<could be made for the Wright Brothers, etc. No invention springs wholly <formed from teh forehead of the inventor, everything builds on previous <innovations. Xerox invented the GUI for all practical purposes. Rather than say "Xerox invented..." I'd say they codified, or otherwise choherently assembled many known concepts into a working system. <planning on inventing an airplane. And besides, the GUI wasn't even a sp <in Apple's eye in 1979, they were just introducing the Apple II+ at that <time! It also forgets the DRI work on GUI kernel (GEM). <The Xerox Star was introduced in May, 1981, and the Apple Lisa 1 wasn't <announced until January, 1983. It shipped in June of that year, more tha <two years after the Xerox. Two years is a freaking LIFETIME in the compu <industry. What is this columnist smoking? agreed! <competitor was Quarterdeck's DesqView, partly GEM too, and some other thi <most people have forgotten like VM/386, not the Mac. Desqview was the leader for a while and rather good as well. <user interface because it was graphical, we did it because it was WYSIWYG <note that the first real Windows app was Aldus PageMaker, a desktop <publishing application. People think Windows was successful because of s WYSIWYG rather than WYGINS (what you get is no surprise) was the driving force. To do that you needed a system that was not bound to hardware and could scale clip and draw or your dead. <interface must be genuinely easy to use and that doing things that way ar <natural. There's this misperception that there's some bad blood between <Microsoft and Apple because they sued us, which couldn't be farther from <truth. When the lawsuit came through, we weren't saying "Those bastards! <we were saying "Huh? Why would they do that to their buddies?" And we I remember the microsoft softcard that was a z80 for Apple that ran CP/M supplied with MS Basic! It was a case of making neat products that worked! If anything it was DRIs lack of agressive drive that made an opening that someone had to fill with DOS and later winders. PS I like most MS products mostly it's their marketing strategies that are a bit suspect and that has little to do with product. Allison