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The Birth of the Apple Lisa
Ton writes "People think Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, but it's much more subtle than that. Braeburn has posted a story about the development and birth of the Apple Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical interface. More on this subject at Andy Hertzfeld's (one of the original developers of the Mac) site Folkore.org."
The Xerox Star was commercial product. It was marketed to Executives, not average folks. Cost was something like $10,000 (in 1981), if I recall correctly.
It's sort of funny that people make such as big deal about the GUI, when in reality the laser printer was (and still is) equally important. Guess who invented the laser printer? Hint... it starts with a X...
So you're asserting Apple stole Xerox's stuff, when right there in the text you quoted it says otherwise. Did you even read it? Allow me to repeat. Read just the bold parts:
Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology.
That looks like a pretty clear quid pro quo to me. Do you think the Xerox people who made this deal were idiots? Do you think they didn't know the probability the Apple people would take and build upon the things they saw at PARC-- things the Xerox suits had no plans to put into products of their own?
I suggest you watch Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds"-- one of the people interviewed is Adele Goldberg, a former PARC staffer. In her interview, she explained that she made it clear to the Xerox suits what was likely to happen if the Apple people got their tour, and refused to give any demos to them unless they Xerox suits directly ordered her to do so. Which they did. The rest is history.
~Philly
While Apple engineers were certainly inspired by PARC, to say they stole belittles the desktop innovations they did: Pull down menus, overlapping windows and a desktop trash bin.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.
That's true, but no reasonable person would be surprised that the Apple people would be influenced by the stuff they saw at PARC. My theory is that (at the time) the Xerox suits saw no value in what was being developed, and thus saw no harm in letting Apple see it. If they thought it was valuable, they would never have let the Apple contingent in the building. Instead, they probably thought they were screwing Apple by getting virtually free money out of their investment, in exchange for letting Apple see worthless, unmarketable crap.
Eventually Xerox sued Apple
Well, sure, after realizing in horror that they gave away the keys to the kingdom. No matter how much money they made on their investment in Apple, it would have been dwarfed by what they could have made if they had fully exploited the GUI themselves.
Apple never tried to argue in that case that their tour of Xerox entitled them to any rights, by the way.
Well, that goes back to my first point. Nobody could reasonably expect the Apple people to not be influenced by what they saw. Short of erasing their memories after the tour a la "Men in Black," if you want to ensure they won't be influenced by the stuff, you don't let them see it.
And though Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple, I can only assume there were no NDAs covering the visits, either-- those would have been a potent weapon in the lawsuit, had they existed.
~Philly
You can spin things however you want, but Apple's case against Microsoft wasn't thrown out because the court didn't acknowledge "look and feel", but rather because a contract between Apple and Microsoft essentially granted Microsoft rights to various aspects of the interface. http://home.earthlink.net/~mjohnsen/Technology/Law suits/appvsms.htmli bliography/93-12html/93-12.ps
Many people don't understand the concept of "look and feel" and focus purely on the appearance of the interface. If you read the article, you would have noticed the point that the Alto's interface was very difficult to use, whereas the Lisa team made usability the primary focus for their interface. While they might have looked similar (overlapping windows and desktop metaphor aside) they had a very different feel. By contrast, Microsoft took much of the "feel" from the Lisa and Macintosh ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-B
Interesting concept of steal: From TFA (which you no doubt read before offering your incisive wisdom):
Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted, and gave Steve and a team of engineers from the Lisa project a tour of the technologies at PARC
Is any one else tired of hearing this shit about how Apple ripped off Xerox?
Actually, industry observers and commentators up until 1990 frequently said that the graphical interface was a bad idea. Check out the press from that time and you'll see arguments that GUI's are too slow, childish, disrespect the expertise of users, and reduce productivity because they take your hands off the keyboard.
And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level. Try booting one up in Win 2.0 some time...
BTW, a huge chunk of what we now consider standard interface stuff was invented for the Mac, such as the file interface.
Windows 3.0 users did NOT "need to upgrade" to intel 386 based machines (which were several years old by then - not NEW as you state) because Windows 3.0 in 1990 supported 3 modes.
- Real mode (which ran on just about anything x86 available)
- Standard mode (which required an 80286 or above processor)
- 386 Enhanced mode (which, obviously, needed a 386 to run) and took advantage of all those "Advanced CPU" features you claim weren't supported in Windows until five years and 3 versions later.
Really, if you're going to make it up as you go along, let people know it's just fictional ranting.