The earliest reference to "coach marks" (in the context of software UI) appears to be the following patent, filed in 1993:
Are there any earlier references, or uses of the term?
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Sign up to join this communityThe earliest reference to "coach marks" (in the context of software UI) appears to be the following patent, filed in 1993:
Are there any earlier references, or uses of the term?
The idea that we might refer to as "pop-up" or "context-sensitive" help today seemed to pre-date "coach marks" by about seven years:
So, it seems that an Apple Patent (referring to Coach Marks) was enabled by an (at the time) seven year old IBM patent concerning something like pop-up help.
I confess to not having been programming at that time, but I'm guessing that the whole idea of having a little window of help next to what you were doing was pretty groovy at the time... and it took a while to catch on and lead to something more advanced like on the fly coaching.