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with its "borrowed" GUI design courtesy of Xerox labs

Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired.

Note also that Apple was invited by PARC to view their research, and a number of PARC employees subsequently moved to Apple to work on the Lisa and Macintosh GUI. However, the Apple work extended PARC's considerably, adding manipulatable icons and a fixed menu bar and direct manipulation of objects in the file system (see Macintosh Finder) for example. A list of the improvements made by Apple to the PARC interface can be read here.

Who else remembers when Panther came out and Apple promised a new Finder? Well, the same words are being used to described the "new finder" in Leopard. Shame on you, Apple.

From TFA:

The changes in Leopard do indicate that Apple has taken a renewed interest in improving the Finder, but motion is not the same thing as progress. For where I'm sitting, it looks like one step forward, two steps back.

Truer words have never been spoken. This guy deserves credit for inventing a vocabulary ("spatial"/"browser") so we can talk about the Finder issues clearly, and cutting through the haze of "new features" to see the underlying problems. How often do you see this level of insight from your typical schwag-drenched tech reviewer?

The problem with the Finder is that, even though most people agree that it's fundamentally broken, it's too mundane to get the high-level attention it needs. In particular, capital-S Steve probably figures most home users will be fine accessing their files through applications, otherwise it would have been fixed by now. But Steve! Remember you were the one who said that saving a few seconds of every user's day is like saving a few lives. Now, Mac OS has an installed base of over 20 million.

New features does not a new Finder make. It may seem like a mundane issue, but now is the time to raise a stink so we can move on from this already. F F T F .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

Solaris CDE was announced in 1983 and is much older than this patent.
The 1980's vintage 512K Macs had something called a desktop switcher, which allowed flipping between multiple workspaces. (I used this as well)
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt&showcomments=1

Bruce Horn and Andy Hertzfeld wrote essays about this on folklore.org.

Horn writes:

As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows. It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the Macintosh design (API's,sample code, etc.) during the Mac's development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their system designers a template from which to design Windows. In contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think.

Bruce Horn and Andy Hertzfeld wrote essays about this on folklore.org.

Horn writes:

As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows. It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the Macintosh design (API's,sample code, etc.) during the Mac's development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their system designers a template from which to design Windows. In contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think.

First of all, Apple was already working on a graphical user interface before they visited Xerox, so they already had stuff like the mouse and bitmapped graphics, and probably some kind of windowing system. Second, I never disputed that Apple took ideas from Xerox. I simply dispute that they copied Xerox's system wholesale and sold it as their own. As I already wrote, you only have to compare screenshots to figure this out.

Straw man. I never said anything like this. Just the opposite: I don't

Oh, yeah, we would have some kind of graphical user interface. Just probably a very different one - whether it would be better or not, nobody can say :-)

Oh, and Bruce Horn and Andy Hertzfeld wrote essays about this on folklore.org.

First of all, Apple was already working on a graphical user interface before they visited Xerox, so they already had stuff like the mouse and bitmapped graphics, and probably some kind of windowing system. Second, I never disputed that Apple took ideas from Xerox. I simply dispute that they copied Xerox's system wholesale and sold it as their own. As I already wrote, you only have to compare screenshots to figure this out.

Straw man. I never said anything like this. Just the opposite: I don't

Oh, yeah, we would have some kind of graphical user interface. Just probably a very different one - whether it would be better or not, nobody can say :-)

Oh, and Bruce Horn and Andy Hertzfeld wrote essays about this on folklore.org.

Does such a project exist yet? If not, why not?

• There's not much demand for it.
  
• Most commercial Mac software exists in Windows, so you can run the Windows versions under WINE in Linux.
  
• Most people who buy a Mac are even less inclined to tinker than a typical Windows user, and therefore much less likely to switch to Linux.
  
• Every Apple computer extends the Steve Jobs reality distortion field to the computer user, ensuring lifelong devotion to the product. I haven't a clue why it doesn't affect you this way.
  

But it's there.

InDesign's H&J system for example is based on TeX's, Adobe having acquired the HZ system from URW which took TeX's H&J algorithm and extended it to include character expansion/contraction and optical margin adjustments. These improvements have been folded into TeX by way of Han The Thanh's (sorry, his name has Vietnamese accents not easily entered here) pdftex (interesting Adobe funded his studies at Masaryk University). His doctoral thesis is available here:

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents21-4.h tml

As regards fonts themselves, while William Donelson's work wasn't TeX, it was quite ground-breaking and influential:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Aliase d_Fonts.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date

And of course, there's the classic meeting of Steve Jobs and Knuth:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Close_Encounters_of_the_Steve_Kind.txt& sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date

William

But it's there.

InDesign's H&J system for example is based on TeX's, Adobe having acquired the HZ system from URW which took TeX's H&J algorithm and extended it to include character expansion/contraction and optical margin adjustments. These improvements have been folded into TeX by way of Han The Thanh's (sorry, his name has Vietnamese accents not easily entered here) pdftex (interesting Adobe funded his studies at Masaryk University). His doctoral thesis is available here:

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents21-4.h tml

As regards fonts themselves, while William Donelson's work wasn't TeX, it was quite ground-breaking and influential:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Origins_of_Spline-Based_and_Anti-Aliase d_Fonts.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date

And of course, there's the classic meeting of Steve Jobs and Knuth:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Close_Encounters_of_the_Steve_Kind.txt& sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date

William

Interestingly enough: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Do_It.txt

Dear PC users,

You fools owe Mac users for everything you have. The great achievements in human history were all the work of Mac users, in spirit if not in fact. Meanwhile, you and your PC-minded forebears fought these Mac users, because PC users are for the status quo. Mac users are all about growing in new directions.

We Mac users said the Earth was round. You didn't believe us. We said the Earth was not the center of the universe. You excommunicated us. We said there were dinosaurs. You said it was a hoax. We said there were cavemen. You still don't have an answer for that one. We Mac users said women and blacks deserved to be equal members of society. You PC users fought us, and killed many of us.

We are the great painters, comedians, writers, playwrights, poets, songwriters, scientists, and lovers. Name me one PC-using legend in human history who was regarded as a good person. Just one. You can't, can you? There are no PC-minded Mozarts—only Salieris. We had MLK. You had Bull Connor. We had Picasso, Warhol, Dali, Da Vinci, Michelangelo. You would have hung a few of these guys for being gay. Where are your artists? You have nothing. No artists. Because you PC users are not creators. You are destroyers.

Most of Silicon Valley and Wall Street's cutting edge is aesthetically intuitive Mac users and Apple fans. The Mac-leaning states account for most of this country's wealth. We have Harvard and the Ivy League. Where are the great PC colleges? University of Texas? Name the great cities of the world that are known for being PC? London, Paris, Rome? Anyone?

You PC users have been a drag on human development since the very beginning. Since Cain (the would-be PC user, always trying to please Daddy) and Abel (the good son, the open-minded son). When you PC-minded folk ruled the world, you hijacked Christianity and turned it into a ritualistic mega-church with a standing army. You massacred millions. There is a reason why that era was called the Dark Ages.

We Mac users countered with the Enlightenment. The Renaissance. It is a fact that all the writers, all the artists, all the great men and women to come from this era were latent Mac users. Many were seen as enemies of the Church and State and would today be enemies of Microsoft. But as always, we Mac users brought you PC-using fools out of the darkness. We dragged you out, kicking and screaming, as usual.

We showed you the wonders of evolution, of science, and you hate us. We are showing you the miracle of stem cell research, the promise that it has, and you want to shut it down. We have shown you the dangers of global warming, whether it's manmade or not—and you still refuse to believe.

We tried to free the slaves. And you fought us. We crafted the world you PC users live in. Your 40 hour work week, getting paid for overtime, no child labor, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid... We created all of it. We created the very world you live in. The art you see, the movies you love, words on the page that stir your heart. And still you fight us.

You PC-using fools would let a simple TV ad stop you from purchasing a product that would probably benefit you. As usual, you cut off your nose to spite your face. Typical. But completely expected. After all, when your heroes are Ballmer and Thurrot and Michael Dell, you must live a sad, hateful life. Anti-everything that makes sense—and pro-everything that doesn't.

I guess that's why you fools support your Vista, even though it makes you less safe. We're fighting malware over there, so we don't have to fight them over here! Genius.

So, continue to hate the Mac users and Apple fans among you. Just be sure to step out of the wa

Do It for the reference.

Ob. Folklore.org on round rects

Maybe I made a mistake, I didn't spot this picture:

http://www.folklore.org/projects/Macintosh/images/ polaroids/polaroids.14.jpg

Tabbed UI, Apple Lisa, circa 1980. Screenshots, story.

Tabbed UI, Apple Lisa, circa 1980. Screenshots, story.

"Stolen from Apple Computer" (whole story)

Here is a story about a game that Bill co-authored:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh &story=Donkey.txt&characters=Bill%20Gates&sortOrde r=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

Sounds like you wish to follow in the footsteps of a legendary hacker (whom I see most days in downtown Palo Alto). His recipe:

Just do it and grow a moustache.

Sounds like you wish to follow in the footsteps of a legendary hacker (whom I see most days in downtown Palo Alto). His recipe:

Just do it and grow a moustache.

Back in high school my first exposure to programming was MacBasic on Mac Pluses. My recollection of it was that it was very user friendly--it adhered to the Mac interface, and if you had a programming error it would not only identify which line it was, but what specifically the compiler was choking on.

Next term they'd been replaced with MS Basic. Its idea of informing you of errors was the line number and "Syntax error" or something similarly vague and useless to a programmer still getting his feet wet. At the time I had no idea why the change was done, but it was definitely not appreciated.

Until then I had no opinion of Microsoft either way, but after using MS Basic my opinion of them soured, and it's been downhill with them ever since.

Then I found out MacBasic had been killed as part of a deal Apple made with Microsoft. Big surprise.

Also, Dashboard is an obvious rip off of Konfabulator, so shut up already about how the sidebar is a rip off of Dashboard.

Actually, Dashboard is a rip-off of...wait for it...Apple's own Desk Ornaments from the original 1984 Macintosh!

Dude, can we just kill the "who did widgets first" argument forever?

Here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt

The idea is from 1980's ferchrissakes. And the dashboard is the best implementation of widgets I've seen. I don't WANT them sitting on my screen. I want press and hold F12 to check things out and I want them to disappear when I release the button. That's what Widgets do.

You sound like a guy who's never used Mac OS X for more than 5 minutes. There's life outside Microsoft bubble and it's pretty vibrant and exciting. Macs just are not what they used to be in mid 90's. Mac OS X stomps all over Vista in pretty much all regards that matter to the consumer (business customers are another story). I pity the fools who are too lazy or stupid to check it out.

This is not the first "Do not steal Mac OS" they've done, although the first version never really got tested in action.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20 by%20Date&detail=medium&search=stolen

History repeating! :D

> it seems that when companies get 'so' big, there seems to be warping of reality for them. i would bet there are some people at microsoft that were very unhappy to admit to this.

Good point, though I would rephrase it as "when egos get too big, there seems to be a warping of reality for them." The first Macintosh team at Apple discovered this when dealing with Steve Jobs, and adopted a Star Trek term to describe this confounding phenomenon:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt&sortOrder= Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

The Reality Distortion Field. Know It. Fear It.

Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.

Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.

The Alto did not have true overlapping windows. However, Bill Atkinson saw the Smalltalk demo, assumed that the windows were indeed overlapping, and then invented Quickdraw regions to take care of it.

From folklore.org:
Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable software.

Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.

Apple has done this before, right? They used to have t-shirts in the old Mackintosh camp that said something like, "90 hours / week and loving it".

T-shirt (sweatshirt) attesting to this. (wonder if the shirt was made in a sweat shop...)

Obligatory Apple reference at Folklore.org.

J

I still think the Bill Atkinson story is the best example of how stupid lines of code is as a metric: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&sortOrd er=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=lines%20o f%20code Chris

I can see that, but it still seems crazy to me. I know that Apple in the early 80's tried to make their developers hit a "lines of code per week" target. But still, when I was learning Python I wrote a 1000-line game in a week, and in my student job at the university I wrote a 1000-line Java tool in a few days (it worked right after a week or two). I guess that, like other posters said, they are rewriting a lot of things.
Still sounds like a stagnated environment to me. I wonder how many lines of code Google developers produce a year?

A bit of a story from the Macintosh

The same attitude towards gaming in the early days is also mentioned in this Folklore.org story of Puzzle, the fun little gadget that shipped with the original Mac.

J

In fact, Apple had this gaming image that was negative for their bussiness. (See the last paragraph of this)
It was in the times of the Amiga. So they fought hard to avoid being seen in the gaming space.

However, since the times of Doom and Quake (ten years ago), there was a big hardware demand for gaming pcs, and being seen as a gaming platform would have helped sales.

Even now, one of the main buying concerns is "would this computer run my favorite games?".

The lack of games for the mac is more about the game developers not wanting to invest in a small market (they are even going out of the PC market because console sales are so much bigger), than anything Apple had done recently about games.

So, that article is outdated by about 15 years.

But it's still important to test those kind of things. A user MAY do that. Apple used to have a way of testing things that was rather ingenious. They used it to get rid of the bugs in the original Mac OS. Check out the story at Folklore.org.

I'll probably get modded down for saying this (who cares? I got karma to burn), but I attribute it to the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.

Basically I think this field extends to customers and potential customers of Apple. Steve Jobs has been successful in convincing people he's never even met that Apple products are superior to everything else, that the hefty price tag all Apple products carry is worth it, that Mac OS X is an open-source operating system, and that Apple can do wrong.

Of course some us seem to be immune to the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. I'm attempting to study what the difference is between people who are immune and those who are susceptible to its effects.

So far the only thing I can figure is that those in the latter category actually believe that they took the word 'gullible' out of the dictionary.

The original Mac OS had them in 1983: history.

Microsoft has always said that the console race is a marathon, not a sprint. However, this initial costly sprint remains important during a period when the company boasts the only next generation system on the market.

A marathon where you're bleeding money for most of the race. Sure hope another company doesn't zip past you on a bicycle or something.

it was also aired (pro bono) by every freaking local news station on the planet as part of a news segment.. and just like the car and coke ads you see today, it was played before the previews at the cinema.

read all about 1984 (the ad, not the book or movie) here

Apple got the cover story because the iMac looked damn sexy - it was different from the vast majority of PCs that came before it.

No. See here.

Why is it the tendency (especially in America) of the masses to sit and talk about companies not in terms of innovation and product quality, or not even in terms of net profit margins nearly as much as in terms of market share and revenue?

People are now on this discussion fussing over whether or not Apple's release of Boot Camp presents a significant threat Dell, the Wal-Mart of computer hardware. Who the hell cares?

I can understand consumer fascination with gross revenues even less than I understand executive obsession with it. Do you think that the CEO of Rolls Royce is losing sleep because they're selling thousands fewer units than Hyundai? More importantly, do Mercedes-Benz owners bat an eye when they see umpteen times as many Fords on the road?

I'll tell you from personal experience that when you own a Mercedes, you don't give a crap what the other guy is driving or why. You didn't buy it for the gas mileage, maintenance or pricetag, either... which are largely the angles on which the majority of cars are sold.

Likewise, Dell is a mammoth and, as someone else pointed out, has to sell zillions of computers just to make money on their wafer-thin margins... just like Wal-Mart.

But let me say something about a factor in the equation you might have overlooked: Ego. Why is it that it still eats at the asses of people like Bill Gates and Michael Dell that Steve Jobs and Apple are still at it?

It might be because Apple figured out how to run a lean and profitable ship, something that is difficult to do... It's much easier to flood the market with crap at low margins, high cost and sell shitloads just by sheer media saturation... just ask any of the major motion picture studios. That's almost all they do now.

A $15 million movie can't afford a Harrison Ford or humongous marketing campaigns, so it damned well better have a great story.

I guarantee you that Mike Dell and Bill Gates are envious of Steve Jobs. Is it the $90 million Gulfstream V jet? Is it the EIGHT BILLION dollars in cash that puny little Apple has on reserves? Is it Jobs reputation as the second coming? Is it the fact that Apple has more pull in the entertainment industry than Dell, Gates and all other IT magnates combined?

In 1997, former Apple Fellow Guy Kawasaki predicted that by 2005, Microsoft would have an operating system on par with the 1997 iteration of Mac OS. He was absolutely right.

It's all of these kinds of things that fry the asses of CEO's who are in love with their own legends. Gates is so insecure that he recently wrote his own article about what he does at work (which just reads like a commercial for bland Microsoft productivity tools), and he signed the byline "Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect"... still touting that made up moniker (if you want to see how hilariously bad a programmer Bill Gates was back when he actually used to write code, read this article) like a young college graduate who's heart is all atwitter after receiving his first batch of the cheapest business cards Kinko cranks out for the falsely inflating (read: meaningless) title of Account Executive.

By contrast, Apple has a brand recognition and appeal that far exceeds almost all other brands across all other industries. But this is not an empty, manufactured status akin to Lexus (which basically rebadged high end $50,000 Toyota Camrys and thus invented a brand). It's more akin to Mercedes-Benz branding strategy. Here's a company that has vehicles that span a price range from $25,000 (C230) to $1.25 million (CLK-GTR). Daimle

Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) is the oldest car company in existence. Apple is the oldest personal computer manufacturer in existence. Both companies' brands are built on a long reputation for bringing numerous innovations to the market and have gradually established themselves a

Suddenly, Ballmer got that twinkle in his eye. For no reason whatsoever, he leapt out of his seat and hurled the chair at Steve. The surprise only shook Jobs for a fraction of a moment as he grabbed a small blue box out of his pocket and clicked a button. His Reality Distortion Field Generator went into full effect, bathing him in a glow of white light. In defiance of the laws of physics and indeed any laws pertaining to the natural universe, the chair was deflected harmlessly and fell to the ground. Rising slowly, Jobs slipped the RDF machine into the pocket of his blue jeans, brushed off his black turtleneck sweater, took a swig from the bottle of water on the desk before sitting back down again to continue the meeting.

A Rich Neighbor Named Xerox

"When Steve Jobs recruited Microsoft to be the first third party applications software developer for the Macintosh..."

The barrier to installing new software is significant. That's why MS could quash Netscape.

The barrier to using another website is not very significant. Unless Microsoft makes IE just not go to www.google.com or something along those lines, they can't do any monopoly leveraging -- they *have* to come up with a superior product.

I can't think of many things that Microsoft might be able to do here. MS does control the OS and your application software. Maybe it could build an initial profile on you based on scanning all the documents in your "My Documents" folder or something, but I don't know how else they could get much of an edge on Google. I guess they can provide faster/easier access to a search text filed -- maybe tapping the Windows button or something will bring up a "search" dialog that goes to MSN.

Possibly MS could provide better content-filtering than Google and then push for litigation requiring search engines to filter content to some degree that Google doesn't.

I still think that MS has a tough battle -- but I admit that there is nobody better in the industry at stabbing people in the back:



And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.

"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.

"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Everybody knows Vista is copying Mac OS X, from the Media Center interface, to the audio subsystem, and to the selection of built-in apps. Well, the author also admitted it, in a special way:

This is functionally similar to OS X's Widgets, which they stole directly from Konfabulator.

Why doesn't he say it in this way:

This is stolen directly from OS X's Widgets, which is functionally similar to Konfabulator.

The risk doesn't need to be financially based. He risked his growing reputation and he risked himself, in a sense, with many of the ballsy moves he pulled.

I'm not a huge fan of Gates. Besides the philanthropy, there's not much to speak highly of, other than he had the personal mix of "what it takes" and was very lucky. I just hate when I hear fellow geeks blast him for being a shitty programmer. It took more than BASIC donkeys to make Microsoft what it is.

Need I say more... (Follow the links, Luke! ;-))