Revisionist history?

[David Schwartz]

The mouse was invented by Doug Englebart at Xerox. 

The first window-based system was the Xerox Star, created at Xerox PARC in the late 70’s. They built around 1000 of them, but didn’t know how to sell or service them. 

(I even saw some around 1982. They were piled on a cart at a company after being pulled off the floor, being prepared to be returned to Xerox.)

Steve Jobs took his team to Xerox PARC in 1980 or so to get a look at the Star, which the folks at PARC were quite happy to show off at the time.

From this, Apple created the Lisa, which never made much headway in the market. Lisa was built on Unix.

Then they built the Macintosh and released it in 1984.  The Mac had a proprietary OS built around a graphics library that was embedded in ROM. I don’t recall what language they used, maybe C, except C compilers at the time were very expensive, so they may have used something else.

MS was FAR behind them. And IIRC, X-Windows didn’t show up comercially until the late 80’s, and it was very expensive as well.

And lest anybody forget, MS purchsaed a company that built a Unix variant called Xenix, and they actively developed and marketed it for sevral years in the early 80’s. They even got a bunch of VARs to port their SCO Unix accounting packages over to Xenix. (SCO was the leading Unix platform for small businesses at the time.)

When I was working at Intel in the early 80’s, we were developing a networking stack for them, being as Intel had just introduced the Ethernet chip which was going to revolutionize networking. (Unless you asked IBM, in which case the whole world would soon be running Token Ring networks rather than CSMA/CD-based LANs.)

They obviously saw GUI-based interfaces as the wave of the future.  While I cannot say for sure, I suspect they decided to base their GUI platform on DOS because it was their own proprietary platform, whereas Xenix at the time required royalty payments to be made to Bell Labs since it was derived from Unix.

Linux didn’t start making any significant inroads until the early 90’s, IIRC.

-David "The Tool Wiz" Schwartz



On Aug 6, 2014, at 1:27 AM, Eric Oyen <eric.oyen at gmail.com> wrote:

> whats even more interesting, MS didn't even invent it. they "appropriated" it from a man in seattle for all of $50,000. It was originally called QDOS (Quick and dirty Operating system).
> 
> In fact when you get down to it, MS "appropriated" rather a number of items from others (like the mouse from 3M). They didn't even invent the windowing interface (the X desktop existed in UNIX long before 1985) and used CDE). THey only reinvented it for MS-Dos (as well as being the subcontractor for apple when they coded the windowing interface for the Macintosh). ABout the only things that MS did well were a complete office suite and SOme server side applications.
> 
> So yes, they have tried to bury Linux, obfuscate where they got a lot of their ideas from and generally been greedy and seeking total control of the OS market. Even to this day, I still will use either a mac or Linux (both have built in accessibility). Windows is too much a pain to properly deal with as a blind computer user (and the accessibility software to make windows work for me is just too damned pricey).
> 
> -eric
> 
> On Aug 5, 2014, at 8:16 PM, George Toft wrote:
> 
>> Nowhere in the article does it say Microsoft wrote/created MS-DOS.  The only error I can see in there is that MS-DOS did not ship on IBM PC's in 1981.  It was just called "DOS" - MS-DOS came out with version 2 when Microsoft changed the OS to a license model and then deployed their own for the clones.  My memory may be getting a bit scrambled as that was over 30 years ago.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> George Toft
>> 
>> On 7/30/2014 2:36 PM, techlists at phpcoderusa.com wrote:
>>> 
>>> I just read a bit of it and it appears to be not as factual as when others are saying.  For instance M$ did not create DOS.  They bought it.
>>> 
>>> On 2014-07-30 15:22, Michael Havens wrote:
>>>> http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/history#T1=era0 [1]
>>>> 
>>>> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>>>> 
>>>> Links:
>>>> ------
>>>> [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/history#T1=era0
>>>> 
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