“Doing it with ‘Mac’… –or– “I ♥ Susan Kare”

In this television piece on the original Apple Macintosh computer, designer Susan Kare spells out user interface concepts that we take for granted now, e.g. pull down menus described as operating like “window shades”. She also explains how and why the Mac uses rich graphics to communicate with the user “so that there’s no need to translate.” Apple has been light years ahead of the competition ever since. Beautiful footage demoing the Mac OS starts in at about eighteen minutes.

By comparison, note that PC users had to wait until Windows 95 to do something as simple as naming their files with more than eight characters. Why it took the Mac so long to catch on is completely beyond me.