4 Nov
2002
4 Nov
'02
10:56 p.m.
"The concept of a point and grunt pictorial user interface is so obvious
and inevitable that it is surely not patentable. After all, isn't
pointing at the pictures and grunting how you order food in a foreign
restaurant?"
- anon at Xerox Parc
Xerox developed many things for which they never asserted ownership.
Thus, they fumbled the future, or at least intellectual property control.
OTOH, both MICROS~1 and even Apple were enthusiastic about claiming
ownership "we stole it from the indians first!"
On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Lawrence Walker wrote:
Something that I have always wondered about is why
Xerox never sued
Jobs ass off for the Mac GUI and also MSWindows which was derrived from
Xerox's 'Small-Talk". They were a major corporation and Apple was quick
enough to disembowel DRI's GEM altho Sam's Atari ST still continued to use
an updated version of the original. MS has also litigated any threat to their
bullying dominance and despite the protestations of the C-64 fans GEOS
(any coincidence there) is obviously a clone of the GEM desktop. The mouse
was also developed at Palo Alto. I have trouble simply accepting that a major
corporation like XEROX was simply a stupid wimp. From all evidence I've
seen Xerox invented the GUI. Something more important than CP/M,
MSDOS, or UNIX. What am I missing here.
Lawrence
lgwalker(a)mts.net
bigwalk_ca(a)yahoo.com