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From the Publisher: The Story Behind the Macintosh Computer INSANELY GREAT: THE LIFE John Sculley, the former Pepsi CEO brought in to facilitate the growing up of the Apple company; and many other key members of the Macintosh teams including Bill Atkinson, the genius behind MacPaint and later, HyperCard. As it turns out, Bill Atkinson did not originally plan for a menu bar on top of the screen. It sort of migrated upward, like cream rising to the top. Atkinson wanted the commands to be geographically predictable, the same place in every application. For that reason, he rejected pop-up windows as had been used in Xerox's PARC computers. Then he got the idea of a menu bar -- a constant presence from which one could evoke a menu of commands by pointing and clicking. At first he put the bar at the bottom of the active window, then after some testing moved it to the top. But putting the menu bar on top of a window presented a problem: when the user shrank the size of the window, you couldn't get the headings to fit. (Microsoft's Windows uses this approach, and suffers by it.) So finally, at user-testing fanatic Larry Tesler's urging, he moved it to the top of the screen. Users quickly learned where the commands were under the individual headings. Atkinson was impressed that they could implicitly visualize where a command might live on the screen, moving the mouse over the heading, dropping down the menu and going right to the location in one fell swoop. It was a case of totally internalizing the illusion of geography in cyberspace -- you would go to a menu choice that didn't really exist until you created it. Steven Levy's INSANELY GREAT isn't only the chronicle of a single machine; it's a chapter in the story of the personal computer's ongoing evolution. Readers who may have never used a computer without icons or a trash can (or Recycle Bin) may want to learn how the Macintosh made the computers and operating systems that followed its introduction were made possible.
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