wildstar128 wrote:
Apple boys and the Billy boys went back to there camps and worked on similar projects. Whether or not they stole from each other, they both were essentially stealing from Xerox.
No. Apple was not.Apple was explicitly *invited* by Xerox (because it wanted those booming Apple shares) to come and visit PARC.
And they *knew* Jobs was interested in doing something with their GUI idead because he basically told them so (they didn't really want to market it itself - developing the cheap pc hardware for it would've been a major undertaking, since Xerox wasn't a computer maker). Also, several Xerox engineers went over to Apple to develop their ideas further.
To quote Steve Wozniak:
Quote Start ---- Q from E-mail: Woz, Did you feel wrong stealing outright from Xerox, and what did you think when Microsoft stole from Apple? (..) Thanks, David WOZ: Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright. Quote End ----
If you remember Lisa and the Mac - they both essentially are essentially Xerox's GUI OS written for the 68000. As a matter of fact, Apple were quite open about there "piracy".
Of course they were. In the Lisa docs they even *explicitly mention* the Xerox Smalltalk GUI *by name* as their direct inspiration. They wouldn't have done that if Xerox had threatened them with a lawsuit for stealing, would they?
(Besides, everybody + dog seems to think it was Xerox which invented the whole graphical/mouse thing of controlling a computer with the Alto from 1973. In fact it was Engelbart and SRI since 1963, culminating in the famous 1968 demo, so if anything, Xerox was taking other people's ideas itself.)
Microsoft written there own version of the Xerox GUI OS for an Intel. Its hard to tell if they were taking from each other on the process.
Take a wild guess: Windows 1.0 came out more than a year *after* Lisa hit the market (1985). It also imitated several design ideas that only the Lisa had, like pull down menus and a menu bar - and it even had a "file/view/special" menu implementation, just like the Mac (from 1984).
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/microsoft/windows10/page_02.htmIn short, Microsoft did steal (as in 'borrow without permission', because it was not invited), Apple basically did not.
Regards, Ruud