Windows prehistory (was Re: Jave - Yet another release)

ppu...@damthatspam.chello.nl (Peter Punk) writes:

> On Sun, 08 Apr 2001 09:24:31 GMT, stu...@bigfoot.com (Stuart Moore) provoked th
e
> following text:
>
> >> You want to lear how to put thousands of lines of code together to one
> >> huge program with lots of bugs and bad code design? You must be kidding
> >> ;-)
> >
> >Don't knock it, Bill Gates isn't doing too badly...
>
> You may know that Windows is modeled after the Mac Classic OS called "Lisa".

That is a garbled version of the story.

Lisa did not run on Macs. It ran on its own pre-Mac 5MHz 68000
based hardware (all in one, but with 2 5.25" floppies next to the
screen). Later after launching the Mac, MacOS was ported to the Lisa
hardware, which was renamed Mac XL. Short after Lisa was killed.

Both Windows and Lisa were modeled after the Smalltalk software of
the Xerox Alto. Lisa by an Apple employee called Jef Raskin after
visiting an Xerox demo. Windows by an ex-Xerox MS employee Charles
Simonji (he also did Word for DOS after the Xerox Bravo editor).

Xerox was an famous "develop here, success elsewhere" firm:
workstations, bitmap graphics, object oriented programming, GUI,
Ethernet, Laser printer, PostScript were all Xerox developments.


> But did you know that before releasing Windows 1.00 (1,5 years late, but that's
> a different story) he made the developers take out a number of features they
> have built in because Lisa didn't have those features either?

Later Steve Jobs saw Lisa (which cost $10000) and demanded an
smaller/simpler ($2500) version, which lead to the Mac. And Bill saw
the Mac and that users liked it and demanded that Windows be reduced
to slavishly follow it, even when inferior.

Interestingly Lisa was also bloated relative to what Raskin wanted. He
later realised his original intention as the Canon Cat (all in one,
even keyboard built in, 1 3.5" floppy vertical against screen, 256k RAM
copied entirely to floppy and re-read from it, only software in ROM,
more like an keyboard-PDA, no mouse).


--
Neil Franklin, nei...@franklin.ch.remove http://neil.franklin.ch/
Hacker, Unix Guru, El Eng HTL/BSc, Sysadmin, Archer, Roleplayer

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