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

On 09 Apr 2001 22:59:19 +0200, Neil Franklin <nei...@franklin.ch.remove> provoked
the 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.

No, it was an extremely abbreviated version of Lisa's history.

>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.

I know all that, but it just didn't seem relevant to the story i was trying to
tell.

>> 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.

And God became grieved over it and decided to create Linus Torvalds.

>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).

And that's something i _didn't_ know. Thanks for sharing.
-- 
        Peter Punk
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