Xref: utzoo misc.legal:4320 comp.sys.ibm.pc:13601 comp.sys.mac:14367 comp.sys.apple:4839 comp.sys.atari.st:8549 comp.sys.hp:577 comp.sys.amiga:16563
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!necntc!linus!sdl
From: sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.hp,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Apple Challenges HP New Wave, MS-Windows, Potentially OS/2 PM
Message-ID: <27668@linus.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 88 00:48:40 GMT
References: <5480@well.UUCP> <5492@well.UUCP> <1457@ur-tut.UUCP> <11830@sri-spam.istc.sri.com>
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 49
In-reply-to: robert@sri-spam.istc.sri.com's message of 21 Mar 88 19:19:15 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.1 of Sun Aug  2 1987 on linus (berkeley-unix)


In article <11830@sri-spam.istc.sri.com> robert@sri-spam.istc.sri.com (Robert Allen) writes:

> In article <1457@ur-tut.UUCP> aptr@tut.cc.rochester.edu.UUCP (The Wumpus) writes:
> +
> +The person responsible for developing the Mac enviorment came from
> +Xerox PARC.  Apple decided (or rather Jobbs decided) to hire him
> +because they had tried to write a system on their own and had really
> +botched it.  My father was at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) the day
> +Jobbs hired the guy (I can not think of his name).  

Actually, the guy that Apple hired away from Xerox PARC (Larry
Tesler?) didn't invent a lot of those ideas either.  Let me quote from
an article entitled "A Display-Oriented Programmer's Assistant," by
Warren Teitelman:

     The idea of a display composed of multiple, overlapping regions
     called "windows" is attributable to and an essential part of the
     Smalltalk programming system designed and implemented by the
     Learning Research Group at Xerox Research Center.  In particular,
     ... the work of Dan Ingalls on the Smalltalk user interface.  The
     idea of using the display as a means for allowing the user to
     retain comprehension of complex program environments, and to
     monitor several simultaneous tasks, can be found in the work of
     Dan Swinehart [who wrote about this while at the Stanford AI Lab in
     1974].  The use of the "mouse" as a pointing device for selecting
     portions of a display goes back to the early work on NLS [written
     up by  Englebart and English in 1967!].

As I heard the story, the Xerox researchers adopted the version of the
mouse that Doug Englebart had developed in 1973.

So anyway, *none* of these things is original with Apple; I hope that
the defendants call Dan Englebart, Adele Goldberg, and/or Dan
Swinehart as witnesses.  That might kill Apple's lawsuit game once and
for all....


Steven Litvintchouk
MITRE Corporation
Burlington Road
Bedford, MA  01730

Fone:  (617)271-7753
ARPA:  sdl@mitre-bedford.arpa
UUCP:  ...{cbosgd,decvax,genrad,ll-xn,mit-eddie,philabs,utzoo}!linus!sdl

	"Those who will be able to conquer software will be able to
	 conquer the world."  -- Tadahiro Sekimoto, president, NEC Corp.