"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the changes from the Alto and Star to the Macintosh, and the changes from the Macintosh to Windows 1.0-3.0-95.
However, I can never seem to find solid info on the Alto or Star, except occasionally a fond remembrance of awesome equation handling or something similar.
I think there is an Alto emulator out there. I never successfully booted it however. There is also a Star emulator, made by Xerox, that runs on Windows, but I also never successfully booted it to the desktop.
All you needed to do was look at the Windows APIs back then and see just how much stealing took place. Apple saw Xerox's product, asked questions, and then built something cheaper and better. Microsoft got special access under the hood and then built something cheaper and worse.
Comments
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Gates&sortOrder=Sort by Date
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the changes from the Alto and Star to the Macintosh, and the changes from the Macintosh to Windows 1.0-3.0-95.
However, I can never seem to find solid info on the Alto or Star, except occasionally a fond remembrance of awesome equation handling or something similar.
I think there is an Alto emulator out there. I never successfully booted it however. There is also a Star emulator, made by Xerox, that runs on Windows, but I also never successfully booted it to the desktop.
All you needed to do was look at the Windows APIs back then and see just how much stealing took place. Apple saw Xerox's product, asked questions, and then built something cheaper and better. Microsoft got special access under the hood and then built something cheaper and worse.
I think the best link to folkore.org related to this article is http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...