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Here is the cure for your ignorance concerning the alleged theft by Apple of the Xerox GUIs:

As for Nokia, they are, as other posters have noted, trying to hit up Apple with more stringent terms than other companies. Apple wants to be treated fairly.

Luckily for Apple, he regained his seat on the board and the rest is history....

The ceo before him towards the end was responsible for the majority of the things that went right with apple after his immediate return, these things take time and companies don't do a 180 overnight it takes planning etc.

So there goes your theory of Job's "extremely controlled experience".

You make it sound like I was implying it was a bad thing? I sure don't like it but the apple fans love the level of control apple puts on it's products, it has always been beauty (with jobs defining what that is) over function.

As for how controlling he can be, here are a few examples

I don't know about you, I consider crap like that to be rather controlling, plenty more stories where those came from on folklore.org, the more you read the more you'll see about jobs' personality

Luckily for Apple, he regained his seat on the board and the rest is history....

The ceo before him towards the end was responsible for the majority of the things that went right with apple after his immediate return, these things take time and companies don't do a 180 overnight it takes planning etc.

So there goes your theory of Job's "extremely controlled experience".

You make it sound like I was implying it was a bad thing? I sure don't like it but the apple fans love the level of control apple puts on it's products, it has always been beauty (with jobs defining what that is) over function.

As for how controlling he can be, here are a few examples

I don't know about you, I consider crap like that to be rather controlling, plenty more stories where those came from on folklore.org, the more you read the more you'll see about jobs' personality

It's hard to reconcile the Jobs that created NeXT, ported it to Macs, and kept building more goodies on top with the hacker-hostile control freak Jobs that released the iPhone.

Jobs has always been very hostile to all forms of user choice, as demonstrated here I loved the apple 2, but the mac was just rediculous.

Apple and more specifically jobs has never been tinker happy at all, he has always been about an extremely controlled experience that suits his taste. example

It's hard to reconcile the Jobs that created NeXT, ported it to Macs

Ah but you see, jobs has always been an extremely good businessman that tries to get the most out of his employees, Mach/BSD already existed when NeXTStep was being made, they essentially just made a new user interface. The openness came from the code they utilized that other people had made, so no surprise.

He only concedes control when it is necessary for a business move that will bring great advantages (adopting existing unix technologies etc) The moment he thinks it would bring significant profit to disabling all user choice in os x, it would occur. But thankfully I doubt that would ever happen.

It's hard to reconcile the Jobs that created NeXT, ported it to Macs, and kept building more goodies on top with the hacker-hostile control freak Jobs that released the iPhone.

Jobs has always been very hostile to all forms of user choice, as demonstrated here I loved the apple 2, but the mac was just rediculous.

Apple and more specifically jobs has never been tinker happy at all, he has always been about an extremely controlled experience that suits his taste. example

It's hard to reconcile the Jobs that created NeXT, ported it to Macs

Ah but you see, jobs has always been an extremely good businessman that tries to get the most out of his employees, Mach/BSD already existed when NeXTStep was being made, they essentially just made a new user interface. The openness came from the code they utilized that other people had made, so no surprise.

He only concedes control when it is necessary for a business move that will bring great advantages (adopting existing unix technologies etc) The moment he thinks it would bring significant profit to disabling all user choice in os x, it would occur. But thankfully I doubt that would ever happen.

This is my understanding of the issues as well. There's a great story on folklore.org about the design of the memory support for the original Macintosh. Bill Burrell, a hardware designer, wanted to support 512 kilobytes of memory although only 128 KiB was economical at the release time. Steve Jobs disagreed; he wanted to sell the memory upgrade to customers in a completely new computer and demanded the extra memory lines be removed from the design.

In the end, Bill Burrell went ahead and added the lines anyway, but I'm sure he eventually got a good verbal abuse from Jobs for it.

As someone who read the legendary Inside Macintosh (1983 draft; I still have it) cover to cover before even touching a Mac (some time around 1985), I don't understand this contention that the original Mac was "closed" to developers. The *case* was not easy to open, but the programmer model was not locked up in any real way. Almost from the beginning, Apple offered assembler- and compiler-level toolsets. Initially these were Lisa-hosted, simply because the Mac porting hadn't been done yet. I personally used Macintosh Development System (1984) and Whitesmiths C in the very beginning, before reverting to Pascal for a while, using powerful toolchains such as TML and Lightspeed Pascal. Consulair C was available in 1985.

From the first moment, third party developer tools sprang up like kudzu around the original Mac, most of them cutting edge in some way. Many innovative development technologies were pioneered on the Mac: interpreted Pascal with a sophisticated GUI (Mac Pascal), Object Pascal and MVC systems (MacApp), Neon, 4GLs, incremental compilers (Lightspeed/THINK/Symantec C), etc. Does anyone even remember that in the 80s, Apple pushed out several full releases of their own Mac Smalltalk-80 system, which Squeak is now based on? (Harvey Alcabes, I remember you.)

And few now remember that the Lisa itself, despite appearances better described as a "minicomputer" than micro, ran about six different operating systems, including UCSD P-system and XENIX, and had several full-fledged language systems from Object Pascal through COBOL and Fortran.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve Jobs said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

source

A lot of Raskin's ideas never made it into the Macintosh.

You may be interested in the folklore.org website, particularly this story.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&topic=Software%20Design&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

This anecdote sums it up quite nicely. Now all we need is a few more of those and we have data :P

And, yes, I do realize Apple stole the GUI from Xerox...

Actually, no. Apple traded their stocks for a day with Xerox engineers which had to show them what they've done. And they've done very little compared to things that were in the first Mac GUI. I.e. overlapping windows.

Things like these are documented on Apple's folklore site.

See him then, see him now - Steve Jobs: Good artists copy, great artists steal . The Apple building flying the pirate flag. Sounds like Jobs, and much of Apple, was against patents and copyrights when he needed ideas, inspiration, creations, works. If you have any doubts, see "pirates of silicon valley". They all stole lots of stuff. Even in open source there are lots of "stolen" concepts, if not code. So far all is good. Enter The Law, rewarding/financing system, and social mores, in their current state, and let the problems begin... we need new ones.

Yes, Bill Gates did write code. As a matter of fact, Andy Hertzfeld (who was part of a little startup called Apple Computer) has a story about some code Bill Gates wrote.

Hands up if you would actually consider using a graphical interface without a task bar.

You mean a wm/desktop environment?

The application menu in System 7 was the evolution of the System 6 switcher and the OSX dock is an improvement the concept. Openbox and other lightweight WM's install without a taskbar. I have one machine where I've removed the xfce tasklist, relying on minimised application icons instead (Minimised apps icons are the only use I have for the desktop).

It doesn't seem so easy.

"No matter how much resolve you could muster, it was still difficult to quit Apple if Steve wanted you to stay. You'd have to sit down with him for a reality distortion session, which was often effective at getting people to change their minds. One day, a few of us were talking about strategies to overcome Steve's persuasiveness."

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

One has to wonder how Steve Jobs ever let Jon Rubinstein leave."

Simple - by forcing him to report to Steve Jobs.

Jobs probably just told him "You don't matter as much as you think you do, anyway."

Not as true as you think: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

You mean the Apple that paid Xerox for the rights AND then wrote from scratch the drawing routines (important parts that weren't even done on the Xerox PARC stuff, but the Apple people thought it was done)?

http://vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/creation.html

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

Apple's "closed-ness" and overpricing due to monopoly on hardware is the reason I'll never buy one of their products. Their profits are so off the charts not because they move a lot of products, but because they charge people way more than their products are worth. Their marketing machine isn't good for selling poor products (the products are good) their marketing machine is good for convincing you to pay almost twice as much as you should. Backlash just like Microsoft experienced several years ago isn't too far off for them unless they make big changes.

What's more, I like Palm's approach to all of this. Hey Apple, Palm just stole your pirate flag!!!

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Pirate_Flag.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=pirate%20flag

Back in 1982, Bill Atkinson also found it hard to measure progress by lines of code: "-2000 lines of code"

Mac-F4? What the hell does that do?

It's called the command key, and it predates the windows key. IIRC, the original Mac didn't have a control key, it was added along with arrow keys to the Mac Plus keyboard.

Thanks, Doug!

Slashdot Tue Dec 09, 2008: The Mouse Turns 40
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/09/163205

Wikipedia: Douglas Engelbart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

Wikipedia: The Mother of All Demos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

and of course,

Folklore.org: 118 stories about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it.
http://www.folklore.org/index.py

Even Steve Jobs approves of Easter Eggs:

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

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt

were you thinking of this? Steve forced the removal of the diagnostic port from the original Macintosh because he thought it could be used for augmenting the system. X_X

Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot.

But Burrell was not that easily thwarted. He realized that the Mac was never going to have something called a slot, but perhaps the same functionality could be called something else. After talking it over with Brian, they decided to start calling it the "diagnostic port" instead of a slot, arguing that it would save money during manufacturing if testing devices could access the processor bus to diagnose manufacturing errors. They didn't mention that the same port would also provide the functionality of a slot.

This was received positively at first, but after a couple weeks, engineering manager Rod Holt caught on to what was happening, probably aided by occasional giggles when the diagnostic port was mentioned. "That things really a slot, right? You're trying to sneak in a slot!", Rod finally accused us at the next engineering meeting. "Well, that's not going to happen!"

Actually-- Apple used to use focus groups. I don't know if they do this anymore-- they do seem to design for The Steve's taste-- but the original user testing was very influential in developing the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. There's one story about it here at folklore.org. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have completely discarded the HIG for Mac OS X.

If you don't know about programming, how exactly are you going to measure output? The incompetent guy is producing more code than everybody else (because he's inefficient) and checking off more bullet points than everybody else (because he works on little stuff, and his output is buggy).

When you have non-techie managers you end up with stories like this. Apple is very lucky that the managers realized how stupid they were being with Bill Atkinson, rather than firing him for insubordination or for being unproductive.

Folklore.org is full of great stuff.

Quality beats schedule? Only to a point. Real artists ship.

It's just a matter of time until geeks wake up and start hating them. Oh, and don't claim you hated Microsoft prior to 1995, you know it's a lie. Everyone wanted to be Bill Gates back then, he was the noble knight/geek taking on the world and bringing down empires like IBM and DEC with his accessible to all consumer computers. It was only after Linux came on the scene that geeks turned on him like the fickle fashionistas that they claim they aren't.

I don't know where you get off speaking for me or anyone else. I started off completely neutral on them when I got my first computer in 1991, but considering it was a Mac, it was perhaps inevitable.

My first foray into programming was MacBASIC, on a Mac Plus at school. It was friendly to new programmers, not only breaking on the line causing the error and giving the error type, but also what specifically the error was--much like Firefox does today with Javascript errors. IIRC it even went as far as to suggest fixes to the problem.

The next grade up used Microsoft BASIC--and its error messages were just shit compared to MacBASIC. My favourite was "Syntax error" and the line number. Fast forward 15 years... gee, Internet Explorer's Javascript error handling is just as useless!

I'm not going to argue the merits of MS BASIC and IE forcing us to actually think and learn; bottom line is that compared to MacBASIC and Firefox, Microsoft's do-the-minimum-we-can-get-away-with mentality grated on me.

Then I learned Microsoft's role in killing the superior version. Then they foisted Office 6 for the Mac in '94--a bloated piece of garbage so slow, you could supposedly run the PC version under Windows emulation faster. A whole bunch of little things formed a pattern and coalesced into an avalanche of negative perception against them.

So I *know* I hated Microsoft well in advance of their Windows 95 launch, thank you very much--and Apple advocates have just as much reason to hate them as Linux ones. Bill Gates was never a hero of mine--by the time I learned who he was, the company he was in charge of had already been tainted in my eyes.

I don't know about anyone else, but one of my pet peeves about Windows is how the desktop appears but the machine isn't actually ready for me to do anything at that point, even though it looks like it is. That's when people get frustrated and start clicking furiously on things because the computer seems to be ignoring them, and then they end up with eight instances of IE opening at once when the computer finally decides it's ready to acknowledge user input. What's the point of the desktop showing up if the computer is not ready? It's like a tease.

I remember reading years ago that Gates was complaining about when in the boot process the desktop appeared (I think this was during the development of Windows 95). He felt that having it show up when it did made Windows feel slow. As a result of his complaining, the developers moved the appearance of the desktop up in the boot process. It seems to have remained that way all the way through XP and Vista. Anyway, I think this was supposed to show Gates' attention to details most people would ignore, but I always thought it showed that he cared more about appearances than having the shit actually work correctly-- it was a lot easier to just have the desktop pop up early and be useless than to figure out why Windows was so damn slow to finish its boot process and do something about it. Certainly makes me think that the "If you can't make it good, make it look good" quote that gets attributed to Gates all the time is legit. It also draws a contrast with another story I read about the development of the original Mac, which Google has shown me can be found here.

Another of my Windows pet peeves is how the hard drive will start thrashing for an extended period of time, for no apparent reason, even when the machine sits idle with no programs open. And it's not because of malware or anything like that, I've seen it on freshly-reinstalled machines not connected to a network. I'm one of those people who likes to know why my computer is doing something, and that mystery drive thrashing has always driven me crazy.

~Philly

It isn't about Microsoft itself, or its applications and operating systems.

If you'd bothered reading it, you'd have seen it does touch on these issues.

And for the people who think this isn't genuine, Gates has always written like a child.

The one important story from folklore.org that's relevant to this article, shows that being grossly underpaid was even prevalent during the early Macintosh days.

They date from the Macintosh development days, but the stories on http://folklore.org/ give the impression that guys like Andy Hertzfeld were driven crazy by Jobs, but would still follow him to hell and back.

For recognition, how's getting to sign the case mould for the Macintosh? How much salary would you give up for that?

Grist for the mill anyway. The man is a slave driver, an egomaniac who steals your ideas and presents them back to you as his own and apparently possesses a Reality Distortion Field , but people love the experience of working with him.

They date from the Macintosh development days, but the stories on http://folklore.org/ give the impression that guys like Andy Hertzfeld were driven crazy by Jobs, but would still follow him to hell and back.

For recognition, how's getting to sign the case mould for the Macintosh? How much salary would you give up for that?

Grist for the mill anyway. The man is a slave driver, an egomaniac who steals your ideas and presents them back to you as his own and apparently possesses a Reality Distortion Field , but people love the experience of working with him.

I've met the man, and he's a jerk. But since I'm an Apple Zealot, I always thought of him as our jerk. And as you pointed out, this is not exactly a secret. There's a wonderful site called Folklore.com, created by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original creators of the original Mac OS and Apple Employee #435. The site is filled with plenty of stories about Steve, of course, but my favorites are the ones about the other engineers, such as those about Burrel Smith.

At the end of the day, however, Steve Jobs is the face of Apple, the figurehead. He couldn't have achieved Apple's current success without thousands of people supporting him, but Apple couldn't have gotten to this point without him either. Remember that the Board of Directors was considering selling the company off when Jobs returned to the company in in 1997.

I've met the man, and he's a jerk. But since I'm an Apple Zealot, I always thought of him as our jerk. And as you pointed out, this is not exactly a secret. There's a wonderful site called Folklore.com, created by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original creators of the original Mac OS and Apple Employee #435. The site is filled with plenty of stories about Steve, of course, but my favorites are the ones about the other engineers, such as those about Burrel Smith.

At the end of the day, however, Steve Jobs is the face of Apple, the figurehead. He couldn't have achieved Apple's current success without thousands of people supporting him, but Apple couldn't have gotten to this point without him either. Remember that the Board of Directors was considering selling the company off when Jobs returned to the company in in 1997.

Steve Jobs seems to agree.

That is nothing compared to what happenned with Mac Basic. This is an early case of Bill Gates bullying another company with gross tactics.

OTOH, Apple's been around for nearly a decade longer than Dell, and people have been predicting Apple's demise since before even Dvorak began his torrent of verbal excrement. And yet, Apple has managed to persevere and surprise all of us over and over again. You may not like Apple, but you can't deny that they know how to weather ups and downs. Steve Jobs seems especially good at getting people excited about even their mundane products. I think Dell should be looking at Apple.

You're misinterpreting my point. I don't believe Apple should simply cater to the whims of a single user.

I do believe that every customer's opinion counts, and Apple ought to believe this as well. The problem is, they have consistently followed their own path and been perplexed when some customers dare to suggest that one size doesn't fit all. Apple makes great products. They just can't see that some users (often large groups of users) really do know what they want, and won't be satisfied just because Apple tells them how great the product is.

Apple has a long history of pooh-poohing the needs of its users, developers, and retailers. If you don't see this, I can't help you.

Read Andy Hertzfeld's anecdote What's a Megaflop? if you want to see how out of touch The Steve was with his customers' needs in 1984 - and in many ways still is today.

Wrong on both counts.

Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and was shown around. Having paid (in stock), he was allowed to "pick one of three", and went for the GUI. Apple developers then did significant extra items on top of Xerox's work (partly because they mis-remembered what they saw; some things like overlapping windows hadn't been worked out by Xerox, although the devs thought they had seen them)

http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/Apple_Computers.htm
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance>The AIM Alliance was an alliance formed in September 1991 between Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture.. In other words, there was never any Atari "exclusivity"

Wrong on both counts.

Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and was shown around. Having paid (in stock), he was allowed to "pick one of three", and went for the GUI. Apple developers then did significant extra items on top of Xerox's work (partly because they mis-remembered what they saw; some things like overlapping windows hadn't been worked out by Xerox, although the devs thought they had seen them)

http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/Apple_Computers.htm
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance>The AIM Alliance was an alliance formed in September 1991 between Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture.. In other words, there was never any Atari "exclusivity"

It's possible those spaces are for the emotionally handicapped.

Bill [G.] looked down on Steve [J.] because he couldn't actually program.

Apple has a history of hiring awesome writers. This is fairly typical of Mac documentation.

Nobody really believes that Mac people like Macs because they have 3d accelerated drop-shadows on everything. That's just at attempt at rationalization. And of course there have been Mac people long before it was licky-shiny.