Are Jobs stole the ideas from Xerox

This article was written by Bruce Horn - a leading developer of Macintosh software. Before he worked for many years in a similar position at Xerox. In this article, Bruce tried to dispel rumors about the well-known fact that Apple had stolen many ideas of Xerox employees and shared his opinion on the development of technologies in the future.

How it all began

I too often hear discussions about the fact that the Macintosh user interface was just copied. Most people think that the ideas were stolen after Steve Jobs visited the research center Xerox Palo Alto. Unfortunately, I must disappoint you - the difference between Apple and Xerox are very significant interfaces.

During his visit, Steve watched the work Smalltalk integrated programming environment, which supports the management of the mouse, creating pop-up menus, drop-down lists, and more another. Lisa division at Apple created a system based on a demo version of Smalltalk, and the Mac team later borrowed these ideas. But in the end implementation for Apple, and Xerox was a huge difference.

Smalltalk had no Finder, Drag-and-drop function has been completely written Macintosh programmers, as well as many others. Team Lisa on their own developed some fundamental things: drop down menus, windows management model clipboard.

Smalltalk meant mouse control with three buttons when the mouse for the Macintosh had only one button. One of the few identical features and Macintosh systems Smaltalk had the opportunity to highlight, cut and copy text.

In the end, the difference in architecture between the Macintosh and the Xerox important than the difference between Mac and Windows. This is not surprising, because Microsoft had access to some API and code samples for the purpose of transfer of certain programs with Windows on a Mac. Even despite the fact that in the Lisa and Macintosh teams are working former employees of the Xerox, we did not use other people's knowledge of the way people think.

Looking back

In my opinion, the Xerox software architecture were even more promising than Mac Do Windows, which makes treated with respect to the labor of their programmers. Xerox Star and did not cause me nothing but joy.

At Apple, we may have created a more complex structure, but because of the pursuit of low prices we have not implemented security features and multitasking as we would like. Origin Mac had severely limited RAM and disk memory. We corny is not enough space for additional code, so many employees were disappointed because of the need to compromise.

The past and the future

I believe that in 1976 the world of high technology is developing too slowly. Every time we simply re-invent the wheel. Smalltalk was a good language with the translation into bytecode, long before the emergence of Java. Object-oriented languages ​​are very popular today as it was 30 years ago. Development environment is not much progress in its functionality.

We are very far from the final capacity of computing devices, we are too much work. However, the market impact is so great that inevitably slow down the development of technology. Why implement something revolutionary when everything is great and is sold without it?

Nevertheless, I think that we can count on Apple. The company is well able to bring to perfection the many things that could have been invented to them. Macintosh And we proved it.

via Folklore.org