The combination of Alto's wonderful graphics screen and its strange little "mouse" took the arcane abstraction known as software and transformed it into something visible, tangible, almost tactile. Users had the weird and eerily seductive sensation of reaching into the computer, of being able to grab what they saw there and manipulate it by hand. Thanks to the programmers, moreover, they found plenty to manipulate: icons, pop-up menus, drop-down menus, scroll bars, and windows-even overlapping windows that seemed to be stacked on top of one another like real, 3-D objects ("I was in the seminar
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