How Steve Jobs acquired the mouse and GUI (video)
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
The fact that Apple compensated Xerox with pre-IPO stock, and more importantly, had a license agreement from Xerox, and even more importantly, Xerox didn't' have the GUI to steal (that being an invention of Apple made based on being awakened to the possibility by Xerox) is still ignored or claimed to be false, even here on hacker news.
In fact, it was only a couple months ago, on this very site, where a bunch of fandroids were attacking Apple on this same issue, and despite responding, with a citation to the real story, showing that Apple had licensed the technology, I was down voted to oblivion and repeatedly people asserted I was wrong (yep, just asserted.) I remember one, memorable response: "Just stop, its been widely accepted by us that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox". Its rare that someone uses the popularity of a myth as justification for its truth, but there it was.)
Already, the same people are claiming that multi-touch has existed for years before the iPhone, and pointing to single-touch panels of the crossed wired style, or stylus driven interfaces as "proof".
From this I conclude that most people who oppose patents and innovation do not understand technology well enough, or do not have any engineering background, and thus cannot tell the difference between two sheets of plastic with a grid of intersecting wires where pressure causes the wires to connect, and a capacitive touch panel, that maps out the shape of each picture, uses an accelerometer to determine the orientation of the device and then figures out which finger of the hand is touching it and thus from that, which pixel in the amorphous blob of contact the user is intending to touch.
To them, they're both the same, and thus Apple's not innovative because its all been done before, and we should shut down the patent system.
I just wouldn't expect that kind of ignorance on a site dedicated to High Tech Startups where, you pretty much have to have at least one founder who knows how to write software.
kenjackson's comment is pretty insightful in this regard. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3206454
>From this I conclude that most people who oppose patents and innovation do not understand technology well enough, or do not have any engineering background, and thus cannot tell the difference between two sheets of plastic with a grid of intersecting wires where pressure causes the wires to connect, and a capacitive touch panel, that maps out the shape of each picture, uses an accelerometer to determine the orientation of the device and then figures out which finger of the hand is touching it and thus from that, which pixel in the amorphous blob of contact the user is intending to touch.
Are you claiming that Apple invented capacitative touch?
> Xerox didn't' have the GUI to steal (that being an invention of Apple made based on being awakened to the possibility by Xerox) is still ignored or claimed to be false, even here on hacker news.
Are you for real?
I'm so curious what you mean by this, unless you have redefined what GUI means.
"There is still some controversy over the amount of influence that Xerox's PARC work, as opposed to previous academic research, had on the GUIs of Apple's Lisa and Macintosh, but it is clear that the influence was extensive, because first versions of Lisa GUIs even lacked icons"
That seems to imply that the Xerox machines did not have icons.
I do not know whether the folklore.org description is accurate, but believe it to be essentially correct. If it is, the Xerox UIs looked were very different from the Macintosh that shipped in 1984 (no icons, no menu bar, no object-verb metaphor, no dragging of objects)
The funny thing is that Apple always felt justified in their copying, when they really just they pulled a fast one on the Xerox HQ people who didn't know what they had in PARC. I think it was probably the PARC people who first considered that Apple stole all their ideas.
That's disingenuous. Apple v. Microsoft stemmed from their existing licensing agreement. It also didn't claim "ownership of the GUI", but tried to assert copyright over the "look and feel" of the Macintosh UI specifically.
I'm not going to engage you on this, because I don't know what it has to do with anything I wrote. You seem to have just jumped on the idea that I'm trying to have some kind of stupid fanboy argument with you. I wasn't. I was trying to point out that your description omitted a relevant fact: saying "Nobody but Apple sued another company..." has a different interpretation when the actual basis of the suit is considered.
Any an all existing licensing agreement were immaterial...
The existing licensing agreement was why they sued in the first place and one of the main reasons the courts cited in the rulings. It can't possibly be immaterial: it's central to their case! You make it sound like they just came out of nowhere and claimed to own all GUIs or something, but the actual case revolved around the existing licensing agreement and the (then untested) claim that "look and feel" as a whole was subject to copyright.
*...as the technology wasn't owned by Apple in the first place. That's what the courts found..."
That's not what the court found, though! Yes, Apple lost the case (rightly), but it was on the basis that most of what they claimed was subject to the prior licensing agreement and that the broader "look and feel" wasn't copyright-able at all, by anybody. Not even Xerox.