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To: Dirk Dawson who wrote (8445)	2/12/1998 2:57:00 PM
From: Alomex	Respond to of 213177

But this guy (David Every) is a reasonable guy. Oh, please. Microsoft "cons" Seattle Computer products when they buy QDOS, yet Apple "paid for everything" when they give a similar dollar amount to Xerox for using their ideas?? The historical facts are more or less correct, the editorializing is shameless.

To: Dirk Dawson who wrote (8445)	2/12/1998 3:20:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213177

Dirk; It was a successor to the Alto that Xerox tried to sell, however it was so proprietary that you had to buy modified programs from Xerox to make it work. I rememeber the history and Seattle computers dumbfool screwup(do you know they had upgrade rights to DOS and successor programs and they could have built Seattl into a huge corporatio, they were restricted to selling with a system but they had a license to make DOS and any successor window product, history now) Some of his comments are a bit revisionist, as they differ from my memory, He is right about Jobs(told you so). I suppose if I took the time I could write a version of the history, but his is mostly correct. Apple did not steal anything, and I never said they did, I just correctly attributed MAC and windows to the PARC roots. Bill

To: Dirk Dawson who wrote (8445)	2/12/1998 7:42:00 PM
From: Jeff Hayden	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Dirk, There's a missing link here on the history of the Xerox OS. I recall several machines at Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) back in the 70's that were all the rage to electronics design engineers called the 'Perq', I think. The machine was made by Three Rivers? It's quite a while ago. Anyways, they used Xerox's GUI with a desktop and icons and menus popped-up when you pressed a certain mouse button. They were actually pretty quick for their time (and expensive) and I believe they used the 68000. We also had a Xerox machine but it was only used to drive a huge electrostatic printer. Jeff

To: Dirk Dawson who wrote (8445)	2/12/1998 8:42:00 PM
From: Russ	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213177

Let me know if you find Xerox's marketing disaster documented. I'm curious to see if it foreshadows any of Apple's marketing blunders. There's a book on it, called Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the Personal Computer. I read it many years ago, but it gives the whole history of Xerox PARC. Xerox was a major stockholder of Apple, and invited Jobs and Wozniak up to tour the lab. I think the deal was they could walk around and look for an hour, and were given free reign to take away any ideas they wanted (but not code or hardware). Alan Kay was heavily involved in the stuff going on at PARC, and the machine they saw was running Smalltalk. Jobs has since said that he was exposed to 3 mindblowing innovations there, and of them, the GUI was the least significant, but he was so blown away by that that he didn't appreciate the other two for years. One was O-O programming, and I forget what the other one was. -Russ

To: Dirk Dawson who wrote (8445)	2/13/1998 2:06:00 AM
From: Bill Ulrich	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

Hi Dirk, re: Xerox marketing disaster + those 3 innovations + mice, men, ethernet, and other gooey stuff. This is a pretty good take on the particulars. www3.pbs.org &#133but because the whole damn thing is so interesting, I recommend one starts here: www3.pbs.org (and sets aside a few hours for some incredibly entertaining, and informative reading. I started at 10pm one night, and by the time I finished, it was 3am&#151it seemed like only about 45 minutes passed by&#133) -MrB