I've heard many times over the years that Apple got the graphical
interface idea from the Xerox PaloAltoResearchCenter people. A couple of
years ago I saw (?The Pirates of Silicon Valley? -- don't recall) which
portrayed the people at PARC adamently against showing this idea to Steve
Jobs (of Apple). They were ordered by Xerox's Corporate Offices to show him
their graphical developments. He took the idea and developed the LISA and
the Macintosh. Bill Gates (of Microsoft, the young contender at this point
in time) saw (the LISA?) at Apple, if I recall correctly, and began
development of Windows. Copyright rulings were that the expression of an
idea was what was copyrightable in these issues, and Apple lost the suit over
Microsoft stealing the idea of the graphical environment, which they had
stolen from Xerox PARC in the first place.
PARC spawned several seminal ideas over the years. One is ETHERNET, the
foundation ideas of interconnecting computers and how to do it, the
protocols, etc. As I recall Xerox wouldn't support further development so
these people (sorry I forgot the names) took ETHERNET with them when they
left PARC, and continued to develop the protocols.
Xerox blew things several times due to large (read industry dominant)
company "corporate mentality". Xerox had no idea what to do with these
ideas, but they made fortunes for other people and changed the face of
computing.
-Gary-
In a message dated 7/23/2000 4:43:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<<
A nice little thing I once read in a book (don't recall the title, I read
too much :) is that at one time Apple wanted to sue Microsoft for copying
the idea of the mouse-driven graphical interface.
Then, from Palo Alto, Kodak (!!) came up and threatened to sue Apple for
the same thing if they were going on with that. Old film and paper
documents showed that Kodak had been experimenting with mouses etc.
already long before Apple got the idea.
(Could be that I am completely wrong with Kodak as the company, but that
is how I remember it.)
Paul
>>
