Xerox Parc

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Thu Nov 7 22:29:00 2002

It was thus said that the Great nerdware_at_ctgonline.org once stated:
>
> On 6 Nov 2002, at 0:06, Eric Smith wrote:
>
> > Jobs cut a deal with them where they were allowed to invest some money
> > in Apple in exchange for showing Apple what they were doing and allowing
> > Apple to use some of the concepts. Also, Apple was a Smalltalk licensee.
> > AFAICT, Xerox didn't have any grounds to "sue Jobs ass off". Though
> > many years later, they tried to do it, and the Judge threw the case out.
> >
>
> Also, IIRC, the Mac team was working with only a visual knowledge
> of the Alto's GUI.... Jef Raskin (I think) developed ways to render
> the hidden parts of windows that even blew away the PARC people,
> since they'd been trying to figure it out for years. Raskin simply
> didn't know that it couldn't be done, so he just did it.

  It wasn't Raskin but another engineer (Atkinson perhaps?) Raskin had
formed the initial Macintosh team and was (if I recall correctly) designing
a text based computer around the 6809 (or perhaps a graphical one but I know
for a fact he didn't care for mice at all and prefered all operations be
done via keyboard). The Apple board at the time were tired of Steve Jobs
poking his nose into the business so they "gave" Jobs the Macintosh project
where he proceeded to make changes to Raskin's design. Raskin soon left
afterwards.

  The engineer in question had been on the tour of Xerox PARC and had
thought that the engineers there (at PARC) *had* overlapping windows and
proceeded to reverse engineer their design. It was only *after* the Apple
engineer had it working did he find out that PARC engineers never
implemented overlapping windows (and I think they were still trying to
figure out how to do that).

  -spc (At least, that's how I heard it)
Received on Thu Nov 07 2002 - 22:29:00 GMT