Hmmm the picture disappeared.
Let's try again:
Notice the captions. Got a clue now? They're personifications of the computers... not users.
Posted on 02/03/2007 6:52:37 PM PST by ShorelineMike
Hmmm the picture disappeared.
Let's try again:
Notice the captions. Got a clue now? They're personifications of the computers... not users.
One other thing on Microsoft innovation: I've had a chance to try Office 2007 and, while at first I was very irritated and skeptical, I must say now that it is an amazing new UI.
I think you would have a much harder time upgrading components in a Mac than you would in a Windows system. I also build my own machines and upgrade the parts. I couldn't imagine trying to do that with one of Jobs' machines (maybe you can and it would be just as easy, but I doubt it, I would be very uncomfortable trying to monkey around with a proprietary machine) - and there is the big MSFT/pc advantage. People feel comfortable playing around with them.
After I posted, I was sitting here wondering what I couldn't do if I had a big Apple tower. Do they have TV cards? I don't know, but as I type this, I'm watching ESPN2 NFL Films Superbowl 1984 (Raiders/Redskins) on my desktop. I bet the rest of my hardware (hard disks, mouse, keyboard, monitor) would hook up fine. But I don't know.
I get a lot of PC hardware dirt cheap on eBay. Apple doesn't seem to have anything like that kind of market depth.
Or are you implying that MSFT stole code from Apple?
Apple code was found in Microsoft products. One in particular was Windows Media Player. They had to re-write it from ground up. That is a fact.
There wasn't anything original about what Jobs did, all his people had to do was imitate Xerox. . .
Let's hear what Bruce Horn, the designer of the Apple Finder among other parts of the original Mac, has to say about that...
"For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This "fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn't true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial.Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.
Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable Software.
Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.
As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows. It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the Macintosh design (API's, sample code, etc.) during the Mac's development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their system designers a template from which to design Windows. In contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think." - Source
And from, Jef Raskin, the original Macintosh Project Manager:
"Horn is correct that click-and-drag methods were invented at Apple and not at PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I know). I created this method for moving objects and making selections after finding the Xerox click-move-click method prone to error. Bill Atkinson extended the paradigm to pull-down menus. This all happened relatively early in the history of the Mac. The way my insight got extended by Bill was typical of how things developed then. Surprising as it may seem in retrospect, there was some resistance to my new way of using a graphic input device and I had to repeatedly explain how drag worked and why it was often easier to use than the modal click-move-click technique developed first (as far as I know) on the Sketchpad system and then used at Xerox PARC. Some of the arguments I used involved looking at number of user actions and the time they took, an approach that was then or would soon become the very useful GOMS model of Card, Moran, and Newell. Bill was a strong supporter of my ideas and at one session where I was explaining how drag worked Bill, by way of amplifying how useful it was, said something like, "And you can use it to open menus, just put the cursor on the top and drag down to the item you want."I hired Bill for Apple, inviting him up from UCSD, where he had been a student of mine. His close friend Bud Tribble, another UCSD student I knew, joined us. Later still Bud was to lead Software development at Next.
Trying to untangle the history is sometimes hard, as in my reference to the work of Card et. al. To see what I mean, here's a bit of background: I had been, in the early 70's, a professor and computer center director at the University of California at San Diego and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) at the now-demolished D.C. Power Laboratory (named for a Mr. D. Power). When PARC was in its first few years I was often a visiting academic there, taking part in discussions and viewing with delight some of the developments going on there; I trust that people there also took pleasure in finding in me someone who was already on much the same user-interface wavelength. I didn't have to be sold on the idea that UI and graphcis were of primary importance to the future of computing. When I joined Apple in 1978 I stopped visiting PARC to avoid any possible conflicts of interest. Given these circumstances I could have learned from Stu Card, Tom Moran or others at PARC the basic ideas of GOMS style analysis, or I might not have run into that work during my visits to PARC. I don't remember, and unless I find something in my files about it someday or someone else recalls a significant event, I will never know if my primitive GOMS-style analysis that helped lead to Apple's adopting my click-and-drag methods was based on their work or not.
"I was the 31st employee at Apple (joining in January, 1978), but I had first met Jobs and Wozniak in their garage in 1976, and told them of the wonderful work being done at PARC. Working on the Apple I at the time, they weren't interested in human factors. While I was the first PARC-savvy person at Apple, Larry Tesler was the first PARC employee to join the company. At first he was strongly opposed to the Mac's easier-to-use mouse methods, and I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use. I had observed that people (including myself) at PARC often made wrong-button errors in using the mouse, which was part of my impetus for doing better." - Source
. . . just like there wasn't much original about what Gates did when he bought the original code from IBM for $50k.
Your garbled history is getting amusing. Gates did not buy DOS from IBM...
The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based computer.QDOS was based on Gary Kildall's CP/M, Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks, QDOS was different enough from CP/M to be considered legal.
Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products. - Source
-ccm
Google Video of "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
It's amazing... the casting is uncanny. Balmer is particularly uncanny.
Complete horse sh*t. Great fame awaits the hacker who can penetrate OS X.
-ccm
You are splitting hairs, and you know it. IBM honcho Jack Sams asked Gates to buy the rights to QDOS from the guys in Seattle. No, Gates did not buy it "from" IBM, but he wouldn't have bought it at all if IBM hadn't asked him to - and if IBM itself didn't want to dirty its hands by buying it themselves (yes, they could have outbid Gates at that time, hard to believe now, I'm sure). That is the famous $50k payment, made right before the release of the IBM pc so that IBM didn't have to worry - haha - about any problems from some upstart software guys. My history is not "garbled," it is correct in its essence, if you want we can all go to an encyclopedia together and quote it at length.
My understanding is that Allen is the guy who knew about QDOS in Seattle, and that the rest was a bluff by Gates to IBM.
And another thing, quoting Apple people about how wonderful and original Apple is/was isn't going to impress anyone. So what if the Xerox system was "prone to error" - it was THE starting point for the modern computer as we know it today. Anyone in the business will admit to that if they are honest. As comedian Fred Allen used to say to critics of his work, "Where were you when the page was blank?"
The only thing proprietary on a Mac is a ROM or two, and the higher UI levels of the operating system. The CPU, memory, hard disks, optical drives, and USB/FIreWire connections are all the same as on a PC. I've upgraded all of these from time to time. Graphics cards are slightly different, but use the same AGP or PCI-X slots as on a PC.
-ccm
What is the page? The corporate R&D boutique or the retail shelve?
Ach!
The word is "shelf," not "shelve," regional dialects notwithstanding.
The "page" was the idea of a mouse, of a computer screen that was more than just a typewriter screen. It was such a revolutionary idea, but at the same time so obvious, it's hard to explain. All you had to do was see it and use it to know how natural it was compared to always typing in written commands. The "page" had Xerox's writing all over it before Jobs ever got involved.
Friday, January 19, 2007
The Mac maker fell a full percentage point to 5.1 percent of the domestic market between the third and fourth quarters of the year, trading places with Toshiba, which climbed from 5.1 to 5.3 percent. Apple remained out of the top five in the world rankings, but a similar set of data released by IDC on Wednesday puts its international share at 2.4 percent.
Shipments of Macs in the U.S. also dipped significantly from 975,000 US systems to 808,000, indicating a genuine slowdown in sales for the Cupertino-based company....
Looks like the trend isn't really on the upside at this juncture.
Now that Dell has signed AMD and is ramping AMD CPU sales the 3% decline they've had may also reverse given that AMD is ramping its output with new fab lines and a 65nm process.
Don't get me wrong however, I'd jump to Apple in a minute if they had apps I couldn't get elsewhere or if they had an OS that was cheaper/superior for my purposes or if Jobs just got his liberal nose out of the air some of the time.
I'm presently dual booting Linux/XP and finding the free Ubuntu OS and the free apps almost superior to MS. Only a few apps remain that only run on MS and may never be ported, especially once the newer CPUS can run multiple OS's at the same time.
Nice save (not).
Gates did not OWN QDOS when he sold it to IBM as MS-DOS. At the time, IBM thought they were dealing with a much larger company than Microsoft was. Gates had written a version of BASIC for the Altair, Apple, Commodore and several other companies, so had a track record, but he had never written an Operating System. IBM approached him as a consultant to discuss what would be appropriate for their soon to be released PC.
He suggested they talk to Gary Kildall about acquiring CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). They did try but Kildall was apparently not available (out flying his plane, it's said) and his wife and lawyer refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Frustrated with Kildall, IBM offered Gates the contract to WRITE an OS. Bill Gates had a contract in hand and had to deliver something he did not own. He had no Operating System. With that contract in hand, Gates licensed Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products.
Basically, Q-DOS was a reverse engineered, simplified version of CP/M. Gates and company then refined and improved on Q-DOS and delivered PC-DOS 1.0. IBM found that, after testing, product contained over 300 bugs in about 6000 lines of code... it also appeared to contain unmodified code from CP/M (vehemently denied by Paterson even as late as 2004) which was a legal problem. IBM demanded a re-write. Gates bought the next version of Q-DOS, 86-DOS outright (Exclusive righs) from Paterson's company and Microsoft hired Tim Paterson to do the re-write. PC/MS-DOS was born.
Was this wrong? Nope. Just smart business.
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