Sure he isn't.
Posted on 04/08/2019 10:37:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
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And eating IBM’s lunch in the process!
“But it was always exciting because we were on a mission to prevent totalitarianism.”
Pompous ass. Are those the placards you have hanging in those slave factories you all operate?
>Hmmm, I’ve met Jobs, Kawasaki, and the Founder of 4D. They’re not >evil, but just people trying to figure out the next thing to do. I liked the >founder of 4D best. ;-)
Didn’t say anyone was evil. I just consider Guy to be a dim bulb. I used to have lunch with Jobs a few times a year in Palo Alto. He had tried to get me to NeXT (I told him, I would never want to work with him) and then when he returned to Apple (same reason).
I do remember having a business meeting once with Laurent, and specifying my company’s requirements, and his 4D would not scale to our needs.
“Xerox had it on a mini. We sold them in our store”
I thought maybe they did. That’s interesting, what store sold Xerox minis? Comp USA? I still contend they really didn’t know what they had and they sure as hell did not how to market it.
The Dod apps I am familiar with were not so much designed beforehand as they are just results of years of change requests and feature adds by scads of contractors who come and go over the years leaving a mess of conflicting code styles, conventions, and basically bloated and out of control.
Holiday Computer Center off Elm St. Mr Holiday owned the store. He was a hobbyist.
“Apple didn’t invent the GUI. Xerox did many years before.”
Beringians discovered America first. But it didn’t matter until Columbus showed up.
I was being sarcastic. Your comment is more correct, but less fun. :P
That Dilbert comic reflects truth about some clueless bosses. Happened to me decades ago when I went to work as a systems engineer for an outfit. Hired as a junior engineer despite having experience but a manager wooed me away from another outfit with promises of advancing. First day, asked my supervisor what it was that he wanted me to work on. Guy got hostile, saying “I need to tell you?”. I said “Just a general direction, tell me what tasks are mine.”. Guy walked away. For the next month I dived in and began fixing software and improving everything, ran circles around their senior staff. All the supervisor did was play games and I realized the place was run by clueless idiots. Supervisor quit after a couple months, and no one missed his absence. By the way, I met Kawasaki a long time ago and have an autographed book from him.
If you ever saw the Xerox GUI work you would see a clone of the old Mac down to the 1 button mouse, toolbar and, menu. Nothing wrong with that. History gets things wrong sometimes just like your analogy.
Not even close to true, Okie.
The Lisa and Mac GUI is really quite different from Xerox’s SmallTalk GUI. They bear very little relationship to each other and share ZERO code at all, Okie.
Apple engineers on their PAID eight hour (sixteen if you count Steve Jobs previous eight hour visit) visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center were permitted take no notes but allowed use any concepts they saw which they found useful. That’s all.
Apple invented draggable active visible multiple layered Windows, nested relocatable menus, live drag-and-drop icons, both vector drawn and bit mapped matching typographic style calligraphy font systems, WYSIWYG display, the Waste Basket / Trash Can file deletion metaphor (later stolen by all other GUIs — some called it a "recycle bin"), and many other features of the accepted features of today’s GUI paradigm. None of those were developed by Xerox. Xerox SmallTalk was in many was GUI that relied much more on keystrokes.
Apple’s development of these GUI features and functionality are well documented and dated as pre-dating all other work on such features with photographic evidence showing the progress. The fact is that Apple invented and developed its own GUI, which was quite different from Xerox’s GUI. False claims to the contrary are just that: false. Another fact is that many of the engineers from PARC went to work at Apple on the Lisa and Mac projects.
Xerox Star office mini-computers sold a basic GUI installation for approximately $50,000. The Apple Lisa sold for ~$10,000, and the Macintosh sold for the same price (over Steve Jobs’ objections and advocacy for a $1695 price) as the 1984 IBM-PC with one floppy drive and a green screen monitor of $2495. No other GUI computer was available for less than the $50,000 Xerox star. That was revolutionary. Now add the Apple laser printer and you’ve got desktop typesetting with pre-press editing, on-screen WYSIWYG, and the ability with Adobe type font to go to actual high definition print typesetting output which is why Apple bought 19% of Adobe. That was revolutionary, and reinvented the publishing industry.
So was Thomas Edison.
Seems to be a prerequisite...................
As I recall, basic starting price was around $75,000, but to be truly useable was more like $100,000. . . After adding workstations. Later they got it down to around $50k.
I have heard that Elon Musk is the same................only time will tell if it works in his favor............
the Macintosh sold for the same price (over Steve Jobs’ objections and advocacy for a $1695 price) as the 1984 IBM-PC with one floppy drive and a green screen monitor of $2495. No other GUI computer was available for less than the $50,000 Xerox star.
In short, Jobs did for GUI computing what Henry Ford did for automobiles.Ford hired a consultant to estimate the market for automobiles. The consultant came back with a number, and Ford asked his basis. He was told that that was how many people he thought could be hired as chauffeurs! Which was completely irrelevant to Ford’s vision of automobiles operated by the general public.
Likewise with GUI: Xerox saw the market for computers in grossly static terms, but Jobs’ vision was a GUI on every desk (and not just at work).
The lesson is to ask, “How low would the price have to be before you would be a buyer?” And ask yourself how close you can come to that target. If you’re off by a country mile, you have to forget it. If you can come in at twice the bid price, now you are in a negotiating position.
I sprung for an Apple IIc in 1984; that was as much as I could talk myself into spending. Would have loved a Mac at $1695 . . .
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