Gorgeous Xerox Star Polaroids

I've never seen early personal computing look so sophisticated.

Xerox Alto Computer and 'Form Pads'

I've just completed reading Bootstrapping, a book by Thierry Bardini which looks at this history, and repercussions of Doug Engelbart's 'invention' of personal computing. It's a great read.

Interestingly, the book contains a diagram of the desktop screen of the Alto, by Xerox. The Alto had a concept of 'form pads' — templates for the creation of types of documents.

(reproduced without permission)

• Why hasn't this concept carried on?
• Where on the Mac do I look for a stack of blank folders if I need one?
• Where do I grab a blank email to start writing?
• …or another common document I'm often creating?

Document-centric computing never really caught on and so we've ended up with Application centric computing. Newer applications present templates on launch instead. Is this an engineering choice or UI choice?

What do you think — are you 'Application-centric' or 'Document-centric'?

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