Made a bit of a fool of myself today, mistakingly implying that I was building webpages using brushed-aluminum backgrounds back in 1990 (my actual statement was that I was doing so "about 15 years ago", but I didn't actually think through what that would mean). In reality the date was closer to 1994, where I was building a little PC configuration tool for a retail computer shop (which was a component of a complex corporate structure that included a music store, home theatre equipment, and computer consulting and sales), allowing users to dynamically configure a PC and get a price (the server-side scripting was some innovative completely proprietary script), and then print out their config and bring it in to place an order.

The impetus for the discussion was the implication by an individual that if Microsoft used brush-metal backgrounds, clearly they're ripping off Apple (as Apple fanatics believe that Apple invented everything. I view Apple very favourable, but more times than not they're simply executing ideas better and more beautifully than people before them).

My reply was that brushed-metal backgrounds were some of the first uses of the BACKGROUND attribute: I fondly recall upgrading my PC configuration web "app" to use a classic brushed aluminum look. This was long before Apple started using brushed metals on their desktops. I was hardly an innovator, and such backgrounds were pretty common because they looked like something people could relate to in the real world, yet they could be low contrast and compatible with overlaid text. They are an obvious and inevitable background.

Outside of my chronology problem, what struck me as most disturbing was the impression some have about the state of computers in 1990 - that the ability for brushed-metal graphics to even exist was simply an impossibility. How absurd. In 1990 the Atari ST and Amiga, both very graphically rich PCs, had existed for a half-decade, and were certainly capable of creating and displaying a trivial brushed aluminum graphic. Apple was already up to the immensely powerful Apple IIfx (I lusted over ads for that "Wickedly Fast" PC). Windows was already out for 5 years, and Microsoft was already a billion dollar company. The WWW didn't exist, but a lot of us had been using bulletin board systems, and interconnected message systems (Fidonet, Usenet, and various others) for quite some time. While you couldn't run a Photoshop effect and generate a brushed metal, people would load up long-existing raster graphics programs and plug in the pixels to generate the desired effect.

The point, if there is one, is that Google didn't invent the internet, and Apple didn't invent graphics. This whole "computer thing" has been going on for a while.