A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems - Mac OS X Internals

Mac OS X Internals (www.osxbook.com) 39
• The user could click on an icon and push the key to open the
icon, which resulted in a window displaying the icon’s contents. Icons
could represent either Data (Document, Folder, or Record File) or Function.
The user could copy, delete, file, mail, move, open, close, and print
data icons. Function icons operated on data icons. Many of the function
icons were analogous to modern-day application icons. Examples of
function icons include File Drawer, In- and Out-Baskets, Printer, Floppy
Disk Drive, User, User Group, Calculator, Terminal Emulator, and Network
Resource Directory.
• Windows had title bars displaying the corresponding icon names and a
context-sensitive command menu. Context-sensitive help was accessible
via the ? button. Horizontal and vertical scroll bars provided page-up,
page-down, and jump-to features. However, STAR windows could only
be tiled 29 and were explicitly designed not to overlap; overlapping behavior
was considered a nuisance (for the end user) in the Alto by STAR’s
designers.
• An abstraction called Property Sheets was analogous to today’s control
or property panels. A related abstraction called Option Sheets implemented
a visual interface for providing options (arguments) to commands.
For example, the “Find” option sheet was a powerful tool for
searching text in a part or whole of a document or selection. Even textual
properties such as case, face, font, position, and size could be used for
searching. It also allowed optionally user-confirmed replacement of the
found text and its properties.
The STAR system was rather expensive, with a base configuration initially
costing $16,500.
1.3. THE GRAPHICAL AGE AT APPLE
Apple was instrumental in making personal computing affordable for the masses
with the Apple ][. However, even after the Apple ][’s success, computers were diffi-
cult to learn for most people—a fact that was perceived by Apple and many others
as a large impediment to computer use. The Lisa (Local Integrated Software Archi-
29 Window overlapping was allowed, and in fact was turned on by default, in STAR’s successor View-
Point.