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Subject: Xerox and MacOS ( 23 of 41 )
Posted by CrazyOne

I like what DNA said up there, pretty well sums up what I think about OS choices. There's no point in persecuting people who don't like your OS of choice, because obviously their OS of choice works well for them or they wouldn't choose it.

Anyway, Xerox and the MacOS. This is somewhat of a myth, debunked by some of the people who were working in both places (Apple and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC). It's true that Jobs and some others visited PARC in I guess 1983, sometime not so long before the release of the original Macintosh. They saw a system in development which used a mouse and did some rudimentary windowing. But what's left out of the story is that Apple was already pretty far along in their development of a graphic user interface (GUI). What they saw at PARC was possibly some reinforcement for what they were doing, not an idea which they copied wholesale. (This is a simplified description from memory.) For example, if I recall the ideas of pull-down menus as well as icons didn't exist in the Xerox system. Those are pretty basic parts of the Mac OS.

At any rate, the whole idea was pooh poohed for plenty of time after the Mac's release. I just recently saw a quote from John Dvorak in 1984 saying in regards to the mouse "There's no indication people want to use this sort of interface device." Heh. This is like Gates saying "No one will ever need more than 640K" or the chairman of Digital in the early 70s who said "No one will ever want a computer in their home."

Couple of funny insults (sorry, I simply *must* share this with someone ;-) :

"Never ask a man what sort of computer he drives. If it's a Mac, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?"
-- Tom Clancy

Windows 95: 32-bit extension to a 16-bit patch of an 8-bit OS originally developed for a 4-bit processor by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition.

And finally, in reference to this whole OS argument:

It was a typical Usenet argument -- a mob of people smashing furiously at a point on the ground where, six months before, there had once been the decayed remains of a dead horse.

;-)
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