Windows 7 borrowed 'look' of Mac

news. ^ | Friday, 13 November 2009

[Swordmaker]

Apple stole everything from Xerox.

No, they did not. Apple had been working on a GUI for two years before the visit to Xerox's PARC for which they paid about $7 million in common stock for the rights to use what they learned. No theft occurred. The Apple interface was significantly different from the Star interface and included the top menu bar, submenus to menus, drag and drop, the trashcan metaphor for deleting files, and draggable windows which did not exist in the Star interface.

[Swordmaker]

Another one of these PING!

Windows7 "borrowed" from Mac Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Let us not forget Xerox."

Which was paid handsomely in stock options in return for sharing their innovations with Apple, and which received not a dime, as far as I know, from Microsoft.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Apple stole everything from Xerox."

A pervasive lie. Xerox made out like bandits on the stock received in return. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29

[Poser]

Every programmer takes the knowledge that is currently in use and tries to improve upon it. It would be stupid to do otherwise.

[I see my hands]

[Paladin2]

"Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds."

There's apparently more to the story.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"There's apparently more to the story."

Of course there is. The fact remains that Apple paid Xerox. Xerox, seemingly motivated by Apple's success at marketing technologies it had sat on and Apple's suit against Microsoft, tried to get more. But (as is Xerox's habit with many things) they had waited too long and missed the opportunity.

Years ago, my father bought a real-estate property that he had a buyer for. He did not mention to the seller that he'd immediately sell it to another party for a profit. This is called flipping. There is nothing wrong or unethical about it. My dad had merely done a better job of mining the marketplace than the owner did. People do the same thing at garage sales and antique shops all the time-- find something of unrecognized value, buy it for a song, and resell it for a profit. If I notice a Ming vase at a garage sale, buy it for $1.50 and sell it on eBay for $50k, did I steal it? Nope.

Saying Apple "stole" anything requires willfully ignoring the millions Xerox made in the incident. It might be safe to say that Steve Jobs pwned them in the deal, just as Bill Gates pwned Seattle Computer Works when he bought for $65k what he flipped to IBM as PC-DOS, setting himself on the path to becoming the world's richest man. Was that theft, or simply savvy negotiation?

But there was no theft on Apple's part. Them's fightin' words.

[Starwolf]

I used a Star for several years. Its level of integration has never been reached by any other platform, though Office is starting to get there.

[6SJ7]

Talk about ahead of his time! Here is a website with the complete audio/video presentation of Doug Engelbart from 1968!! 40 years ago, and he's demonstrating using a mouse, cut & paste, and hypertext. Wow! 40 years ago the standard means of interacting with a computer was a punch card deck and a line printer. This is amazing!

[Swordmaker]

"Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds."

No... the lawsuit was instituted by a Xerox CEO who was new to the company and did not know the history of what had transpired. It was dismissed when Apple presented the signed agreement in which Apple gave Xerox 1,000,000 pre-IPO share of common stock for the rights to use what they learned at two 8 hour show and tell meetings at PARC. But even that evidence was deemed moot because the statute of limitations had long since expired for Xerox to bring such a suit.

[TheBattman]

Huh? I didn’t read anyone “crying” - simply reporting what someone directly tied to MS and the release of Windows 7 said about the interface. Period.

You are the one playing crybaby... Trolling is really a lame sport. Maybe you should take up a different form of entertainment.

[antiRepublicrat]

I used a Star for several years. Its level of integration has never been reached by any other platform, though Office is starting to get there.

It was a pretty high-end deal. Of course what do you expect for $100,000 1981 dollars for the server and $16,000 each for the workstations. It would have been interesting to see what could have happened had Xerox had some business sense in the computer market.

[Porterville]

Do you need a tissue?