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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dragonfly who wrote (1018)	5/26/1998 6:50:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1600

OK I'll try to do better. Marc Andressen was one of the people who wrote Mosaic but NOT while he was at netscape. He's a smart guy and if you had said 'Marc was one of the people who invented the browser' I might have cut you a little slack. Let's not confuse Marc's achievements as an individual with Netscape's as a company. I think MS did at least as much to improve and extend the spyglass product as Netscape did for mosaic - mosaic was a much better product to start with, but now the two are pretty close. You make another hard-to-support claim about GUI development - Apple created the first one-- the first operational one as well as developing about half of the essential features that we consider fundamentals of a the gui. In 1980 I was the lead engineer on a team that developed a windowing GUI for CAT scanners. This system supported overlaid windows and window sizing via pointer device. It also could cut and paste text or graphics from one window to another, and used a trackball as a pointing device (light pen was optional). This was pretty obviously years before the Mac. Of course those systems cost more than a million dollars in 1980 bucks, so they were not likely to show up on anyone's desktop. Also HP might claim to have had some pretty nice graphical environments which could do most of that stuff, Apollo had a few nice features too. And of course there were graphics systems from Digital both on VAX workstations and big VAX. Workstations and special purpose systems don't count in your analysis I guess. Maybe you were talking only about personal computers. I thought we were talking about who had the great insights, who were the technical innovators. I hate to break your bubble, but lots of others had done the features years before. The great Apple feat was to do the job using general purpose hardware (which was a pretty fine achievement in its own right). Here's another historical fact you can dig into if you really know anyone who was on the early Mac design team. Early on in that work, long before the product was more than a concept, some key pieces of development were done by a couple of sharp guys from - can you guess - MICROSOFT. I just looked at your profile and realize that you are only 29. so you would have been maybe in the 6th grade when all of this stuff was going on. Nothing against young guys but you obviously were not there to see the state of the art in the early 1980's. The Mac was a wonderful leap of imagination but it was mostly an affordable packaging of formerly exotic and expensive capabilities. Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI. Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile either.