Re: Apple II-Or Come on people, It's a 20 year old computer

["Andy Kessel" <akessel@aol.com>]

Just to clarify a little history, Apple did not steal the lisa/mac user
interface from Xerox, they paid Xerox quite a bit of apple stock for the
priveledge of using it, more that I can say for the scumbags at Microsoft.

Andy

"Paul Schlyter" <pausch@saafNOSPAM.se> wrote in message
news:8ippuu$de6$1@merope.saaf.se...
> In article <395042D8.F250D99A@wanadoo.nl>,
> ruud.dingemans <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl> wrote:
>
> >> I've never seen a more impotent computer than the Apple Lisa....
> >
> > Hey, a bit more respect for the grandmother of all modern personal
> > computers, ok.
>
> FYI: the majority of today's modern computers did NOT evolve from the
> Lisa.  Many people frown on this, but "the grandmother of most modern
> computers" happens to be the IBM PC.  Reality isn't always as
> exciting as some would like it to be.
>
> > It may have been a flop at the time because of cost, but it started a
> > revolution nonetheless.
>
> No it didn't.  The original idea was stolen by Apple from Xerox, so
> Lisa wasn't the original computer with a GUI.  And the Lisa was
> simply too expensive to start a "revolution" on the market -- the
> Macintosh did that.
>
> That won't leave much of a revolution to the Lisa, right?
>
> > (Besides, this thing had some *cool* hardware specs that the Mac
> > didn't have at the time.)
>
> Possibly -- I never immensed myself into the architecture of the
> Lisa.  I noted that, besides being expensive and slow, it also broke
> a tradition from the Apple II:  the Lisa, and later the Mac, were much
> more closed systems.
>
> The tradition of being an open system was carried over by the PC line
> of computers (Apple advocates sometimes describe this as "the IBM PC
> stole many ideas from the Apple II", but as we've already seen, Apple
> too stole design ideas).  Ironically, IBM itself tried to change this
> to closed systems, when they introduced their PS/2 line of computers.
> And today few people use PS/2 computers, and IBM is almost gone from
> the PC scene.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> And, yes, I'll give the Lisa and Mac another credit: they spawned a
> religious war which was to last for over a decade, about which was
> the "best" computer.  This war even raged on within Apple, and in the
> end it killed the Apple II line of computers some years earlier than
> it otherwise probably would have died.  It became particularly
> pathetic when people advicating the Mac, Atari and Amiga got together
> to hotly debate *which* GUI was the "best"....
>
>
> Today, things have calmed down a bit: all modern computers use a GUI
> of some kind.  The Mac has "opened up" a bit (I think), and it can
> even read standard diskettes instead of using its own weird low-level
> diskette format (which means only software add-ons are needed for a
> Mac to read a PC diskette, or a PC to read a Mac diskette).
>
> And of course everyone are hooked up to the Internet nowadays, which
> means differences in diskette formats no longer really matter much.
> And the Internet was invented neither by Apple, nor by IBM or Microsoft...
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
> Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
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>