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10-24-2011, 09:01 AM   #1
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Interesting quote from Steve Jobs Bio

When Steve Jobs found out that Bill Gates was preparing to develop a graphical user interface he called Bill Gates down from Seattle...

QuoteQuote:
Their meeting was in Jobs's conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn't disappoint his troops. "You're ripping us off!" he shouted. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!" Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. "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. "
Why? Because both had seen Xerox's ALTO... arguably the first "personal" computer with a WYSIWYG interface. Xerox never really did anything with it while Apple and then Microsoft filled the market void and Xerox eventually abandoned late efforts to recover their early lead.

Mike

10-24-2011, 09:07 AM   #2
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Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Busy Being Born

It took a lot of innovation to make the Mac.

It didn't take quite as much to copy it.
10-24-2011, 10:15 AM   #3
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Except that Steve was copying as well... There are, if you really think about it... very few true inovations in this world. Most things are built on at least a foundation of earlier work.

I didn't post this, by the way, to knock Steve Jobs...
10-24-2011, 10:20 AM   #4
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QuoteOriginally posted by MRRiley Quote
When Steve Jobs found out that Bill Gates was preparing to develop a graphical user interface he called Bill Gates down from Seattle...



Why? Because both had seen Xerox's ALTO... arguably the first "personal" computer with a WYSIWYG interface. Xerox never really did anything with it while Apple and then Microsoft filled the market void and Xerox eventually abandoned late efforts to recover their early lead.

Mike
The difference is Apple paid Xerox to see the Alto, Micro$oft simply stole it. It's also wrong to say Xerox never did anything with it. They released the Star workstation (Xerox 8010 Information System) in 1981.


Xerox Star - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The problem was that it cost $75,000, it was also released the same year as the IBM PC.

Part of the problem Xerox had (other than management not getting it) was that Steve Jobs hired all the best people away from them.


And Steve wasn't copying any more than Xerox was.

NLS (computer system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

QuoteQuote:
Frustrated by the direction of Engelbart's "bootstrapping" crusade, many top SRI researchers left, with many ending up at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, taking the mouse idea with them.



Last edited by boriscleto; 10-24-2011 at 10:41 AM.
10-24-2011, 10:21 AM   #5
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Jobs didn't steal the Xerox GUI. Apple paid for the demo and developed the ideas that Xerox didn't (because a PC wasn't part of Xerox's core business). But Apple and M'Soft and IBM (remember OS/2?) weren't the only ones building multitasking GUIs then. I've abused a zillion GUI packages on various systems, some character-based (including graphic characters), some memory-mapped or straight-to-screen graphic. And most of these borrowed-stole-plagiarized-improved ideas from other builds. I wrote a couple myself. Once you have a function library, it's easy in almost any language.

That's how warez evolve: assemble a toolkit, incorporate whatever nifty ideas (from anywhere) that seem to fit, but fit them together in novel ways. And then someone else reworks those ideas and adds others and builds something else, ad infinitum. Such is life.
10-24-2011, 10:29 AM   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by boriscleto Quote
The difference is Apple paid Xerox to see the Alto, Micro$oft simply stole it. It's also wrong to say Xerox never did anything with it. They released the Star workstation (Xerox 8010 Information System) in 1981.

Xerox Star - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The problem was that it cost $75,000, it was also released the same year as the IBM PC.

Part of the problem Xerox had (other than management not getting it) was that Steve Jobs hired all the best people away from them.
QuoteOriginally posted by RioRico Quote
Jobs didn't steal the Xerox GUI. Apple paid for the demo and developed the ideas that Xerox didn't (because a PC wasn't part of Xerox's core business). But Apple and M'Soft and IBM (remember OS/2?) weren't the only ones building multitasking GUIs then. I've abused a zillion GUI packages on various systems, some character-based (including graphic characters), some memory-mapped or straight-to-screen graphic. And most of these borrowed-stole-plagiarized-improved ideas from other builds. I wrote a couple myself. Once you have a function library, it's easy in almost any language.

That's how warez evolve: assemble a toolkit, incorporate whatever nifty ideas (from anywhere) that seem to fit, but fit them together in novel ways. And then someone else reworks those ideas and adds others and builds something else, ad infinitum. Such is life.
My comment about "never did anything with it" was qualified by "abandoned late efforts to recover their early lead"... which includes the vastly overpriced Star. There are reports that Gates got a look at the Alto too. Also, justifying copying Alto by saying they paid for a demo is like saying I can release a CGI movie called Body Swappers about a planet where there are floating mountains and humans run around in alien bodies just because I paid to see Avatar.

Part of the point here really is that a GUI or even multiple GUIs was inevitable... and being designed to be used by humans, the look and feel is largely dictated by ergonomics.

Mike
10-24-2011, 12:46 PM   #7
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IIRC the agreement for the Jobs-team visit to Xerox PARC was specifically to learn of their blue-sky warez. Not so much like paying ten bucks to walk into a film, but more like paying a million bucks to tour an FX lab to see what's being done that won't be exploited in-house. IIRC the Mac that emerged from the long process that started with the PARC tour didn't much resemble the SPARC system. IIRC PARC'ers didn't complain much that their work was stolen. Some were even hired by Apple, to continue developing what Xerox wouldn't support.

As for cloning Avatar... What, filmmakers plagiarizing plots!?!? How could that happen?!? Y'all are welcome to do your own bastardized remake. Straight to torrent...

10-24-2011, 12:57 PM   #8
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Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: A Rich Neighbor Named Xerox

Rich Neighbor with Open Doors ? Apple and Xerox PARC » Mac History

QuoteQuote:
They showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they’d done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn’t know that at the time but still thought they had the germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.
QuoteQuote:
Apple bought access to the PARC by means of a stock deal that seemed lucrative to the Xerox managers on the East Coast: They might buy 100,000 Apple stocks for one million dollars. Holding this admission ticket in the hand, Steve Jobs, Apple’s president Mike Scott, Bill Atkinson, and a number of members of the developing team marched up. “I think mostly … what we got in that hour and a half was inspiration and just sort of basically a bolstering of our convictions that a more graphical way to do things would make this business computer more accessible.”
That's the payoff, they got to buy 100,000 shares for $10/share. For a one hour demo.

QuoteQuote:
Larry Tesler, who then took part in the demo as an employee of the PARC, had been fascinated by the visitors: “After an hour looking at demos, they understood our technology and what it meant, more than any Xerox executive understood after years of showing it to them.”
Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: On Xerox, Apple and Progress

Last edited by boriscleto; 10-24-2011 at 01:08 PM.
10-25-2011, 07:59 AM   #9
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Those guys didn't earn the nickname "Pirates of the Silicone Valley" a couple of decades ago for no reason.
10-25-2011, 08:12 AM   #10
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QuoteOriginally posted by RioRico Quote
Apple and M'Soft and IBM (remember OS/2?) weren't the only ones building multitasking GUIs then.
There's a tragedy. Microsoft Windows should never have won out over IBM OS2. In 1995-96 I had an OS2 system running a building automation system, plus the usual office tasks. What a sweetheart of an operating system, very user-friendly and rock solid. I don't recall it ever crashing for the entire year I used it. The Windows program on my home system was blue-screening all the time, while crunching far less complex tasks.
10-25-2011, 08:25 AM   #11
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10-25-2011, 08:39 AM - 1 Like   #12
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QuoteOriginally posted by FlashCube Quote
Those guys didn't earn the nickname "Pirates of the Silicone Valley" a couple of decades ago for no reason.
I think that's a different movie altogether.
10-25-2011, 08:41 AM   #13
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QuoteOriginally posted by boriscleto Quote
That is a pretty geeky story.
10-25-2011, 09:14 AM - 1 Like   #14
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I worked at a Computer Mart of Detroit franchise back in the early 80's. We sold 6,000 IBM PCs sight unseen, because of the IBM name... talk about sheep. The funny thing is, no one cares to remember the abuse Apple users took from PC users who were so tied into the IBM reality distortion field that they actually implied the GUI was for sissies. Every Apple user I know of suffered abuse for their platform.

Windows, up to and including 3 and 3.5 were jokes, better than DOS but nowhere near the sophistication of the Apple systems of the day. So yes, Apple and people who owned them actually championed the GUI. And when did PC's ever get plug and play right? Do they to this day have plug and play under control? I am sure Job's dressing down of Gates was completely ridiculous. Gates had asked Apple to develop the GUI for PCs and Steve turned him down. Did Steve really think the whole rest of the world was going to forsake GUI's so he could have more market share, the kind of Monopolist of the GUI world? For all I appreciate what Jobs did with his sense of "staying silly" , he had some serious personality disorder issues in his psychological make up. One of which was taking himself way to seriously. The last thing we need is a book, which also takes him way too seriously. Maybe he was pushed the limits as the "enfant terrible" of the computer industry.. but lets not forget both the "enfant" and the "terrible" parts.

Last edited by normhead; 10-25-2011 at 07:20 PM.
10-25-2011, 10:23 AM   #15
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QuoteOriginally posted by normhead Quote
And when did PC's ever get plug and play right? Do they to this day have plug and play under control?
Yup, mostly.
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