Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

...into a mouse and windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where Hertzfeld most wishes that Atkinson had dated the shots. It's tempting to say the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Atkinson thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure.

This particular picture shows different fonts in overlapping windows, but there was no window manager yet, so they couldn't be dragged around.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

The first pop-up menu, which looks just like SmallTalk, as does the simple black title bar.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

This picture shows that the development team hadn't given up on the soft-keys approach yet.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

By now, it's the spring of 1980 and things are starting to happen fast. This picture shows the earliest text selection, using a different highlighting technique than the team ended up with. It also shows a "command bar" at the bottom of the screen, and that the team had started to use nonmodal commands (make a selection, then perform an action, instead of the other way around).

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

The very first scroll bar, on the left instead of the right, before the arrow scroll buttons were added. It also has a folder-tab style title bar, which would persist for a while before being dropped (Atkinson says that at that point, he was confusing documents and folders.)

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

This photo shows that the team had adopted the inverse selection method of text highlighting.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

By the summer of 1980, the development team had dropped the soft keys. This photo shows that the group had mouse-based text editing going, complete with the first appearance of the clipboard, which at that point was called the waste basket. Later, it was called "the scrap" before the team finally settled on clipboard. There was also a SmallTalk style scrollbar, with the scroll box proportional to the size of the document. Note there are also two sets of arrows, since a single scroll bar weirdly controlled both horizontal and vertical scrolling.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

This picture shows that the development dropped the proportional scroll box for a simpler, fixed-size one, since the group was afraid users wouldn't understand the proportionality. It also shows the I-Beam text cursor for the first time. At this point, the team was finally committed to the one-button mouse, after a long, protracted internal debate.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

This picture shows Atkinson playing around with "splines," curves defined by a few draggable control points. QuickDraw didn't end up using splines, but the picture is still notable for the first appearance of the "knobbie" (a small, draggable, rectangular affordance for a point).

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

Here, the team is experimenting with opened and closed windows, an approach that was eventually dropped (but made a comeback in the '90s and is in most systems today in one form or another).

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

This picture shows the first window resizing, by dragging a gray outline, though it's not clear how resizing was initiated.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

This picture shows that windows can be repositioned by dragging a gray outline. The team wanted to drag the whole window, like modern user interfaces do today, but the processors weren't fast enough in those days. As far as Hertzfeld knows, the NeXTStep was the first system to do it the modern way.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

Evolution of the Mac interface--Gallery 2

The first appearance of pull-down menus with a menu bar at the top of the window instead of the top of the screen, which is how Microsoft Windows still does things. By this point, the development team had given up on using a single scroll bar for both horizontal and vertical scrolling. The interface is starting to look very much like what the Mac shipped with in 1984.

Credit: Photos courtesy Bill Atkinson. Captions adapted from Andy Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley."

For the third gallery in this series, click here.