Reply to post: Re: What!

Is Microsoft's chatty bot platform just Clippy Mark 2?

Kepler
Headmaster

Re: What!

"Some years later Apple 'appropriated' Xerox's ideas in the Lisa then and only then did Microsoft think they would have GUI too. Have you never heard of the court case, Apple sued Microsoft for copying their idea - they lost but for reasons other than it being an original idea by Microsoft."

That's partly but not entirely correct.

I do not have the dates handy at the moment, but:

Although Steve Jobs's first visit to PARC did take place before Bill Gates's first visit there, it is a matter of record that future Microsoft employee Charles Simonyi gave Gates a guided tour of PARC before Jobs ever spoke to Gates (or anyone else at Microsoft, but it was Gates to whom he first spoke) about Lisa or the Mac.

Even on that score, my memory of events is a bit rusty. I don't believe Microsoft was ever told ahead of time about the Lisa, nor asked to write software for it; just the Mac. The Lisa was pretty-much a closed system. But the key point is that Gates and Allen and Microsoft as a whole were already at work on a GUI-based "operating environment" of their own before anyone from Apple ever said a word to anyone at Microsoft about any of Apple's own desires and intentions in this regard. There's even a photograph somewhere that shows them working on it, outlining the details on a white board.

This might be the photo, but I cannot tell for sure at the moment, in a hurry:

Gates and Allen in the early days

Microsoft's original internal name for the project was "Interface Manager", and that might be what appears in the upper right-hand corner of this picture — I can't make it out.

(Looking again, I think it just says "window manager", in which case it is a reference to the functional component of the overall system or interface rather than to the contemplated name of the new product in its entirety. The word "window" looks faded or partially erased, which is why it's so difficult to read.)

.

Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews include both the photo and all of the pertinent dates (sometimes only approximate, but still pinned down enough to establish sequence) in their book Gates, which if anything is a mildly hostile biography, but in fact is pretty-much fair throughout.

(They take every opportunity to present facts that make Gates look bad, but at the same time they are careful to document everything and not overstate the case.)

.

(Every other item on the white board in the photo makes sense in light of the detailed discussions presented in the book of what Gates, Allen and Simonyi had in mind for Microsoft, and for the suite of applications recycling the same interface that they were planning to offer, based on the word processor that Simonyi had written when he was still with Xerox PARC. Including the idea of enabling it to run on multiple processor architectures, and offering it through multiple vendors. There was a lot of talk about pseudo-code in that section of the book, as they hoped to write all their applications to an interpreter, and then just port the interpreter to each new platform supported.

Rather importantly — and I know it makes a difference — I do not recall whether this photo was taken before or after Jobs first spoke to Gates about the Macintosh. I suspect it was after, but the fact remains that Gates had already seen all the cool stuff at Xerox on his own, and was already at work on his own effort to copy Xerox before Jobs ever said a word to him about this stuff. I don't think Gates even knew before Jobs told him that Jobs had seen all the Xerox stuff too!)

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