Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 27, 2021

All those Microsoft lawyers couldn’t save Zune.

Hard to imagine that icons, files, folder, etc were all once features so new that they were thought of as exclusive intellectual property

If so it would have been Xerox’s ;)

Microsoft chose the Stones’ Start Me Up to introduce Windows 95 – just for the line “You make a grown man cry”…

…and MS / Apple stole the whole lot from Xerox’s PARC.

And Apple took theirs from Xerox. That is why they lost their suit.

Microsoft renamed Apple’s “Trash Can” the “Recycle Bin.” That made it totally different.

I remember when that happened! I worked with Mac’s, had trouble figuring out PCs, and then a few years later, I glanced at a PC and the display looked like a Mac’s.

Apple hired MS to port Apple’s Office program to Windows. That’s how MS got their fingers on the code.

Don’t worry, Hank — Apple stole it all from Xerox. Everything is fine.

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal” – a quote attributed to Picasso and often quoted by Steve Jobs as part of his self-flattery image. Steve Jobs stole the GUI idea from Xerox PARC. Bill Gates merely copied it from Apple.

(The quote has also been used to flatter Stravinsky, who often stole riffs and other ideas from fellow composers but turned them into something always distinctively “Stravinsky”)

Bill Gates bought Windows from a different programmer for $20,000, who was the guy who stole it from Apple.

Why didn’t Bill Gates start making breast implants? Because he didn’t want to get into a look and feel suit with Dow-Corning.

It seems like only yesterday when the mouse was magic. Wireless meant you were a stand-alone computer and could only play the games you loaded and use the printer you were attached to. All that and still some smartaz would pass you a floppy disk with a virus on it and laugh when your work disappeared.

Yep. Apple drove Digital Research out of business over suing them about the Gem desktop’s trashcan icon. The start of my hate and hate some more relationship with all things Apple.

There are huge differences. For example, it’s called a recycle bin, not a wastebasket.

At one point, I’m sure lawyers discussed copyrighting the QWERTY keyboard layout.

There’s an old story goes something like this…Mr. Gates passes onto the next world and stands before St. Peter, who has a conundrum… where to send him; Heaven or Hell. After all, he helped develop the desktop computer that now lives in every home, but then there was that gawdawful Windows 95! So St. Peter decides to let Mr. Gates check out both Heaven and Hell. He sends him to Heaven first.

After a while, he checks on Mr. Gates who says Heaven’s nice but kind of boring. So, off to Hell he goea, where he finds a nice, clean sandy beach, with some young ladies in nice bikinis… it is a mite warm, though…

St. Peter checks on him again and Mr. Gates says that Hell’s the place for me! So, off to Hell for eternity!

Checking on him a bit later, St. Peter finds Mr. Gates chained to a wall being tormented by demons. Seeing St. Peter, Mr. Gates asks him what happened to the beach and the babes? St. Peter replies, “Oh, that was a demo!”

Bill Gates: Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor – Xerox – who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin’ in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you’re yellin’? “That’s not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first.” You’re too late.

The quote above is from the movie Pirantes of Silicon Valley.

There’s some debate as to whether Bill Gates actually said that or not.

There is also speculation that Apple didn’t take that idea from Xerox PARC. Roberto Santocho says the basis for what would become the Macintosh was designed by Jef Raskin in the 1960s. He also says the mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart, who used it in a demonstration of a GUI in 1968. Xerox PARC was created in 1969

Except Apple stole much from PARC, as Microsoft’s 3,000 Lawyers pointed out at trial.

Was this when they abandoned even the pretense of a DOS shell?

And yet windows still controls 90% of the market because there’s solo much MORE you can do with pc as related to the locked down Mac world.

Apple, of course, pirated its UI from the old Xerox Star office automation system.

Should’a loaded Microsoft Bob… or better yet, Microsoft Bubba…

Apple did not invent the look and feel of its GUI. It used existing design and modified the aesthetic properties. The Atari ST and the Amiga both had GUIs that had all of the features mentioned. XEROX PARC

A story arc to which I can relate.

The last GOOD Microsoft operating system was Windows XP. It was all downhill after that.

Back in the day I saw a Xerox Star. I thought it WAS a Mac. The only difference was no logo in the corner, otherwise the graphics were identical.

I recall the lines at Computer stores to buy Windows 95

Apple stole their “designs” from all over, but they did put everything together in an elegant manner. I used an Amiga in the early- and mid-80s; everything the Mac could do, but in color and with a multi-tasking OS.