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The Mac was an improved version of the Lisa, which was a copy of the Xerox Alto, which was inspired by Englebart's NLS.

You can see what it would have been had Raskin carried out his plans, because he did, to something called the Canon Cat: http://tinyurl.com/47hj7m

Raskin has a better claim to the iOS design, in that it is an "incredible morphing computer".

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Ah, yes, the Canon Cat. A real world-changer, that.

Yes, too bad. It looks far superior to what I'm typing in now.

You know, if you wanted to implement a Canon Cat, you could probably do it pretty easily and on a reasonable budget with a modern 16-bit or 32-bit microcontroller, an SRAM chip, an SD card, an LCD, the keyboard of your choice, and Lua instead of Forth. Or you could hack up Emacs or something to support LEAP keys and whatnot (maybe you can relabel the Windows key on your keyboard), although that wouldn't give you the instant-turn-on ability. Most of the detailed specs were available on the web for a while under the name "The Humane Environment".

Expanded url:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3953309968260107254...

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