On Thursday, January 17, 2002, at 09:39 PM, Rob wrote: > Tis true, Bernard. Apple crawled into a storage closet and blew the > dust off of a cast-off idea that had been turned down by Xerox's Board > of Directors and turned it into the Mac OS we all know so well. >
This is pretty misleading. Actually, during the summer of 1979, Steve Jobs cut a deal with the Xerox Development Corporation whereby Apple got to use their GUI technology and they got to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the bargain price of $10 each. Xerox made a lot of money off the deal and they also got to market a computer called the Star, based on the technology. The Star failed in the marketplace, as did the Lisa, Apple's first try at a GUI computer. Apple went back and rewrote most of the software from scratch to put it in a less expensive box. That's where the Mac came from. A long time ago I briefly used a Star. About the only resemblance to the Mac interface is the mouse. It couldn't handle overlapping windows. There was no menu bar. There was no easy desktop metaphor. The machine was painfully slow. Apple completely reinvented the interface for the Lisa and the Mac. I wish this old canard about Apple stealing the Macintosh interface from Xerox would die. It's always struck me as the self-serving wishful thinking of Windows users who want to say something like "Apple stole it from Xerox, so it's okay that Microsoft stole it from Apple." -- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 22. For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
