🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <danpop.807548756@rscernix>, Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) wrote:

[...]
>And Apple copied somebody else's work.

Apple did it, in part, by hiring the people from PARC who were doing the
work there.  I have mixed feelings about this, but at least to some extent
I believe that ideas should be allowed to go with the people who think of
them.

Also, there was a rumored exchange of money (and stock?) between Apple and
XEROX in the early '80s.  I remember the speculation at the time was that
this was enough to protect Apple.

[...]
> And Apple
>isn't the first company to come with a commercial product with a GUI.
>Apollo Domain had it before the Mac.  Apple was the first with a
>product targeted to the mass market.

Don't confuse Apple and Mac.  There was Lisa before the Mac, and the Lisa
was sold (starting in '81 I think) at the same time as the XEROX STAR
office system.  I first saw the Apollo system much later, in '83 or so,
just months before the Mac and well after the Lisa.  Of course all of
these earlier systems were quite expensive.  The Lisa was about $10K I
think.  Even a 64KB, 8/16-bit CPU, floppy-disk IBM PC was over $3500 at
the time.  The first Macs we bought in '84 were about $1500, had 128KB
memory (later the fat-Macs had 512KB), a 16/32-bit CPU (the same M68000 as
in a Sun workstation at the time!), built-in networking (essentially
unknown in the IBM PC world at the time), and it came bundled with WYSIWYG
word processor and paint programs.  The Mac Plus came out in '86 I
believe, a contemporary to the 286 based PC-AT, and still even at that
time, Macs were arguably cheaper and faster than the IBMs.  It was only
after the clone companies started taking advantage of the 386 and 486
machines a year or so later that it could be argued that PC iron was
cheaper or faster than the Macs, but by that time Apple had moved to full
32-bit addressing, while DOS still had its 640KB limit.  I thought the Mac
II's in '87 where the first machines that were arguably overpriced.  And
yes, there was a Windows at that time for PC iron, but nobody really
cared, did they?

>Has Apple sued MIT for X or OSF for Motif or DEC for the VMS GUI?

They did kick around Digital Research when they tried to sell their
Mac-alike (GEM wasn't it called?).  I don't think it made it to the
courts, but DR did change things so that it didn't look so much like the
Mac.

And didn't someone else try to sue MIT over the idea of a backing store
for refreshing overlapped windows?

Also, these other GUIs still do not offer the consistency of the Mac
interface.  I run Motif on unix machines, and some applications look
pretty Mac-like (Mathematica for example), while others blaze their own
unique trial.  And X was designed originally with too much of a
dumb-server/smart-client point of view; it was designed primarily by DEC
people with the idea of having dumb X terminals talking to smart VAXes. 
It is only more recently with workstations that this network-based system
has been coerced into a single-machine user interface.  If memory and CPU
prices had remained as high as they were in '84, perhaps that is how we
would now be using X.  But they didn't, so the smart graphical server (ala
Mac if you want to give Apple the credit) is now the norm rather than the
exception.  The problem is that we're still waiting for cheap workstation
software, and Mac software, now like PC software, isn't so cheap anymore.

$.02 -Ron Shepard