> Back in the late 1980s, there was no question—the Mac changed everything, and everyone agreed that graphical was the superior interface.

No, they didn't. The Mac's GUI benefitted in certain specific applications, like DTP, early on, but the Mac was an also-ran for most serious productive work for a very long time, and even when GUIs became standard in the PC ecosystem, it wasn't until the late '90s that productivity apps decisively moved from the DOS-based TUI world to Windows GUI applications.

> So good GUI apps really came from teams of elite designers and developers. The best ones all worked for Apple.

The folks who actually managed to build interface paradigms that successfully reconciled complex business functionality with sufficiently easy-to-master GUIs worked mainly for IBM and Microsoft. The CUA paradigm was the winner here.

People seem to forget that Apple had next to zero penetration into the business computing market, and nearly went bankrupt, back in the '90s.