> From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> I won't attempt to argue with anything you've said because it's all
> correct... except for the bit about Microsoft stealing the Mac's
> interface. They were both stolen from Xerox. :-)
Actually, Apple was one of four licensees of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center
Smalltalk technology, which included a windowed interface and object-oriented
system software (developed under Adele Goldberg), and mouse (invented by
Douglas Englebart). Two of the other licensees (Hewlett Packard and Digital
Equipment Corporation) played with the system, wrote a report, and moved on --
into oblivion, in the case of DEC. I wonder if there's any regrets there!
Tektronix went on to produce their own commercial Smalltalk system, crippled by
the Xerox license that specified that it could only be on hardware that the
licensee produced, but Tek couldn't make cheap Smalltalk computers any better
than Xerox could -- about $10,000 minimum for the Tek 4016 or the Xerox Dorado.
I worked in Tektronix Computer Research Laboratories at the time, and we had it
running on cheap 80386 MeSs-DOS PCs in the lab -- years before Microsoft
released a "useful" version of Windows. I wonder how things might be different
if we had been allowed to sell that software on that machine... perhaps people
would be saying "Microsoft stole Windows from Tektronix."
Apple abandoned the underlying object-orientation (the real value, if you ask
me) and kept the conceptual user interface elements, and the rest was history.
At the time, Microsoft had limited access to Apple's Lisa and Macintosh system
software through cross-licensing agreements, which a court later ruled they
violated when they came out with Windows. They paid Apple a settlement, and
laughed all the way to the bank.
So I think it is much more accurate to say that Apple legally licensed the
concepts from Xerox PARC, and that Microsoft "stole" those concepts (as ruled
in court) from Apple, later receiving a hand-slap for abusing their license
agreement.
(Much of this is documented in "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of
Advice," by Glenn Krasner.)
----------------
A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and
interconnection remains the same. -- Donella H. Meadows
:::: Jan Steinman, EcoReality Co-op ::::
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