suhler@im4u.UUCP (Paul A. Suhler) (04/23/88)
I've heard on this newsgroup that: 1) Apple licensed the icon-based environment of the Mac from Xerox; and 2) They didn't license it; they just copied it and Xerox didn't gripe. Does anyone know the truth? Please cite some written reference, not just "I read it somewhere..." Thanks. -- Paul Suhler suhler@cs.UTEXAS.EDU 512-474-9517/471-3903
ebcs4590@rocky.oswego.edu (Stephen Garrell) (04/24/88)
In article <2662@im4u.UUCP> suhler@im4u.UUCP (Paul A. Suhler) writes: >I've heard on this newsgroup that: >1) Apple licensed the icon-based environment of the Mac from Xerox; This past winter I had an interview with Xerox. While there They showed me their latest work-stationns, it looked remarkably like a Mac. They told me that the Mac was designed by a Xerox employee who quit and went to work with Apple. Along with him went the Xerox secrets. I can't be any more specific than this but the source is extremely reliable. Perhaps you should ask in comp.sys.xerox(?) for more specific information since this was a big scandle at Xerox. Stephen Garrell
gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu (04/24/88)
Many of the advanced PC products aren't just copies of Xerox products,
they're duplications of Xerox technology by former Xerox employees.
When I was at Xerox, I heard
(1) Some ex-Xerox employees helped in the design of the original
macintosh. However, they made quite a few fundamental improvements
(resources) on the way Xerox does things
(2) Other ex-Xerox employees went to microsoft to write MS-Word.
MS-Word is (supposedly) a very close ripoff of the first WYSWYG
editor ever, called Bravo. It's been improved many times, because
Bravo had bugs and actually had a *worse* user interface.
(3) I have heard the same about MS-Windows. The design and
implementation was supposedly aided by ex-Xerox employees.
(4) Of course, the entire company called Adobe was formed by
disgruntled Xerox employees when Xerox refused to release its printing
technology (Interpress) on the world. Adobe invented Postscript
for that purpose.
Xerox is famous for developing great things, and squandering them.
Their marketing, until recently, was completely inept. Also, much of
the research they do is future-predicting. They give their
researchers futuristic machines (for instance, personal DEC-10's 8
years ago, 25MIP multiprocessors today), and ask them to dream up new
things to do with all those extra processor cycles....
Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
{gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}
[An ex-Xerox employee]blh@VLSI.CS.CMU.EDU (Bruce Horn) (04/25/88)
Sigh. I can't believe this discussion is continuining... Neither the Lisa nor the Mac were designed by a single person, contrary to what some people would like to believe. There were quite a few Xerox people who went to Apple (including me--I was the only one in the Mac group) who contributed to the "look and feel" of the Mac and Lisa. When I was at Xerox (1973-1981) there was NOTHING that looked or worked like the Mac or Lisa. The Star was quite different: an improvement on the Mac in some ways, worse in others. Ideas are not stagnant--they evolve, improve, or get replaced by better ideas. The people from PARC who went to Apple didn't suddenly stop thinking about how to do things better; we just moved to a different company. Yes, as a product of Xerox PARC I am proud to say that many, if not most of the important concepts that system designers everywhere are using these days on workstations were created or refined by my friends at PARC. The collective creativity and system design savvy on Coyote Hill Road and Hillview was staggering. However, it was the people at Apple who first took the ideas (adding a few of their own) and put them to work on reasonably affordable computers. I wonder what the folks at PARC are working on now. We're sure to see their ideas on a production machine in a decade or two, and then when everyone else is implementing them on their own machines we can argue about the origins of the concepts again. By the way, take another look at Oliver Steele's list of important concepts and their origins, posted previously. I believe it to be quite accurate. -- Bruce Horn, Carnegie Mellon CSD uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!cmu-cs-vlsi!blh ARPA: blh@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu