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

Well, they do exist. Check the "Windows User Experience" in the MSDN Library. Whether or not they're followed, is another matter entirely. One of the worst examples is Bloatus...er...Lotus Notes. The password dialog alone is enough to drive you crazy. I don't even bother with it, it's so bad. I've a script file that starts Notes and eventually sends my password to it.

>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.
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>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.

I've a soft spot in my heart (some would say head< s >) for the Atari. I always wanted one of their STs, but never got one. The OS on the original 6502 machines, however, was called by Bill Wilkinson (of Optimized Systems Software - who wrote the Atari BASIC, DOS and the original Apple DOS) as perhaps the best on a small system prior to the Mac.

>
>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?
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Side note regarding Ashton-Tate and SQL Server. In 1988 (I think) Microsoft and A-T entered an agreement to produce Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server. The idea being to marry the A-T's upcoming dBASE IV to SQL Server as the primary development tool. Something that didn't quite work out. Given this, it's made me wonder if the Fox acquisition was for much the same purpose. Pure speculation on my part, however.