>On 11/20/02 @ 4:29 PM, Martin Joseph wrote:
>
>They are derived from the work of other people
>(Englehart et al.), which Steve Jobs recognized
>as the future of computing, and apparently
>XRX did not.
While Apple engineers did see PARC's system, the original Mac had a
totally new interface design/implementation.
It has been a while since I saw the PARC interface. But my first
impression was that the Mac was a different beast eventhough it had
similar traits. For example Apple used a one button mouse (PARCs was
three button) and overlapping windows (PARC not true overlapping). And
the Mac menu bar at the top was totally different from PARCs
implementation through the use of a popup menu.
...much the same as the difference between a Newt and a PalmOS device, or
Pocket PC for that matter.
My understanding, is that the Apple engineers saw very little code, but
rather the interface running on a computer when they visited PARC.
Now compare that to MSFT and windows. MSFT had access to the Mac APIs
because they were developing Excel, among other apps, for the Mac. If
you compare Win95 APIs vice the Mac APIs, you might just be surprised
that some even have the same names, structure and call implementation.
Now that is copying...
The original Mac crew deserves credit for what they did. It was truly
innovative at the time -- which is almost 20 years ago when the original
Mac which was introduced.
Anyhow, my 2 cents.
Sushi
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