From: https://medium.com/@aiu-brainless/did-bill-gates-steal-the-gui-concept-from-steve-jobs-81e9964084dc
Date: 2021 Nov 20
Author Alias: Medium.com 'Brainless'
Did Bill Gates steal the GUI[i] concept from Steve Jobs?
Yes, he did. Here is the story of what actually happened, told directly to me by the two men who are the experts on the subject. This story has been mistold for decades and people who are allegedly experts are still repeating the same inaccuracies. There are many quotes floating around the Internet coming from movies and books, that tell the story second or even third hand and they do not bother to get the entire story. What I illuminate here is what the vast majority of those reports conveniently leave out.
· Where did the GUI come from?
· Jef Raskin and Doug Engelbart both told me directly their part of the GUI, mouse, and Macintosh story, and everything below I got directly from them either in person or in direct person-to -person email, many years ago, so without any media involved I know this to be absolutely true. (Doug and I were members of the same education foundation so he sat next to me every month and we would chat endlessly about this stuff.)
· The very first (GUI) personal computer that you could actually walk into a store and buy, set up in your home and do something productive with it, was the Apple Lisa (quickly to be replaced by the Macintosh). Before that there were no products that had a GUI. So if we go by what the US Government uses as the yardstick in patent disputes to determine the winner then Apple wins.
· If you go by who first conceived some sort of interactive text on a human interface (that we now call hypertext, Display PDF and/or a GUI) then we can credit the 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges toiled “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” and it was definitely not Xerox.
· Jef Raskin, the “Father Of The Macintosh,” told me that he wrote his thesis, titled “A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System” Pennsylvania State University, 1967 [I got an MS/CS from Penn State in 1970 but do not recall Jef. –FNC], which preceded the founding of Xerox PARC by three years, so again, it did not come from Xerox.
· The Quick-Draw Graphics System not only described what was later to be called Quickdraw in the Macintosh operating system; it described how to make a personal computer with a graphical user interface, a feat that had never been done before.
· So if we go by who did the first public technical documentation of a GUI then the winner is Jef Raskin, who beat Xerox by years, and Xerox never did document it anyway. Jef went on to use his design in the Macintosh which actually made it to market and you could actually buy it so Jef and the Macintosh still are the winner, not Xerox.
· Doug Engelbart presented “The Mother Of All Demos” in 1968 showing a live audience a working computer with a GUI and a mouse (the mouse allowed the GUI to make sense to the user) so if we go by the first public demonstration of a GUI then Doug wins (with thousands of humans who witnessed it live, in person) this demo preceded the founding of Xerox PARC by two years, so once again Xerox had nothing to do with it.
· Doug’s demo was mind-blowing, impressing all of us, but as he told me, the computer was large, too impractical to place on a desk and it was never sold to anyone.
· Apple and Xerox
· Apple paid Xerox US$100,000 for an unlimited license for all Xerox technology.
· Xerox PARC was a think tank and the way they made money was to think of ideas that would attract companies to pay for a license to see these concepts and prototypes. The only way to get in to see anything was to pay the fee and be a customer. Apple paid the fee and was a customer, and this is how Steve Jobs got past security and got into the top secret rooms to see anything at all. Steve saw that Xerox also had a computer with a GUI, which Apple already had as a prototype, but this computer used a mouse, and Apple was using a light pen which Steve Jobs hated. When Steve saw the mouse he was ecstatic because that is exactly what he wanted for the Lisa/Macintosh. Steve went and got his staff and brought them to Xerox to show them The Mouse. They already had their own GUI prototype in place so when they asked if the mouse was covered by the Xerox license, Xerox had to admit the mouse actually came from Stanford AI (everyone else called it SRI, I don’t know why we called it Stanford AI, maybe that is the name of the project, but it was another think tank) that was literally up the road (at Stanford University) and [admit] that Xerox had nothing to do with the mouse.
· This moment is the one that everyone misquotes badly. Yes, Steve Jobs did bring his staff to Xerox to see something that excited him, and he brought them there during his second trip to show them The Mouse. That is the moment that everyone gets wrong since the GUI was already prototyped at Apple. It was the mouse that the movies and the books mistook for the excitement that Steve showed, nothing more. If you look at the Xerox PARC prototype and then compare it with the actual realization of the Macintosh then you will see that they share nothing in common, other than both being a GUI. The Mac design was as different as different can be. Macs are modal where Xerox was amodal. Macs are linear and logical where Xerox was obfuscated in mystery because the average person could not see where they were supposed to click to do anything so the functionality was a complete mystery. Mac design is very simple, and consistently reliable for a person to find any function that is needed at any time. The two systems could not be any more different if they had tried. Obviously neither one was a copy of the other, and yet there are still misquotes and misattributions about what Steve was actually excited about when he was legally visiting Xerox.
· Therefore Apple did not ever steal anything from Xerox, and they could not “steal” anything anyway since they had a paid license for everything anyway.
· Doug Engelbart and The Mouse
· Apple went to Stanford AI and paid US$100,000 for a perpetual license for the computer mouse.
· Apple is the only company in history to this day to have ever actually paid for a license for the mouse.
· The computer mouse was patented by Doug Engelbart and Stanford AI.
· All other companies who use the mouse, including Xerox, did so illegally, and are still doing so illegally to this day.
· Doug told me in person that he was greatly saddened that The Mouse was stolen by all of the companies in the computer business, and for its part Stanford AI did not get any public credit by the media. I brought up that Apple did pay for the license and that it was Apple that made the mouse a household name so that now the computer mouse would be famous forever, and he perked right up, smiled at me (to be honest it was the first time I ever saw him smile) and after that we were buds. We always sat next to each other at the educational conference and he would tolerate my endless questions about the real history of the computer industry. I assume because he saw that I respected him and his amazing accomplishments. May you rest in peace Doug; I miss you.
· Doug did tell me in person that Steve Jobs flipped out over The Mouse because his team already had the GUI developed, and they were using a light pen (which IIRC was integrated into the prototype by a woman who I once met, but I am sorry that I forgot her name. She either integrated it or she had used it on the prototype. I just don’t remember because we were at an event where I was super busy and did not think to give her my business card, to stay in touch, which I have regretted ever since), and The Mouse actually made sense to Steve which is why he jumped at the opportunity to pay Stanford University for the Stanford AI license fee that included The Mouse.
· Xerox PARC stole the mouse from Stanford, which I verified with Doug, so Xerox did not ever invent a complete system, and Xerox PARC was not a manufacturing organization, only a think tank, so Xerox did not ever bring anything to market, and they did not invent a complete solution that could be stolen.
· Summary -Sub Plot So far
· Jef Raskin and Doug Engelbart where the key technology contributors that supported Apple’s legitimate and legal creation of what led to the Macintosh. It was unique and was the first personal computer, desktop computer, that you could actually go buy and set up on your own at home and use productivity software that the average computer user could actually do something with and produce a useful deliverable. By all corporate and US legal standards that makes Apple the first to invent and deliver a personal computer with a GUI, to market. [Very true. –FNC]
· Bill Gates
· Steve Jobs was going nuts over the Lisa/Macintosh. When the Lisa failed to sell in significant numbers (apparently due to its astronomical price tag) Steve then saw that Jef Raskin was correct, that a lower powered but fully functional personal computer with a GUI would be more appropriate for the market at that time and he gave Jef a lot more leeway to create the Macintosh.
· One of the keys to success was to get software developers to start creating software right away for the new platform, so Steve Jobs visited Bill Gates and convinced Bill to have Microsoft to start writing Macintosh software immediately.
· Jobs gave Gates all of the Macintosh source code so that Microsoft could get started right away.
· Microsoft Word for Macintosh was released in 1985.
· Word for Mac was Microsoft’s first WYSIWYG word processor, and although Word as a program had already been around for years on DOS, it was crude. The Mac version was the initial modern version that was then back ported to Windows.
· Bill gave his team instructions to use the Macintosh source code to develop Microsoft Windows.
· Microsoft never had permission to use the Macintosh source code for anything other than developing software applications for the Macintosh user market, ergo Bill Gates stole the GUI concept from Steve Jobs.
· After years, and the failure of the Look & Feel lawsuit to help Apple, Bill Gates once said that they should not have given me the source code if they didn’t want me to use it, in admission that he stole the source code for the Macintosh to create Windows (i.e., he had the source code legally, and he used it to create Windows illegally and immorally).
· Another common untruth that has been repeated is that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates collaborated on Windows, and that Jobs somehow intentionally gave Bill the source code so Microsoft could build Windows. Not only is that untrue, but Steve asked Bill to shut down Windows and when Bill refused Steve took him to court and sued him for theft in the infamous “Look & Feel” lawsuit. If Steve did not want Microsoft to do Windows, then he would not have spent all that money to launch a very public lawsuit.
· Andy Hertzfeld, a famous Apple employee, who was the core member of the Macintosh development team noticed that his contact who was working with Microsoft was asking too many questions about Macintosh and its functioning, so he alerted Steve that Microsoft was in the process of stealing the Mac. If Steve had given Microsoft permission to copy Macintosh then Andy would not have had to raise the alarm to notify Steve of the theft in progress.
· After the fact, Bill Gates attempted to cover his tracks by stating publicly that both he and Steve stole from Xerox, but of course that is a total fabrication. Bill did not steal from Xerox; he stole the Windows GUI from the Mac GUI that he had in hand. Bill Gates eventually admits the theft when he says that they should not have given me the source code if they didn’t want me to use it, a clear and positive admission of his guilt (about the theft of the GUI from the Macintosh source code).
Conclusion
Bill Gates did steal the Macintosh GUI to make the Windows GUI.
If we had enacted the DMCA law back then, it would have been easy for Apple to win the lawsuit against Microsoft, but at the time the law in the US was very weak in protecting software works and those types of lawsuits rarely resulted in a win (today the opposite is true, where patent trolls try to extort money from Apple, IBM et al for vague patent infringements, but they occasionally win significant amounts of money because the rules are poorly worded and the trolls figured out how to use those protections in a predatory manner).
Thank you for reading
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An interesting side note on the history of the GUI. I used to work at an FFRDC. In the Library, deep down in the Archives, sat a desk and the front panel of what was a computer. The panel was around six feet high. In the panel was a small cathode ray tube. The rest of the tube operated computer had long since been discarded due to space restrictions.This was the first GUI interface. The small cathode ray tube did one thing: a small cursor could be moved around the screen by a toggle stick on the control desk.
The system had been developed under a DARPA [ARPA?] contract.
Unfortunately I can't say if that was by the people you wrote of. It's been 11 years since I retired [around 2010] from the Library there.
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Well, they both stole it from Xerox, sooooooo....
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They both stole the GUI from Xerox.
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The "Comprehensive Display System" used a trackball and vector display, and was installed in British warships in the 1950s.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Display_System)Like most innovations in computing, it's very hard to point to a single landmark event where the GUI was invented. All we have are a series of incremental innovations by many different people over many years. Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI, but then neither did Xerox, and neither did Doug Engelbart or Jef Raskin. That's not to diminish their contribution, but let's also remember the contribution of the many nameless engineers that predated them.
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Not sure it mattered terribly. Obviously neither Jobs nor Gates invented the GUI as your article points out. And notwithstanding Commodore Amiga and Atari ST building similar capability all around the same time, it would appear everyone was onto it in their own way…
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"All other companies who use the mouse, including Xerox, did so illegally, and are still doing so illegally to this day." Nope. The patents expired long ago.More for the photo captions.
Steve Jobs repeatedly bought new Porsches and too advantage of California's lengthy time allowance to register them, returning the cars to the dealer and buying another.
He also regularly parked those unregistered Porsches in handicapped spots at One Infinite Loop. When Apple announced new products, it was always just Steve Jobs on the stage.
When Bill Gates announced new products, he'd bring the entire team responsible for them on stage with him. The success of Microsoft was built upon a pair of big lies.
When MITS was looking for a BASIC for their new Altair computer, Gates lied and said they were already working on one for computers using the CPU in the Altair.
Only after MITS shipped Microsoft a computer and documentation did he and Paul Allen get to work.
Then when flying to demonstrate their BASIC, they realized they'd forgotten a loader program, quickly wrote one during the flight, and when toggled into an Altair it worked.
Gates' second Big Lie was when he told IBM was when he told IBM they were already working on an operating system for Intel's 8088 and 8086 CPUs,
then after inking the deal they looked around for an OS for the 8088 and bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $25,000
then changed the name to 86-DOS. Much easier to throw $25K at someone else's janky start then get to work porting it to IBM's architecture.
[See Bill Gates, CP-M, QDOS, MS-DOS, Microsoft.htm For a better account of this. –FNC]
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All very interesting!!!
The article suggests that Apple had a GUI prototype when Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC.In his own words, Jobs recounts that wasn’t the case. Here, at 6:40 mark, is his own recollection:
[Very interesting. –FNC]
https://youtu.be/J33pVRdxWbw