[vox] Gates on Linux & Sco

[Edwin P. Groot]

     From what I read of "Fire in the Valley", Xerox sued Apple in the late
80s because the GUI was Xerox PARC's invention.  In late 1979 Steve Jobs
exchanged a million $ of Xerox investment in Apple for a special tour at
PARC of the Alto computer's GUI and other inventions.  It was after that
tour in 1981 that Jobs decided to put a GUI of overlapping windows, icons
and a mouse to directly manipulate screen elements, in the Lisa project,
and later the Macintosh project.  The Lisa came out in 1983, and the Mac in
1984.  Xerox lost the lawsuit for details I don't know, but one important
thing was there was no transfer of technology from that tour - just
inspiration from seeing a GUI.
     All makers of alternative GUIs had not seen the developments in Xerox
PARC, but were inspired from seeing the Lisa and the Mac.  These came out
between 1983 and 1985, and included IBM's Topview, Digital Research Inc.'s
(DRI) GEM, DSR's Mondrian, VisiCorp's Visi On, and Microsoft's Windows.
GEM's ver. 1.2 Desktop looked spookily like a Mac on a PC - down to the
white menubar at the top, drive icons on the right side, a trashcan on the
bottom right, overlapping windows and a dithered monochrome desktop.  Apple
sued DRI over 'look and feel' and forced DRI to change its desktop in the
next version of GEM.  Only two non-overlapping windows were allowed, for
instance.  When Microsoft replaced its brain-damaged and gawky Windows 1.03
with Win 2.01 in 1988, Apple sued Microsoft over 'look and feel', but lost
even after extending the suit to Win 3.0 in 1991.  Microsoft protected
itself back in 1985 by threatening to stop application development for the
Mac unless Apple licensed key elements of the Mac OS to Microsoft.  It all
goes to show that the dominant PC GUI won not by quality, but by how they
managed their business.
     BTW, GEM survived as part of the ROMs in Atari STs, and as the
graphics library for Xerox's Ventura Publisher.

     Edwin

At 11:37 PM 7/27/03 -0700, you wrote:
<<<schnitt>>>
>This kind of reminds me of a question I was gonna post earlier tonight...
>Why didn't Xerox go after Apple, Microsoft, Commodore, Atari, the X
Consortium, etc.,
>for GUIs.
>
>
>I read the book "Dealers in Lightning," but it was a couple of years ago,
so my
>memory is hazy. :)  The rumors I remember hearing, though, was that Apple
was going
>to go after MS and others for stealing the windows/icons/mouse idea, but
Xerox
>came down on Apple about it.  Were they (Xerox) hands-off with the other
companies
>out there making GUIs???
>
>
>-bill!
>
>-- 
>bill@newbreedsoftware.com                           Got kids?  Get Tux
Paint! 
>http://newbreedsoftware.com/bill/       http://newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/
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