Iconic Office Quotes

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9 likes Like Facebook_icon “Read this to yourself. Read it silently. Don't move your lips. Don't make a sound. Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing anything. What a wonderfully weird thing, huh? NOW MAKE THIS PART LOUD! SCREAM IT IN YOUR MIND! DROWN EVERYTHING OUT. Now, hear a whisper. A tiny whisper. Now, read this next line in your best crotchety- old man voice: "Hello there, sonny. Does your town have a post office?" Awesome! Who was that? Whose voice was that? It sure wasn't yours! How do you do that? How?! It must've been magic.
Bo Burnham (Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone)
Acting is the most insecure of all the trades, the most risky. In their professional lifetime most actors rehearse longer than they play, spend more time traipsing from office to office in search of jobs than they rehearse and play combined.
Tallulah Bankhead (Tallulah: My Autobiography (Southern Icons Series))
These were children, after all, who were taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, the twelve-year-old Young Pioneer who was made a national hero and icon for all Soviet children when he served his collective by ratting on his own father for trying to hide grain from the police. These were children raised in schools designed according to the “socialist family” theories of Anton Makarenko, an ideology officer of the KGB. Makarenko insisted that children learn the supremacy of the collective over the individual, the political unit over the family. The schools, he said, must employ an iron discipline modeled on that of the Red Army and Siberian labor camps.
David Remnick (Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Pulitzer Prize Winner))
Don hits rock bottom in the series’ finest hour, “The Suitcase,” which is essentially a two-character play about Don and Peggy stuck in the office through a tumultuous night. She wants to leave for a birthday dinner with her boyfriend, while he needs company to avoid placing the phone call that will tell him that Anna Draper — the widow of the real Don, and the one person on Earth with whom this Don feels truly comfortable and safe — has died of cancer. Over the course of the episode, Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss are asked to play every emotion possible: rage and despair, joy and humiliation, companionship and absolute contempt. In the most iconic moment, Peggy complains that Don took all the credit for an award-winning campaign she helped conceive. “It’s your job,” he tells her, his voice dripping with condescension. “I give you money. You give me ideas.” “And you never say, ‘Thank you,’” she complains, fighting back tears. “That’s what the money is for!” he screams.
Alan Sepinwall
Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
The one thing that seemed to be on our side, however, was the reality on the streets of Egypt. Day after day, the protests spread and Mubarak’s regime seemed to crumble around him. On February 11, I woke to the news that Mubarak had fled to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh and resigned. It was, it seemed, a happy ending. Jubilant crowds celebrated in the streets of Cairo. I drafted a statement for Obama that drew comparisons between what had just taken place and some of the iconic movements of the past several decades—Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesians upending a dictatorship, Indians marching nonviolently for independence. I went up to the Oval Office that morning to review the statement with Obama. “You should feel good about this,” he said. “I do,” I replied. “Though I’m not sure all of the principals do.” “You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak[…] “for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an “extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.” As Obama delivered a statement to a smattering of press, it seemed that history might at last be breaking in a positive direction in the Middle East. His tribute to the protests was unabashed. Yet our own government was still wired to defer to the Egyptian military, and ill equipped to support a transition to democracy once the president had spoken.
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
themselves on the building's famous balcony. Millions more will watch the ceremony and celebrations on live television -- crowded around screens in their homes, at street parties in towns and villages and at major landmarks. Lawmakers are already lobbying London Mayor Boris Johnson to install a giant screen in the city's iconic Trafalgar Square. Britain's Foreign Office said royal officials had sent their regrets to Estibalis Chavez,
Anonymous
When I went to the well of the Senate to record my vote before the clerk, it drew gasps. At least that’s how it felt. It was viewed as somehow impertinent for a freshman senator to dare vote no for such a nomination, especially against an icon of the institution and especially after nearly every other Republican in the Senate, moderate or conservative, had indicated the proper vote I was supposed to make. This was an early sign of many senators’ view—that freshmen are supposed to meekly go along with prevailing sentiments. It was markedly different from my view of the office, which is that I had a responsibility to 26 million Texans to do my very best to represent them and to stand for the principles they sent me to Washington to defend.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
THE GRANDEST, MOST eloquent evocation of Depression-era populism came from the Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, whose 1936 offering was a book-length poem called The People, Yes. Aside from its iconic title, the work is almost completely forgotten today, a strange outlier amidst the last century’s highbrow taste in poetry. Sandburg’s verse is not abstract; it is not avant-garde. But let us put our cynicism aside for a moment. As the title suggests, The People, Yes was a full-throated celebration of ordinariness: the manners of the people, their dreams, their folly, their aspirations, and above all their speech, the “plain and irregular sounds and echoes from / the roar and whirl of street crowds, work gangs, sidewalk clamor,” as he wrote in the introduction. As with Ballad for Americans and so many other works of the time, there is a compulsive listing of identities, repeated efforts to name-check everyone. Sandburg gives us cantos that are lists of occupations, cantos made up of slang expressions and lines from folktales and popular jokes. There are strikers, angry farmers, tricksters, soldiers, armies, and, of course, a big fat rich guy, ordering others off his property. Naturally Sandburg attacks the elite, mocking the pretenses of aristocracy and reminding his Depression-era audience of something they knew all too well—that justice treats rich and poor differently. He reminds us that bank robbers go to prison but, if you’re a bank officer who loots the company, “all you have to do is start another bank.
Thomas Frank (The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy)
[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.
Kenneth Whyte (Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times)
former KGB officer with a confident walk and shy smile, a tough administrator of disarming simplicity, a market-oriented reformer willing to increase state control over the market, and a touching father who can fly a jet and uses military slang in his speech. (Fartyshev
Helena Goscilo (Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies Book 80))
As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.
Barry M. Katz (Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design (The MIT Press))
The Power of Myth For screenwriting, Jon recommends The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which he used to determine if Swingers was structurally correct. He is also a big fan of The Power of Myth, a video interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers. “With The Jungle Book, I really am going back and doubling down on the old myths.” TF: We recorded our podcast during the shooting of The Jungle Book, in his production office next to set. Months later, The Jungle Book was the #1 movie in the world and currently has a staggering 95% review average on Rotten Tomatoes. Long-Term Impact Trumps Short-Term Gross “Thanks to video, and later DVD and laser disc, everybody had seen this film [Swingers], and it had become part of our culture. That’s when I learned that it’s not always the movie that does the best [financially] that has the most impact, or is the most rewarding, or does the most for your career, for that matter.” Another Reason to Meditate “In the middle of [a meditation session], the idea for Chef hit me, and I let myself stop, which I don’t usually do, and I took out a pad. I scribbled down like eight pages of ideas and thoughts, [and then I] left it alone. If I look back on it, and read those pages, it really had 80% of the heavy lifting done, as far as what [Chef] was about, who was in it, who the characters were, what other movies to look at, what the tone was, what music I would have in it, what type of food he was making, the idea of the food truck, the Cuban sandwiches, Cuban music . . . so it all sort of grew out from that.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
For Microsoft’s productivity applications, the break came when the world transitioned from text-based DOS applications to graphical user interfaces, in the mid-1980s. But as the industry shifted from text to graphical interfaces, it created an opening, as every application needed to be rewritten to support the new paradigm of dropdown menus, icons, toolbars, and the mouse. While Microsoft redesigned and rethought their applications, their competitors were too stuck in the old world, and so Word and Excel leapfrogged their competitors. Then in an ensuing stroke of product marketing genius, it was combined into the Microsoft Office suite, which promptly became a colossus. Much effort was put toward making each application within the suite work with each other. For example, an Excel chart would be embedded within a Microsoft Word document—this was called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)—which made the combination of the products more powerful. In other words, the product really matters, and bundling can provide a huge distribution advantage, but it can only go so far. It’s an echo of what we now see in the internet age, where Twitter might drive users to its now-defunct livestreaming platform Periscope, or Google might push everyone to use Google Meet. It can work, but only when the product is great. This is part of why the concept of bundling as been around forever—the McDonald’s Happy Meal was launched in the 1970s, and cable companies have been bundling TV channels since their start. But at the heart of these bundling stories are important, iconic products that reinvent the market.
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
You Are a Rounding Error” “[I had] an executive at Yahoo! who brought me and Steve in [for a potential acquisition discussion]—this was early in Reddit—and told us we were a rounding error because our traffic was so small. . . . I put, ‘You are a rounding error,’ on our wall in the Reddit office after that meeting as a wall of negative reinforcement for me. That ended up being kind of valuable for me and helpful, and I still am grateful to this day that he was such a dick, because it was so motivating. But I don’t want to be that guy.” (See Amanda Palmer’s quote, “Take the pain and wear it like a shirt” on page 521.)
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
therefore an investment like that is unbeatable. Buildings that I would buy for $500K within the year were $800K and I put only maybe $100K down, so you made 300% on your money. . . . I quickly developed and traded up my buildings and bought more apartment buildings and office buildings on Main Street down in Santa Monica and so on. . . . I benefited from [a magic decade] and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
The dominance of the Church hindered the development in Muscovy of the secular art forms that had taken shape in Europe since the Renaissance. Instead, the icon was the focal point of Muscovy’s religious way of life. It was an artefact of daily ritual as much as it was a creative work of art. Icons were encountered everywhere – not just in homes and churches but in shops and offices or in wayside shrines. There was next to nothing to connect the icon to the European tradition of secular
Orlando Figes (Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia)
home for two decades. And now, her phone was acting up. For the tenth time, she stabbed at the messages icon, only to have her screen flicker and throw her right back to the home screen. No, no, no! As she reached the door to her office, she swiped her access card and waited for the green light. The card scanner beeped twice and then remained red. Frowning, Ariel swiped her card again, only to have the scanner repeat the curious glitch. Then realization dawned on her. It wasn’t a glitch—Jim had already had her security access revoked. After ten minutes of pacing in the hallway and trying, still unsuccessfully,
Fiona Grace (Always, With You (Endless Harbor #1))
Hot Pot is the agency of choice for brands looking to win in China - tailored to fit the needs of the most demanding consumer market in the world. Delivering success in this rapidly changing ecosystem requires solid strategic planning, exceptional localised creative campaigns and dynamic management across marketing and ecommerce channels. We have a growing team and offices in London and Shanghai and have delivered growth for iconic brands like Mulberry, Selfridges, Liberty & Whittard of Chelsea.
Hot Pot China
Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.
Mekong Moe (The Vietnam whore)
Next to Alma on our All Saints’ table was an icon of another accidental saint, Harvey Milk (the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, who was shot to death by a fellow city employee in 1978). The icon showed Milk standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with five silver bullet holes in his chest and a golden halo behind his head. The icon was created by Bill, one of our congregation’s artists, who called me later when someone challenged him for creating a visual representation of sainthood for someone who was not Christian. I explained to Bill that what we celebrate in the saints is not their piety or perfection but the fact that we believe in a God who gets redemptive and holy things done in this world through, of all things, human beings, all of whom are flawed.
Nadia Bolz-Weber (Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People)
Leadership isn’t just for global icons and marketplace titans. It’s an arena everyone gets to play in. Because leadership is a lot less about having a formal title, a large office and money in the bank. And a lot more about committing to mastery over all you do—and in who you are. It’s about resisting the tyranny of the ordinary, refusing to allow negativity to hijack your sense of awe and preventing any form of slavery to mediocrity from infesting your life. Leadership is about making a difference, right where you’re planted. Real leadership is about sending out brave work that exemplifies genius, turns your whole field on its head by its scope, innovation and execution, and is so staggeringly sublime that it stands the test of time.
Robin S. Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
To be clear, every day—for the rest of your life—you’ll be faced with the chance of showing leadership, wherever you are and in all that you do. Leadership isn’t just for global icons and marketplace titans. It’s an arena everyone gets to play in. Because leadership is a lot less about having a formal title, a large office and money in the bank. And a lot more about committing to mastery over all you do—and in who you are. It’s about resisting the tyranny of the ordinary, refusing to allow negativity to hijack your sense of awe and preventing any form of slavery to mediocrity from infesting your life. Leadership is about making a difference, right where you’re planted.
Robin S. Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
In many of my public talks, I guide a very simple 10-second exercise. I tell the audience members to each identify two human beings in the room and just think, “I wish for this person to be happy, and I wish for that person to be happy.” That is it. I remind them to not do or say anything, just think—this is an entirely thinking exercise. The entire exercise is just 10 seconds’ worth of thinking. Everybody emerges from this exercise smiling, happier than 10 seconds before. This is the joy of loving-kindness. It turns out that being on the giving end of a kind thought is rewarding in and of itself. . . . All other things being equal, to increase your happiness, all you have to do is randomly wish for somebody else to be happy. That is all. It basically takes no time and no effort. How far can you push this joy of loving-kindness? One time, I gave a public talk in a meditation center called Spirit Rock in California. As usual, I guided the audience in this 10-second exercise, and just for fun, I assigned them homework. I was speaking on a Monday evening, and the next day, Tuesday, was a work day, so I told the audience to do this exercise for Tuesday: Once an hour, every hour, randomly identify two people walking past your office and secretly wish for each of them to be happy. You don’t have to do or say anything—just think, “I wish for this person to be happy.” And since nobody knows what you’re thinking, it’s not embarrassing—you can do this exercise entirely in stealth. And after 10 seconds of doing that, go back to work. That’s all. On Wednesday morning that week, I received an email from a total stranger, Jane (not her real name). Jane told me, “I hate my job. I hate coming to work every single day. But I attended your talk on Monday, did the homework on Tuesday, and Tuesday was my happiest day in 7 years.” Happiest day in 7 years. And what did it take to achieve that? It took 10 seconds of secretly wishing for two other people to be happy for 8 repetitions, a total of 80 seconds of thinking. That, my friends, is the awesome power of loving-kindness.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
of uniformed and plain-clothed officers, and a tent, and the allure was too much to resist. Even the tourists were ignoring two of the region’s most iconic views—the booming image of Mount Rainier dominating the
Robert Dugoni (The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite, #4))
Culture is a vehicle for true self-expression. The flowering of individual creativity takes place in the context of culture. When a child becomes peer-oriented, the transmission lines of civilization are downed. The new models to emulate are other children or peer groups or the latest pop icons. Appearance, attitudes, dress, and demeanor all adapt accordingly. Even children's language changes — more impoverished, less articulate about their observations and experience, less expressive of meaning and nuance. Peer-oriented children are not devoid of culture, but the culture they are enrolled in is generated by their peer orientation. Although this culture is broadcast through media controlled by adults, it is the children and youth whose tastes and preferences it must satisfy. They, the young, wield the spending power that determines the profits of the culture industry — even if it is the parents’ incomes that are being disposed of in the process. Advertisers know subtly well how to exploit the power of peer imitation as they make their pitch to ever-younger groups of customers via the mass electronic media. In this way, it is our youth who dictate hairstyles and fashion, youth to whom music must appeal, youth who primarily drive the box office. Youth determine the cultural icons of our age. The adults who cater to the expectations of peer-oriented youth may control the market and profit from it, but as agents of cultural transmission they are simply pandering to the debased cultural tastes of children disconnected from healthy adult contact. Peer culture arises from children and evolves with them as they age. Peer orientation breeds aggression and an unhealthy, precocious sexuality. The result is the aggressively hostile and hypersexualized youth culture, propagated by the mass media, to which children are already exposed by early adolescence. Today's rock videos shock even adults who themselves grew up under the influence of the “sexual revolution.” As the onset of peer-orientation emerges earlier and earlier, so does the culture it creates. The butt-shaking and belly-button-baring Spice Girls pop phenomenon of the late 1990s, as of this writing a rapidly fading memory, seems in retrospect a nostalgically innocent cultural expression compared with the pornographically eroticized pop idols served up to today's preadolescents.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
At the office, everyone tells everyone that everything is “amazing” and “exciting” until the words have been pounded into a kind of semantic pabulum. Of course they do. The pabulum is safe, inoffensive, a way to groom without taking a stand—or standing out. And so, as we scroll through the available smiley faces and wineglass icons, these shortcuts to sensibility, we seldom stop to wonder whether our solitary voices have been squashed by the predetermined flashcards of sentiment we’re encouraged to hold up in their place. :-)
Michael Harris (Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World)
Supertech Supernova Spira is a splendid, spectacular project located in Sector 94, Noida. This is the biggest in North India; having mixed use development spread over 5 million square feet (75 acres approx.) offering tallest buildings of 300 meters with 70% open area with each plot. The staggering 5 million sq ft of fabulous city redefines extravagance and has lavish living spaces which satisfy your desire to have an opulent home, high-tech offices that create awesome workplaces. It houses contemporary amenities and green living and stands out in the NCR. This iconic 80 storey tower has a Helipad, Observation Desk, Luxury Hotel, Serviced Suites, High End Luxury Apartments, Exclusive Club House, Sky Lounge and Bar, along with a panoramic never ending view and view of the bird sanctuary.
ambuj shukla
The Star workstation he shepherded to launch was an amazing accomplishment. Enclosed in a squat beige-colored box which, like its ancestral Alto, slid on casters under a desk, the machine came packed with features no one had ever seen before and few envisioned in a commercial office machine. These included a bitmapped screen (in “muted blue,” as Xerox promotional literature described it at the time), a mouse (“an electronic pointing device”), windowed displays, and “What You See Is What You Get” document preparation. The bundled functions included text processing, a drawing program, the first integrated “help” program, and electronic mail. By far the system’s most striking feature was its graphical user interface, the stylized display that communicated with the user via the bitmapped screen. This arrangement of icons and folders built around what the Star designers called the “desktop metaphor” is so familiar today that it seems to have been a part of computing forever. But its pioneering implementation on the Star included some capabilities that had yet to resurface on the market nearly two decades later. Text, formulas, and graphics could all be edited in the same document. (Compare today’s “integrated” software, in
Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)
Xerox had the Alto; IBM launched the Personal Computer. Xerox had the graphical user interface with mouse, icons, and overlapping windows; Apple and Microsoft launched the Macintosh and Windows. Xerox invented What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processing; Microsoft brazenly turned it into Microsoft Word and conquered the office market. Xerox invented the Ethernet; today the battle for market share in the networking hardware industry is between Cisco Systems and 3Com. Even the laser printer is a tainted triumph. Thanks to the five years Xerox dithered in bringing it to market, IBM got there first, introducing its own model in 1975.
Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)