"A principal may be expected to take pride in his dealings with other principals, in his expertise in some special field, or in macroscopic evidence of the results of his work, such as sales volume, cases successfully handled, etc. He is less likely to be motivated by the development of supporting skills, such a learning the intricacies of his firm's computing system. This may be contrasted with the pride a secretary might take in such skills as typing, shorthand, or filing. Furthermore, a principal will devote less time to the exercise of such skills."
“The term "principal" will denote a person who works in an office and whose productivity is, or could be, substantially enhanced by secretarial support. Principals' roles include manager, administrator, and professional; and they are found in all major industries, in government, and in education, law, and medicine. [...] The productivity of many principals is difficult to measure. We shall not deal explicitly with this problem.”
Someone whose output is hard to directly measure? How does this differ from other indirect job roles?
Without bitsavers, a large part of computing history would be lost. This is about one of the highly relevant developments in the history of personal computing - the commercialization of the graphical user interface. Thanks for posting this!
It was an influence on the use of icons in the Lisa UI, referenced by the other papers in the same directory. Note the original comment was the commercialization of the graphical UI. This paper was also before the release of the Xerox Star in 1981
Smalltalk-80 on Alto had no icons, or desktop metaphor. We didn't get that until the Star (Xerox Dandelion) and the Lisa.
I had always assumed the Lisa folks took that from the Star, but seeing this paper I'm wondering if that assumption is not fully correct.
The Alto was a beautiful machine, but the software that ran on it doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to a Mac or Lisa or even the Star. Fire up the classic Smalltalk-80 interface on Squeak and you'll see what I mean. It's a brilliant system, but in the end it's an IDE written in Smalltalk for writing more Smalltalk programs. There's not a lot of "end user" there. Other software that ran on the Alto wasn't much different.
Xerox was very protective of the UI work going on for Star.
The Lisa UI papers go into the details of how Apple's UI evolved.
From another thread
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Has Bill's pictures of how the UI evolved and with the exception of some influences after seeing the Star at the intro happened independently.
Software on the Alto was a collection of experiments built by computer scientists. The one exception was Tesler's Gypsy system built for Ginn Publishing.
Xerox SDD and the Star were tasked with turning PARC's research into a product.
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/sdd/
and they did it slightly ahead of Apple but the big difference was their use
of PARC's strongly typed programming language (Mesa) and its single address
space 16 bit microcoded processor instead of something that was HP-like (PASCAL and segmented multitasking).
I was extremely lucky to have stumbled upon boxes of SDD documentation and source listings in the warehouse of a silicon valley surplus store that cleaned out the SDD building in Palo Alto in the 80s to get much of the documentation that is in that directory on bitsavers. More than you ever wanted to know about Mesa can be found in http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/ Additional history of Mesa can be traced back to SAIL and SRI, but not all of that is on line yet.
Yes, but Xerox unfortunately never managed to turn their great ideas into a (commercially successful) product. Otherwise we would perhaps all work with Smalltalk or Lisp machines today - or maybe Oberon, Niklaus Wirth's work was also significantly influenced by his sabbatical at Xerox PARC...
This is so cool. I spend a lot of my downtime at work reading old technical papers and research papers. Great way to relax between server upgrades and wire runs lol
