Re: Our Windows windows will be resizable, soooon, vows Microsoft
Obligatory pedant comment pointing out that neither Smalltalk on the Alto nor Star Office featured overlapping windows. They were both tiled systems.
But the Apple visitors to PARC thought they'd seen overlapping windows so that's what they implemented, and did a rather clever job of it.
I suspect this is one those things many people will miss, back then polygon clipping was both leading edge graphics research and cpu intensive - particularly given cpu speeds back then were typically measured in single digit Mhz's...
So the simplest way to implement 'windows' was simply write to those cells in the framebuffer you were interested in and let the monitor continue to display the surrounding older data. Switching application, the paused hidden application simply updated the cells it was using, overwriting their previous contents.
So Apple was able to see the intent of the earlier research and apply cutting edge graphics algorithms to make it real.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
