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I'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...

by fidotron6 hours ago|

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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.

by rjmunro1 hours ago|

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Open and save dialogs are insane. Let's make a whole other finder that's completely different to the main one we use to navigate files.

The RISC OS approach is like a million times better. The only thing I would add is a context menu to create a new file of whatever kind at this location, like The "New" menu in windows.

by timthorn5 hours ago|

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Paul Fellows absolutely claims that. From https://astrospeakers.org/provider/paul-fellows :

> He worked on the first generation of home computers and lead the design of the RiscOS operating system for the ARM processor, including inventing the apps and icon bar user interface that has since spread to phones and computers across the world

by timthorn6 hours ago|

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Well, a reminder of the origin story of RiscOS: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Acorn/fellows.php

Paul Fellows later went on to be the CTO of AlertMe, which became the basis of British Gas' Hive service, and then Lowes' Iris product line.