twas the night before dub dub, when all through the house,not an ipad was stirri
ng, not even with a mouse... stephen hackett,  pixels link minethis is a continu
ation of the harbingers series  an exploration of apples advancements in humanco
mputer interaction and their influence on the computing industry. ive been worki
ng on harbingers for over a year now, and i told myself id finish it before appl
e announced their headset. whoops it stands alone, but builds on the ideas from 
part .a prewwdc harbingers interludeor how i stopped worrying and learned to lov
e the namethe conceit of this series is that humancomputer interaction hci is th
e most interesting part of computing innovation. its assertion is that the metap
hors we use define user interfaces have profound effects on the world because th
ese metaphors define the paradigm of that interaction. its vehicle for this expl
oration is apples contributions to hci.and im publishing this the day before wwd
c  because i believe we are on the literal eve of one of these paradigm shifts  
one that is  years in the making.in part  of the series, i traced the contours o
f the finders development, which drew inspiration from three major sourcesthe mo
st famous, xerox parcs gui. the story of steves visit to parc is a bona fide leg
end. there, jobs and the lisa team at apple saw the graphical user interface for
 the first time and the team fell in love.the mit speech interface groups datala
nd concept. in more folklore about the sibling mac and lisa projects, dataland o
ften comes up as a philosophical influence on on the finders spatial data manage
ment technique. this is a classic john siracusa hobby horse, and has become one 
of mine as well. its easily overlooked how fundamental a shift it was to find da
ta by going to where it is instead of by finding it by its name, because this in
teraction method universally became the foundation of consumer data management a
fter the lisa. and, finally ibms pictureworld concept. i believe this is the mos
t often overlooked of the three major influences on the finder, but i think that
 it is the most interesting. at the time, the lisa projects main goal was to mak
e computing accessible to office workers who likely had no prior computing exper
ience  a herculean task. pictureworld offered a remedy for this problem, by leve
raging a gui to create an onscreen diorama of an office using icons. whereas dat
aland allowed a user to literally place documents in an infinite plane, with no 
icon representation, pictureworld offered a more pragmatic approach for the th c
entury use icons to represent documents and applications, and layer a cohesive o
ffice theme on top of these icons trash cans, inboxes, filing cabinets, folders,
 desk tops, etc. to tie everything together. pictureworld is what invented the d
esktop metaphor.none of these influences had a complete product, which is why it
 took all three for apple to synthesize into an interface for the lisa. of cours
e, the mac team quickly appropriated these advancements for their own