Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

[ChemSleuth@earthlink.net (Dennis Doms)]

In article
<Pine.SGI.3.91r.990626200216.2577229A-100000@tcfreenet.org>, "Greg J.
Buchner" <buchner@tcfreenet.org> wrote:

>On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, www.TwinForks.com ... Eastern LI's Best wrote:
>
>> The movie seemed really accurate to me. Any misrepresentations came
>> because they tried to condense 20 years into two hours -- while
>> making things like GUIs easy to understand for a mainstream audience.
>
>Parts of it didn't really come close to being accurate...especially
>the part about PARC.  Go to <http://www.pbs.org/nerds/qa4.html> and
>look for the 'question' by Jef Raskin...who started the Macintosh
>project at Apple.

The only reference I saw at that site was to Raskin's involvement with
the CAT, which was based more on the principles of his Apple IIe
Swyftcard than the Mac. According to Malone's _Infinite Loop_, the
actual Mac that shipped was too complicated and too expensive compared
to his original vision (pages 254-259, on Raskin's departure).

I played with a Swyftcard years ago. I didn't care for the way it
worked, but I still marvel at the elegant simplicity of the way it
functioned. Raskin definitely thought "outside the box" in terms of
simplifying computer use.

>What it gets down to is: Apple didn't steal the GUI from PARC...they
>were already working on it when the Macintosh team dragged Jobs to
>PARC to show him the GUI.  Jef Raskin also did hit graduate paper
>on a GUI referred to Quickdraw in 1969.  So, how can you steal
>something that one of your employees conceived in 1969...although
>I don't know if he was the first.

The conclusion that Apple had any type of workable GUI before Xerox
seems to conflict with historical context, too. Whether or not the
physical visit to PARC occurred before the Mac project originated,
rumors of the interface could have preceded it (else why would Apple
have *visited* PARC?). And the above paragraph totally blows by the
fact that Raskin *worked* at PARC before he got to Apple. Obviously
PARC had something tangible before Apple did. The burden then becomes
proving Apple didn't base their designs on Xerox's concepts, and I
think that would be difficult.

That being said, there's the less tangible issue about whether using a
previously developed concept is "stealing"; lawsuits over designing
products that "look like" someone else's usually didn't succeed (at
least at that time; remember Visicalc vs. Lotus?). Apple's and
Microsoft's concepts of the implementation obviously differed from
each other and from Xerox's. I think it might be fairer to say they
both were influenced by the overall concepts of the GUI. But I have
never seen something to dispute that PARC was the first to make it
real. (The Mac made it better, and Microsoft made it universal.)
 --
Dennis Doms  ChemSleuth@earthlink.net  http://home.earthlink.net/~chemsleuth
"If Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp, and Monica Lewinsky all worked
              on car lots, I would buy my car from Monica."
            -- Brian Clarke, "Letters", _Time_, April 5, 1999