Does this guy not know how to spell "Alto"? ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Christian Liendo [christian_liendo at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 12:56 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Wired Article, On Jan 19, 1983 Apple unveils Lisa http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/01/0119apple-unveils-lisa

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote: I've always heard the story told the way the article reads... that apple stole from xerox and microsoft stole from apple, who sued microsoft, etc. I'm always left wondering why xerox didn't stomp on both of them. brian

Oh, none of that is in dispute. The question implicit in Ian's comment on the article was whether the writer left out the Alto from his story or not. (I think he did, but that he doesn't even know that he did.) One thing that I did notice the writer got completely wrong and forgot to comment on: The version of Windows that caused the suit was *not* v1, but v3. Windows v1 was a tiling text interface on top of MS-DOS, and looked not the least like anything from Apple or Xerox.

Without necessarily disagreeing with your premise, there are some very noticeable similarities in v1 already, though. One example is the Get Info pop-ups, very Mac OS in spirit, never to be seen again in future editions of Windows. Neither Windows 1 nor 2 sported proportional typefaces yet, either, which contributed to them feeling like "text" interfaces. One book that debunks many of the myths/misconceptions surrounding the entire Xerox/Apple/Microsoft debacle is Michael Malone?s excellent *Infinite Loop. *Very recommended. Marcin

You?re correct. I should have clarified that I meant the window chrome/UI, not the content fonts in applications. Mac OS?s and other GUIs default system fonts were typically proportional, which helped them distance themselves from text-based UIs. Windows sat uncomfortably in the middle until v3. :) Marcin

On Fri, 22 Jan 2010, Chuck Guzis wrote: Certainly, in software, not in text mode.. The regular Hercules MGA could do 720 x 348? graphics, and there were drivers for Ventura, Windows 3.10, PCPaint, etc.

Maybe Xerox's lawyers were smarter and recognized that a 'look and feel' lawsuit was stupid. (The fact that later decisions legitimized the 'look and feel' theory to some extent does not change my opinion that it is stupid precedent.) After all, think about the Intel vs. NEC suit over the V20. NEC created a chip that "looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, etc." NEC was found faultless because they did not copy Intel microcode or masks: they built their own "duck" that looked and quacked the same way. In even less guileful fashion, both Apple and Microsoft took ideas arguably available from Xerox's publications and demonstrations and built their own products upon them. I have always considered Apple's suit against Microsoft to have been a nuisance suit pure and simple, but then IANAL.... -- Ian

Only thing though... Xerox actually got something for the access they gave the Apple engineers... namely 100000 options of common Apple stock. It's not as though Apple stole the concept outright. And in other cases, former Xerox engineers ended up proliferating the GUI concept when they left to work at other companies aside from Apple. And of course the GUI concept wasn't first done on the Xerox Star... previous to Xerox's implementation the NLS had a lot of the same design paradigms. ________________________________ From: Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wed, January 20, 2010 2:27:41 PM Subject: RE: Wired Article, On Jan 19, 1983 Apple unveils Lisa Maybe Xerox's lawyers were smarter and recognized that a 'look and feel' lawsuit was stupid. (The fact that later decisions legitimized the 'look and feel' theory to some extent does not change my opinion that it is stupid precedent.) After all, think about the Intel vs. NEC suit over the V20. NEC created a chip that "looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, etc." NEC was found faultless because they did not copy Intel microcode or masks: they built their own "duck" that looked and quacked the same way. In even less guileful fashion, both Apple and Microsoft took ideas arguably available from Xerox's publications and demonstrations and built their own products upon them. I have always considered Apple's suit against Microsoft to have been a nuisance suit pure and simple, but then IANAL.... -- Ian