gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (09/02/89)
Is this a blow to Apple?
I assume the lawyer thinks it will be easy to show that Apple has no
monopoly on overlapping windows. I sure hope he's right. If this
court decides Apple has a monopoly over overlapped windows, then Apple
will be every bit as guilty as IBM at trying to unfairly squash
competition. In fact, my opinion of IBM might (for once) rise above
my opinion of Apple (IBM has lately been doing some good things for
the american chip industry).
Obviously, Apple has no monopoly on overlapped windows. They were in
Smalltalk-80, which was publicized in BYTE long before the Lisa was
released. They were in early versions of MIT's Lisp machine. They
were in Perq workstations. They are ALL OVER THE PLACE right now.
It's like trying to grant someone a patent on the automobile, in this
day and age.
Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies