>"Apple was hurt by MS's outright theft of Apple's GUI design,...
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>Jerry,
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>This statement always tends to amuse me. "...Apple's GUI design..."?? Where did Apple get that from? Xerox, that's who. Apple paid Xerox nothing. Further, Microsoft wasn't even the first to utilize the GUI after Apple introduced Lisa. Commodore did it, and so did Atari.
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>Fact of the matter is that Apple was hurt more by Apple's own actions than by Microsoft's so-called theft.
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>Next thing people will try to tell me is that Microsoft's SQL Server was stolen from Sybase.

George;

GUI standards? Seems like they barely exist and change all the time.

Alan Key had a bit to do with what we call GUI. He was one of the founders of PARC, Palo Alto Research Center which was developed by Xerox in Palo Alto, California to further computer research for Xerox. Key helped to develop the Alto computer which preceded the Star, and he developed Smalltalk. Anyone who knows the history of OOP knows about Smalltalk. The Star was the main influence for the Apple Lisa/Macintosh.

Key went to work for Atari in 1983 as chief scientist, and then Apple in 1984 where his concept of GUI was used at both companies.

Xerox was very innovative but could not conduct business in the computer world successively.

The company I worked for at the time (Ampex) had Star’s, 860’s, 820’s and later 822 Xerox machines. I liked my S-100 much better and could do many more things with it. One day when the Director of R&D was visiting me from PARC, I suggested using CP/M as an operating system to allow other programs to run on 860’s, etc. as it was Z-80 based at that time and used the Suggart floppy standards (201 and 240 etc.). A few weeks later I was given a copy of CP/M for the machine in my office by Xerox – free of charge. Some time later I bought a copy of dBaseII from our “friends” at Ashton Tate. We went to Word Star and Word Perfect rather than the Xerox word processor.

To purchase dBaseII you had to answer many questions – CPU, computer, operating system, etc. I paid $795 and then received a large box filled with 8” floppies and manuals. The software would not load so I called Ashton Tate. They had no idea what to suggest and said “If you figure it out, do you want to be a consultant for Ashton Tate”? At that point I told them what I felt about the professionalism of Ashton Tate! An hour later I had the program running. And thus began my introduction to database programming.

By the way I did have the “pleasure” of working as a consultant for Ashton Tate, just before Borland bought them. Things had gotten worse at Ashton Tate. My association with Borland was very positive and professional. IMO Borland did a lot to help the so called xBase community – especially Fox Software, with the acquisition of Ashton Tate. It is very possible that Fox Pro would not exist today because of Ashton Tate and their hunger to control database development, the words dBase and anything that resembled a dbf. Some people think Microsoft is bad – ha-ha!

How would you like to pay a third party licensing fee each year to Microsoft because you want to sell a tool you have created using Visual FoxPro? How many of you remember this was a legal requirement of Ashton Tate? If your tool was of interest to Ashton Tate they would incorporate it into the next maintenance release (they came about once a quarter - with new manuals or inserts). So if you did something useful and it sold on the software market, Ashton Tate had the rights to give it away free and they did! How is that for promoting the development of software tools?

Tom