On Oct 6, 2011, at 7:38 AM, LAR wrote: > On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:19 AM, Raymond E. Feist <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> On Oct 6, 2011, at 6:25 AM, Anestis Kozakis wrote: >> >> On 7 October 2011 00:04, Mat Fisher <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> I'm pretty sure the lovely research team at Xerox invented the graphical >>> user interface:) >> >> And Xerox management saw no use for it so the research team gave it away for >> free. Same with the mouse. >> >> Not free. Xerox still gets an annual royalty from Apple. Not as big as >> they'd like, which they went to court over and lost, but they get paid. >> Best,R.E.F. >> ---- >> www.crydee.com >> Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by >> stupidity. >> >> >> >> > > That is why I used the term Acessible - yes most of it came from Xerox > Parc - but it was Jobs who not only recognized the potential but made > it affordable for the home user, with a system that cost 1/5 of what a > PC system with equivalent power cost. > > Oh as to the 2nd story, I was kinda there for that part of history. > > A) Microsoft was much larger than Apple - as MS-Dos, etc was the > dominant operating system. More, MS came out with their first Excel > and graphical version of Word as the first business apps available on > the mac. HELPING Jobs and apple break into a market that had pretty > much ignored Apple before. There was a race between them and Lotus > (Makers of Lotus 1,2,3 and Symphony at the time). > > B) Windows was based on Topview by IBM, it was THEY who imposed > restrictions on Gates, making him wait a full year before he could > introduce Windows 1.0. TopView was IBM's answer to the Mac. > > Larry > >
The period when I was speaking of, when FlightSim was still their cash cow, there was a lot of overlapping stuff going on. Later, at IBM, for example, the PC division was at war with the OS/2 division and PC won. I'll never forget at E3 one year sitting with the OS/2 team guys in the coffee garden at the hotel while the PC division crew was in the lobby waiting for the limos that Microsoft was sending over to take them all out for a killer dinner. At that time I was using OS/2 on my first PC and found it klunky, but better than DOS. I asked the gang at IBM what they thought their future was, and they said, "Bleak." To sum up, as it was told to me, Microsoft was doing ZERO for OS/2, only the absolute minimum that Apple and IBM required in the original contract. Apple wasn't doing much more, given they saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that Microsoft was going to pour all their energies into Windows trying to develop a "Mac killer." IBM didn't get it, and repeated demands by the OS/2 group that the PC group be brought into line were ignored. I have wondered from time to time how different the PC market would have been had Microsoft and IBM been serious about OS/2. At the point I used it, it was nothing more than a very slow stupid Mac wannabe, but who knows how it would have turned out. Anyway, Topview was part of the code swap during the early OS/2 integration of the three companies, and as I recall, that 1 year for competing products was simply to force Microsoft into working hard on OS/2. As Windows 1 was pretty much a beta and over a year away, ,they had no trouble singing that. I am hazing on the details, but as I recall, Microsoft made the big push into GUI with Windows 3.0. The timing of all the consent decrees and covenants not to compete, etc. are vague and I'm don't have time to go do research. I just know that as of today, Apple won in significant ways, Microsoft did very well by themselves, and IBM never got the PC market, not even today. Best, R.E.F. ---- www.crydee.com Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity.
