Intuition is an interface between user and computer, therefore itīs called user-interface. Intuition is responsible of handling mouse data, menues, windows, gadgets, requesters and screens [1].
The menue system of the AMIGA has been patented and will be subject of the following discussion.
In general, inventions are supposed to improve a known state of the art in a specific field of technical science and are based on developments known before. Thatīs basically true for all inventions. Also the AMIGA user interface is based on such developments.
In an interview, C. Sassenrath (1982-1985, Amiga Corp./ Commodore Amiga, Inc., Manager of operating systems) discusses the question whether the Amiga user interface were a descendant of Xerox developments which also were used by Apple:
"Yes, very much. We studied the Xerox work. We also studied at that time the Lisa. The Macintosh had not come out the door quite yet. We had different opinions on various things. We also had to deal with color and most of those systems had no color. So, that was a new consideration. We also elected to go with a two-button mouse for instance which is kind of todayīs standard for the PCs at least. And that was based on the ability to both point at something on the screen and also be able to pull up menues on the screen." [2]
In the following I will try to discuss the differences of the Amiga user interface compared to the Lisa interface by Apple and the Star interface by Xerox, which were quoted in C. Sassenrathīs interview and why these differences were the basis for a patent.
The history of graphical user interface goes back until 1945 when Vanaver Bush along with his "Memex" computer envisioned a time when users would interact with a machine with graphical interface. He published his ideas in an article, titled: As We May Think in the July issue 1945 of "The Atlantic Monthly" magazine [8]. In the fifties Douglas C. Engelbart took this idea and began to work on making it reality. At this time Engelbart is with Ames-Laboratories as an electronics engineer, later with University of California.
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There, together with him are working several gifted computer scientists to design such a revolutionary machine. His team has many interesting ideas, and developed a couple notably products. The most notably being the "Mouse", named after its appearance because of the three buttons and the chord looking like eyes and a nose and a tail. At first the chord was still fixed in front of it. In the mid sixties these developments by Engelbart and his team go on at Stanford Research institute, Menlo Park, California [3]. |
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On June 21st 1967 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) filed a patent application, titled X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System which was granted by USPTO under US 3,541,541 . |
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Engelbart: SRI patented it, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later I learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like 40 000 $. [4] For Engelbart the invention of the mouse whose prototype was built by Bill English in a wooden box, seems to be just a little part of his so-called Augmenting Human Intellect project. Within this project the bases of hypertext, video conferencing and dynamical on-screen editing is already evaluated. |
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In 1970 Xerox established the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California. Most engineers working for Engelbart join him again. There, Xerox collected most of the geniuses of those days. They are supposed to create new advancements in computers, regardless of price.
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Taking the visions of Engelbart, and their new visionaries like Larry Tesler and Alan Kay they began to work on a new type of computer. The result of this work is the ALTO, which can be seen on the left-hand side picture, the first workstation with built in mouse interface. The ALTO is capable of handling several files in different windows at the same time, features menues and icons and can be connected to a local network. Xerox didnīt purchase it commercially, but provided it to Institutes and Universities for further research work, because at a price tag of 40 000 $ they didnīt see chances for ever marketing it. For the first time ALTO utilizes a black on white display with a resolution of 808x606 pixels with bitmap display that consisted of pixels controlled by its bits in memory. For each task an on-screen visible rectangle, called "Window" is generated which can be moved over the entire screen. The tasks were performed using a contextual menu that would pop-up allowing you to perform different actions with a mouse click. The utilized network protocol is called "Ethernet". [4] |
(Thomas Unger)