Re: Patents

John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 01:10:22 -0500

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Harvey Newstrom <newstrom@newstaffinc.com>

>Apple paid Xerox for the rights to use their ideas

Apple paid Xerox??? That contradicts everything I've read on the subject. Where did you hear this ? How much did they pay? They must have gotten more than "look and feel" so exactly what did they get for their money?

>Microsoft purchased technology from Apple which they used to develop
>Windows, which was initially intended to be a Macintosh emulator for the PC.

Well, Microsoft is certainly no stranger in the Apple world, for many years they had more programmers writing Apple programs than Apple itself did, but I would be very surprised if Apple would cooperate with anyone to write an emulator to run on a PC, they've always acted like that's the last thing in the world they'd want. But I've been surprised before so perhaps you're correct, but I'd love to know your source.

>Microsoft also did this with their deal with IBM in which they promised
>to let IBM have rights to put Windows 3.0 technology into their OS/2
>operating system. Having seen what Microsoft did to Apple, IBM made
>sure the contracts gave them rights to Windows 3.0 technology and all
>future derivative works. Microsoft then came out with Windows 95, and
>claimed that it was a brand new operating system that was in no way
>related to prior versions of Windows.

And Microsoft was right. Although Bill Gates strongly advised against it IBM insisted that the first version of OS/2 be a 16 bit system and even worse, they wrote it in assembly language (not C) optimized to work best on a 286 chip. That decision was one of the most stupid in the history of computers. OS/2 version 1.0 could never handle Windows 95 nor could it be modified to do so, IBM had to start from square one to make the next version and by then Windows had a big head start.

John K Clark jonkc@att.net

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