@dukope Susan Kare.
Incredibly influential designer.
(Edit: Read the thread below: its perfection seems to be an artifact of the Mac's square pixel interpretation of the Lisa's bitmap arrow, which looked narrower because the pixels were vertical. But whoever drew it for the Lisa drew it just before Kare was at Apple!)
@dukope Huh. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her bitmap sketches, but perhaps she was just mapping it out?
What have you found?
@JoshuaACNewman @dukope I think the Mac pointer came from Lisa. The Lisa pointer is, as far as I can tell, identical to the Mac one. I doubt Kare could have designed it; she was hired in early 1983, and the Lisa UI had been finalized by that point.
My guess is that the original pointer was designed by Bill Atkinson. He was one of the folks who visited PARC, so he'd seen the Alto pointer, and he also designed the Lisa UI (he invented the menu bar, too) https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html
@csilverman @JoshuaACNewman @dukope
It also looks surprisingly similar to some characters in the X11 Cursor font.
Somehow the rotten fruit company always got away with getting very detailed inspirations from 3rd parties.
@yacc143 @JoshuaACNewman @dukope Going by the alt text of that image, those icons are from X11R3, which came out in 1988. The Apple Lisa came out in 1983, Mac was ’84. (I notice the wristwatch, pencil, i-beam, and spraycan icons are in there too; those were definitely by Susan Kare.)
Somebody did get some very detailed inspiration from a third party here, but it was not the rotten fruit company.
@csilverman @JoshuaACNewman @dukope
Yes, but I did not find any images of the font earlier. X was released mid 1980s, but was based on the W Window System, which on the modern Internet is missing in action.
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| In 1984, Bob Scheifler of MIT replaced the synchronous protocol of W with an asynchronous alternative and named the result X.
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https://lunduke.substack.com/p/w-the-window-system-before-x-that
@yacc143 @csilverman @JoshuaACNewman @dukope Many are those which have gone searching for a copy of W; none have succeeded.
By the way, X was first written for the VAXstation 100, which ROM has a mouse cursor which is pointing straight up rather than the diagonal left-up.
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