[Richard Kimball]

Very true. Most people don’t know, or choose to forget, that Jobs and Woz (the Apple founders) originally stole the GUI idea from Xerox Park.

This has been posted at least a hundred times on FR and shot down at least a hundred times. Apple paid $100K for a four hour demonstration of the Xerox GUI. Xerox knew what they were doing when they gave the demo, and knew that Apple was making a computer with a GUI, and that this was the reason they wanted the Xerox demo. There was other compensation involved. Swordmaker has all the details, but Apple did not "steal" the GUI from Xerox.

[The_Victor]

This has been posted at least a hundred times on FR and shot down at least a hundred times. Apple paid $100K for a four hour demonstration of the Xerox GUI. Xerox knew what they were doing when they gave the demo, and knew that Apple was making a computer with a GUI, and that this was the reason they wanted the Xerox demo. There was other compensation involved. Swordmaker has all the details, but Apple did not "steal" the GUI from Xerox.

The fact that Xerox has not tried to sue Apple is the clearest indication that the GUI concept wasn't technically stolen. But that doesn't change the fact that idea wasn't Apple's (could not be copyrighted by Apple) and therefore couldn't be stolen from Apple by Microsoft, as alleged in Apple's lawsuit.

[chris_bdba]

Yes very true my brother works for the big X corp and says that in meetings where the bigwigs come in this still comes up somestimes as this is their biggest scr*w up and no one ever wants to repeat it.What they could’ve made off of that if they hadn’t have sold it so cheap!

[highimpact]

I know you’re right. “Steal” was a poor choice of words on my part. They took the idea from the GUI creators at Xerox. Not much of a difference when it comes to being the creator of something, or being the beneficiary of something that was already created, which (by the way) is the topic of this post.

I’m a Mac user. And no, I didn’t steal it :)

[Swordmaker]

This has been posted at least a hundred times on FR and shot down at least a hundred times. Apple paid $100K $7,000,000 in pre IPO common stock for a four two eight hour demonstrations of the Xerox GUI. Xerox knew what they were doing when they gave the demo, and knew that Apple was making a computer with a GUI, and that this was the reason they wanted the Xerox demo. There was other compensation involved. Swordmaker has all the details, but Apple did not "steal" the GUI from Xerox.

There. Fixed it for you, Richard. Mostly right. Just had a few details wrong. ;^)>

[Tribune7]

Swordmaker has all the details, but Apple did not "steal" the GUI from Xerox.

Very true. OTOH, the question as to whether MSFT stole MS-DOS from Gary Kildall is a bit more open