Thanks for the details.
Chuck Norcutt
On 10/2/2010 3:09 AM, Jan Steinman wrote:
>> 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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