As a side issue, the relevant part of Kildall's memoir has been issued
in the public domain, see The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/04/pc_pioneer_gary_kildalls_unpublished_memoir_revealed/
Interesting reading stuff there about the contacts of Bill Gates with
Gary Kildall.
Henk
Op 2016-08-18 om 03:06 schreef John:
The way I got the story when I worked at IBM in the 90s was that the IBM
PC was a project secret even from IBM's management who thought it was
going to be just a new terminal product to work with IBM's System/32
mini computers.
The team from IBM who were developing the PC was interested in acquiring
CP/M for the operating system. Legend has it that Gary Kildall refused
to meet with them because he wanted to go flying instead.
According to the people I worked with at IBM, they went to visit Digital
Research unannounced. The IBM team started off by slapping IBM's
standard, draconian non-disclosure agreement down on the desk & scared
the sh** out of Mrs. Kildall, who told them she couldn't sign it without
talking to her husband Gary - who wasn't there; he'd taken the day off to
be with their daughter.
She asked them to come back the next day, but their itinerary had them
at Microsoft the next day to acquire a license for Microsoft's BASIC
interpreter.
Somewhere in the conversation around licensing Microsoft's BASIC for the
new PC, Gates "just happened to mention" that he had a disk operating
system" that he would gladly demonstrate if they'd come back the next
day (instead of returning to Digital Research to meet with Kildall).
I don't know if Gates had already acquired QDOS from Seattle Computer
Products or not, but I don't think he bothered to mention that IBM
needed an OS before he purchased QDOS from SCP.
On 8/17/2016 7:27 PM, John Coyle wrote:
IIRC, Gates and Balmer bought a licence to CP/M, which had been the
only really successful OS for microcomputers, apart from strictly
proprietary ones such as that used by HP. Even so, it was all a bit
mickey mouse until IBM steam-rollered into play with their IBM PC,
which was basically vastly under-specified, but was like a wet dream
for many people who had suffered using terminals on mainframes and
minis!
John in Brisbane
-----Original Message-----
From: PDML [mailto:pdml-boun...@pdml.net] On Behalf Of Godfrey DiGiorgi
Sent: Thursday, 18 August 2016 08:21
To: PDML List <pdml@pdml.net>
Subject: Re: Mac Yosemite--"This is a bug, not a feature"
On Aug 17, 2016, at 11:16 AM, Bob W-PDML <p...@web-options.com> wrote:
On 17 Aug 2016, at 19:13, John <sesso...@earthlink.net> wrote:
On 8/17/2016 1:34 PM, Bruce Walker wrote:
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 12:06 PM, P.J. Alling
<webstertwenty...@gmail.com> wrote:
Pisses me off that Microsoft is trying to make the whole OS more
Mac like, in some ways, mostly that aren't helpful.
Mickeysoft has been trying to make their OSes more Mac-like since
Windows 1.0. And they miss the mark every single time.
That is a base canard!
Micro$haft stole the Windoze look 'n feel from Xerox PARK fair &
square.
And, unlike Steve Jobs & his NexT computer, they even PAID Xerox to
let 'em in there so they could steal a more accurate copy.
http://mspoweruser.com/bill-gates-response-to-steve-jobs-on-windows-ri
p-off-claim/
I thought I might inject some information into this
rapidly-becoming-insipid thread of BS. From the mouths of the players
involved:
"It took a while for Steve Jobs to become interested in Jeff Raskin's
enthusiasm for the work going on at Xerox PARC. Jeff had been trying
to get him interested for some time but Steve considered Jeff too
much of a geek to be worth listening to. Eventually, however, Jeff
learned the right way to approach Steve and Steve went to a
presentation at PARC where the Xerox teams working on graphical
systems, object oriented programming, pointing devices, etc, showed
off some of their latest ideas and technology.
Steve was immediately bowled over by what he saw and asked Adele
Goldberg (then manager of the group) for authority to bring his
engineering staff in for a closer look. Adele flatly refused to grant
access. She sent a memo up the Xerox management chain to New York
stating that she had no authority to grant access to Xerox IP to an
outside company, and beyond that felt it a very dangerous thing to do
from the point of view of patents and IP. She recommended that the
request be formally denied from the top.
It was a peculiar situation. Xerox management back East really didn't
know what they had been investing in with PARC, few if any successful
products had come out of PARC to date, and they didn't seem to quite
understand the intensity of Adele's response to Steve's request. So
when Steve called the CEO and Chairman of the Xerox board of
directors, they invited him to visit for a meeting in New York.
At the meeting, Steve pointed out that Xerox was a majority
stockholder in the fledgling Apple Computer company at the time.
Xerox had been investing a huge amount of money in Xerox PARC for a
decade with little to show other than a wonderful range of ideas and
concepts that hadn't made it into any products yet. Meanwhile, Apple
Computer, then barely three years old, had been delivering products
(and profits in the form of dividends) on a consistent and increasing
basis since they held the stock. Steve wasn't asking for any code or
tangible IP, he was asking for access to people, ideas and concepts
that hadn't made Xerox any money yet on the promise that their
holdings in Apple would increase in value and return them dividends
on their investment.
The end result was that the Xerox board of directors agreed to give
Steve and his engineers access and an in-depth tour with PARC's
engineering staff, over Adele's wishes and recommendations. It was
apparent during the meetings at PARC that followed that many of the
people who'd been working on the technology for years were
disenchanted with Xerox because they wanted their ideas to make it
into products that people would use, not just sit on the shelves as
research papers. So a good number of them quit PARC over the next
year and three, moving to Apple to re-invent some of their ideas in a
form that Apple could use, and patent, for future products. The first
systems that incorporated some of their ideas were the Apple Lisa and
then the original Macintosh.
This is why, when years later Xerox management (not the same folks
Steve talked to in 1979… of course) tried to suit Apple for
infringement, the courts threw the case out.
This all happened half a decade before NeXT existed, btw. The time
period is 1979 to 1980; NeXT didn't come into being until 1985.
Microsoft engineering, under the direction of Steve Balmer and Bill
Gates, ripped off many of their ideas for Windows directly from the
Xerox folks, at first, and then from Apple, and actually ballyhooed
their skill in doing so without being able to be caught. They got
away with it with some settlement money and other things at a time
when Apple was very weak financially and politically. They never had
the relationship with Xerox that Steve leveraged to obtain access,
and the work they ripped off was more specifically the
re-invention/re-imagining of mouse, user interactions, etc, that were
all new work patented by Apple."
(Of course, Balmer and Gates had ripped off someone else's OS source
code in the first place (can't remember who's specifically at the
moment) to revise into a version for a 16-bit processor (Intel 8080)
that was then licensed to IBM (at the time, another big company that
knew nothing about what was happening on the West Coast with respect
to microcomputers) with a ridiculously poor (from IBM's perspective)
licensing agreement that left Microsoft with the ability to sell the
OS to anyone they wanted without permission from IBM. Those Gates and
Balmer have a very long history as ripoff artists of the highest
grade, which Bill Gates has only partially eroded by his recent
philanthropy efforts.)
This story was told to me in parts by Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Adele
Goldberg, Jeff Raskin, Steve Wozniak, and even a little bit by SJ
himself, as well as a couple of the smaller players in the drama at
different times and in different contexts, over a period from about
1986 to 1999. All the pieces told the same story and fit together
nicely, which is why I find it credible.
enjoy
G
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