Operating systems and graphic user interfaces

Abstract

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of myself and the panelists and SIGGRAPH, I'd like to welcome each of you to our session this afternoon. This afternoon we're going to be talking about operating systems and graphics user interfaces. Of course, I'm the panel chairperson. My name -- J. Paul Grayson, the chairman and CEO of Micrografx, and I feel very fortunate this afternoon to have a number of distinguished speakers here with me. I'd like to briefly introduce each one of those. As you're probably aware from looking at the program, there have been some last minute changes in the speakers. But I think we're very fortunate to have a number of unique and talented individuals with us this afternoon. So I feel very good about the speakers that we have. The first speaker this afternoon is Chris Espinosa, who is a technical consultant at Apple, but I think that description really doesn't do Chris justice at all. Many of you are aware that Chris has been in the personal computer business about as long as it has existed. He was one of the original members of the Home Brew Computer Club, was actually employee number eight at Apple Computer, and is now the most senior employee at Apple Computer. While at Apple he's had a number of significant accomplishments. He was originally responsible for the Apple II, was on the original Macintosh development team, was the author of the Macintosh user interface specifications, and has also been the product manager for Hypercard. The second speaker today will be Martin Dunsmuir, who is the director of Presentation Manager development for Microsoft. Martin has been with Microsoft for approximately four years. He is from the U.K., from Britain. So you may notice a slight accent. He was previously the director of Zenix Development for Microsoft. He was responsible for Zenix 386. He is also responsible for PMX, was part of the technical team that sold the PM behavior, the PM user interface to the OSF Motif Group, and has been the OS/2 Presentation Manager director since about March. The third speaker changed so recently I didn't have a chance to update his slide. So rather than Tommy Steele today, from IBM we have Dr. Mike Edwards. Mike is a software engineer in the PM technical office. He's been on assignment in Boca Raton for approximately 18 months, having originally been in Hursley as a Hursley PM developer, and I think he was planning on going back to Hursley in the next few days and got called in to do this. So I think his wife had to take care of some of the business, like selling the car and the house, while he came to Boston. Mike also has a very interesting background. He got into graphics while he was a student at Birmingham University in England, and he was part of a team of people that won a Nobel Prize in 1983 for particle physics. And I hope you'll hold your questions about particle physics until after the presentation is over. The last speaker today is also a very distinguished gentleman. Guy or "Bud" Tribble is a founder of NeXT, where he now oversees all of the systems software development. Previous to that he was a software manager for Apple where he oversaw the system and application software development for the Macintosh and for the Apple II. The panel format this afternoon -- we'll hear each of the speakers in the order that I've mentioned. Between each speaker I will probably ask one or two questions to try to draw out particular topics from the speakers. Then after the final speaker, we'll open it up for questions from the audience. Please join me now in welcoming our first speaker, Chris Espinosa.