alt Hacker NewsI've always been curious whether choices in Mac OS X might have been (unintentionally) influenced by RISC OS. I believe there were a disproportionate number of Brits on the HI team at Apple.
The stand-outs to me are the use of blue folder icons and the Dock.
https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/3rdParty/Retro...
Replies
There was persistent noise even back in the 90s that the icon bar was inspiration for the Windows task bar in Win95. Quite the basis for it, or if it was nonsense, no idea. (HN has previously surfaced some serious Acorn related historical surprises, so someone here may actually know).
What has been quite surprising over the years is how violently many people raised with Open/Save dialogs hate the Risc OS filer and approach to saving and loading files.
Many.
A decade & a half ago, I put the original project team lead in touch with the London user group, which resulted in this talk:
https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/
A decade later, I moderated a virtual interview with him and the surviving core team members:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/23/how-risc-os-...
One of the core team got head-hunted to NeXT in the USA. He took his Archimedes running RISC OS with him. Reportedly, he demonstrated it to his colleagues, and presto, the following beta of NeXTstep had this new "Dock" that was much like the Acorn RISC OS "icon bar".