NASA examines shabby manuals before moving on to backup equipment • The Register



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Column Looking at the past 40 years of IT, it’s hard to imagine how things could have been different. When Steve Jobs traveled down the valley at the end of 1979 to visit Xerox PARC, he found the missing piece of the puzzle that had plagued him since Woz hacked the first Apple I: how to create a computer that everyone could. use.

The computer engineers of the PARC had solved this problem with WIMP: windows, icons, menus, pointer. Add a high-resolution display, a component-based operating system written in the spiffy object-oriented Smalltalk programming language, as well as a high-speed network interface to connect all the systems together, and, well, it’s up to you. just about all modern computing, even today.

Xerox has secured pre-IPO shares from Apple; Jobs has found a way forward, but one that will take years to bear fruit. By July 1981, the two companies felt comfortable enough to sign a partnership agreement that looked a bit like marketing at the time – each only promising to promote the other’s products – but which quickly changed the pattern. world.

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