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This article first appeared in the August 2000 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Like the old Wild West, the Internet has it's own collection of myths. As with the West, some are true, some are lies and some have a hint of truth mixed with huge portions of exaggeration and wishful thinking. This was really brought front and center for me last month because I was spending several days near Seattle-literally within walking distance of the Microsoft campus-shortly after Judge Jackson recommended the company be split.
Seattle is an interesting city. Thanks to the boom in and around Microsoft, it has thousands of millionaires and a smattering of billionaires. The city runs on caffeine-even hardware stores have cappucino corners, and every gas station serves three flavors of latté.
The suburb of Redmond, where Microsoft lives, is heaven for a computer junkie. Dozens of little hole-in-the-wall computer stores are scattered throughout the town, and this has led to cutthroat competition. There's no better place to hunt for that huge new hard drive or Ethernet card. It's dangerous for me to wander Redmond with a credit card; all the pieces for my new build-it-myself Linux box made it home. The barb on the hook is that 8 percent Washington sales tax.
So, what does the city that Bill built think about Judge Jackson? While wandering about the hardware huts, I talked with many Microserfs and hangers-on. Surprisingly, the feeling is mixed. Most admit that the days of the wide-open, anything-goes Microsoft are gone. As one of the salespeople said, "Microsoft was broken when they tried to fake the evidence ... boy was that stupid ... I'm sure the judge made up his mind right then!" The Microserfs seem most worried that there seems to be little contingency planning by higher-ups for the possibility they might lose the appeals.
In talking to these mostly late twenty and thirty-something cyber-junkies, it was striking how little they actually knew about the origins of Microsoft and where Windows came from. They've learned their history from the Web, where a largely self-serving mythology has been built up by the Windows crowd about who did what first and who borrowed what from whom. After learning that I prefer Macs, Apple's place in the mythology was explained to me. Here are a few of the more blatant myths I heard.
Myth #1: The Macintosh is a copy of Windows.
This is only believed by a few very historically-impaired people, who have somehow missed the context of the pretentious January 1984 Orwellian hammer-slinging-woman Super Bowl commercial. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who later went on to direct Alien and Blade Runner, and has the same oppressive atmosphere as Blade Runner. Despite the fact it was only shown once on national television, Advertising Age recently called it the " ...best advertisement ever." You can judge for yourself by viewing it via QuickTime (www.apple-history.com).
In 1984, IBM (a.k.a., Big Brother) was the despised competition for Apple in the ad. Windows 1.0 didn't go on sale until 1986, and Windows didn't really take off until 1990, with version 3.0.
Myth #2: Apple stole the Macintosh ideas from Xerox.
This is usually brought up when somebody accuses Microsoft of ripping off the Mac user interface, as if stealing from a thief is somehow more morally justifiable. But, the actual story is far more complicated.
In the early days of Apple, several people were hired who had worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Chief among these was Jef Raskin, who joined Apple as employee number 31 in January 1978. Raskin was a UCSD computer science professor who had spent time at PARC as a visiting scholar. His 1967 Ph.D. thesis, arguing for graphical user interfaces, was entitled "Quick-Draw Graphics System." The set of graphics routines built into every Mac from the very beginning is called QuickDraw, no doubt because of his influence.
The former PARC people began bugging Steve Jobs to go over to PARC and see the Alto, an experimental prototype of a graphical computer. Jobs did so, and was captured by the ideas. He cut a deal where Apple sold Xerox a million dollars of stock at a very good price in return for Jobs being allowed to see the Alto again, along with some Apple programmers.
The Alto was a huge near-mainframe-sized computer with a three-button mouse. It was programmed in an early object-oriented language called Smalltalk, and much later came to market as the $15,000 Xerox Star, a marketplace failure. The interface did have windows and a three-button mouse, but looked nothing like the early Mac. For example, to move a window, the new coordinates had to be typed in, and windows didn't automatically update when they were exposed. There was no menu bar. Ideas like "click-and-drag" weren't there.
For some time, back at Apple, Jobs had been pushing development of a new computer, called the Lisa, meant to be a machine for medium-sized businesses. At the time, the Lisa was being developed as a traditional green-screen text machine. He decreed that the Lisa should have a graphical user interface. Even with the brief peek it had at the Xerox work, Apple was still forced to invent most of Lisa interface itself. Smalltalk was designed to run on a large (for that day) computer, while Apple wrote the original Lisa software in assembly language and Pascal to run on a much smaller machine..
In the midst of the Lisa project, political infighting at Apple took the Lisa project away from Jobs, so he took the concept over to the "pirate" Macintosh project. Unlike the Lisa project, the Macintosh had been envisioned as having a bitmapped screen from its inception. The original Mac, with 128K of RAM had drastically less than the Lisa, so some of the ideas from the Lisa system were again refined and the software rewritten to fit into an even more cramped space. Remember that the original Macintosh operating system, Finder and a couple of programs could fit on a single 400K floppy disk, with room left over to save files. Of course, they had to because, in terribly short-sighted design decisions, the original Macs didn't support hard drives or more RAM.
Judging by my brief turn long ago playing with a Star-which has a much more advanced interface than the Alto-the leap from the Alto to the first Macs is akin to the leap from the Wright brothers to Lindburgh. The Star is slow and the interface terribly clumsy, even in comparison to the original 128K Mac. One reviewer called its performance "stately." It does have the desktop metaphor introduced for the Macintosh and later used in Windows. (Some offices have trash cans while others have wastebaskets.)
Myth #3: A court threw out Apple's copyright suit against Microsoft, and this proves Microsoft didn't copy the Mac when it made Windows.
This does have elements of truth to it, but the story is once again more complicated.
During the development of the Mac, Apple realized the new machine would need software. They wooed Microsoft by showing them prototypes and offering technical help in writing programs. This was an exciting prospect for Microsoft because, as few people now remember, at that time Microsoft only produced an operating system and programming languages. They badly wanted to break into the application programming market. The original Word, Excel and File for the Macintosh came from their agreement. These programs were later ported back to Windows to form the core of Office.
In 1985, when John Sculley was in charge of Apple, Microsoft came back and negotiated a newer agreement allowing them to use certain Macintosh features in their own operating system. At the time, Apple understood that the features were needed so Microsoft could port their programs to DOS. These features were used as Apple expected in Windows 1.0, which was not much more than a program manager running on top of MS-DOS.
When Windows 2.0 was released in 1988, the Mac-like features were blatantly built into the operating system. Apple immediately sued Microsoft for intellectual property infringement. The suit dragged on interminably. Finally, in 1993, the courts ruled that the original contracts between Apple and Microsoft could be interpreted broadly enough to cover Microsoft's use of Apple's intellectual property. Therefore, Microsoft triumphed because the original contracts were too broadly written, and not necessarily because Microsoft didn't use Apple's intellectual property.
The 1985 agreement between Apple and Microsoft must surely go down as the most costly contractual mistake of the computer age. But, in hindsight, at the time everybody believed the real money in personal computing was with hardware, not software. Bill Gates was almost unique in his insight that the reverse was true. Sometimes a sign of genius is being the only one to see the obvious.
Myth #4: Microsoft developed all the major pieces of Windows.
Since the introduction of Windows 3.1 in 1992, every installation of Windows has included a major technology developed by Apple: TrueType.
By 1987 it was clear to everyone developing personal computers that scalable outline fonts were going to be the way text would be displayed. Apple began a project called Bass (because fish can be scaled), and had prototypes available by 1989.
Apple and Microsoft were both annoyed with the prices Adobe was charging for Type 1 fonts and PostScript, so they reached an agreement in 1989 that Apple would supply a font scaling technology called TrueType and Microsoft would create a PostScript-type graphics system called TrueImage.
Apple came through with their side of the bargain by refining Bass and naming it TrueType. TrueType became part of the Mac operating system in 1991 and Windows in 1992. Nothing except a few buggy and slow prototypes were ever seen of TrueImage.
The August 22 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will feature Jane Blake speaking on "How to design your own web page using free software found on the Internet."
Jane Blake has been writing and designing web sites since 1995, with three in operation today. On one, she sells an e-book using credit card transactions. Earlier this year, she was the featured speaker on AOL's Get Published chat seminar entitled, "How to Self Publish." Today, with many years experience in writing, editing and publishing, she is manager of Internet content for a large dot-com. She also teaches Introduction to Macintosh for the Kentucky Career Institute. Jane credits the Louisville Computer Society for a tremendous amount help over the last six years in helping her learn computer skills.
The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
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