Re: Errors in a Microsoft Propaganda Book

["Joshua Bell" <inexorabletash@hotmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> "Windows" didn't really become the norm until bitmapped raster
> graphics became common (that's why virtually all "windows" are
> rectangular ;-).

Even then, it's rather disturbing to look at prototype shells for the 
Macintosh:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Early_Demos.txt

Actually, most of folklore.org is fairly disturbing to me. When the Mac came 
out I was a wee lad of 10. The Mac was (seemingly) so radically different 
from the Apple II's we had at school. 68000 chips, a GUI, 3.5" drive, and so 
on. Relative to the II, the Mac seemed like something delivered by an 
advanced alien civlization.

Reading folklore.org many years later (and with a CS degree and industry 
experience under my belt), it finally hit me that the Mac really was just an 
incremental improvement over the Apple II that got *extremely* lucky - the 
daring move of no backward compatibility combined with about 5 deeply 
intertwingled strokes of genius (built-in monitor, standard mouse, bitmapped 
display, toolbox in ROM, high capacity floppies, elegant GUI design).

The elegant GUI design is perhaps the truly distinguishing feature. IMHO, it 
wasn't until XP that Windows was actually in the running with the in pure 
visual style to the of the 1984 Mac... and I spent most of the last decade 
working for MSFT.

...

On a total tangent, I spent the day (family out of town!) writing an 
Applesoft interpreter in Javascript. Permanently warped my brain, the II 
has.

Joshua