Michael Kellough said:
As a Mac partisan I have say this is a huge understatement. We've all heard the story but it was rather clearly expressed in
this recent story.
"The Schmidt-Apple saga has distinct overtones of a generation ago when Bill Gates from scrappy upstart Microsoft managed to get Jobs to give him Macintosh prototype units under the guise of developing Microsoft apps for them. Gates delivered on that promise, but he also delivered his own Windows computer operating system, whose ideas were stolen rather blatantly from those Mac prototypes."
Michael, what you're calling a clearly expressed story, looks to me like more like a clearly expresed opinion. Any story that uses a lot of "perhaps" and "appears to be" is bound to be more speculation than fact. Interesting article though, thanks for the link.
Furthermore, the stealing (borrowing?) of ideas is commonplace in the computer industry and always has been, and few of the players are above doing it.
The GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated) by Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Dan Ingalls and a number of other researchers. It used windows, icons, and menus to support commands such as opening files, deleting files, moving files, etc. In 1981 Xerox introduced a pioneering product, Star, incorporating many of PARC's innovations. Although not commercially successful, Star greatly influenced future developments, for example at Apple, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
In 1974, work began at PARC on Gypsy, the first bitmap What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) cut & paste editor. In 1975, Xerox engineers demonstrated a Graphical User Interface "including icons and the first use of pop-up menus.
Beginning in 1979, started by Steve Jobs and led by Jef Raskin, the Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple Computer (
which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas. The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first commercially successful product to use a GUI. A desktop metaphor was used, in which files looked like pieces of paper; directories looked like file folders; there were a set of desk accessories like a calculator, notepad, and alarm clock that the user could place around the screen as desired; and the user could delete files and folders by dragging them to a trash can on the screen. Drop down menus were also introduced.
There is still some controversy over the amount of influence that Xerox's PARC work, as opposed to previous academic research, had on the GUIs of Apple's Lisa and Macintosh, but it is clear that the influence was extensive, because first versions of Lisa GUIs even lacked icons.
Going back even further, Doug Engelbart's Augmentation of Human Intellect project at SRI(Stanford Research Institute) in the 1960s developed the On-Line System (NLS), which incorporated a mouse-driven cursor and multiple windows used to work on hypertext. Engelbart had been inspired, in part, by the memex desk-based information machine suggested by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Much of the early research was based on how children learn. Engelbart's work directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. Several people went from SRI to Xerox PARC in the early 1970s.
So how can anyone today accurately say who has stolen what, and from whom? [smile]
BTW: As you well know, I am also a huge Macintosh partisan, especially when they're baked in a pie.
