Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/12/28
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> Just because Gates > saw the Mac OS and said "we need a windowed OS" doesn't mean he invented > anything. I was very close to the action when Windows was developed. What happened is that Gates hired a man named Scott McGregor away from Xerox PARC to come to Redmond and build a visual interface to DOS. Scott picked the name "Windows", and it stuck. If I recall correctly, Scott left PARC for Microsoft in about 1984. Larry left PARC for Apple about 2 or 3 years earlier. Scott was a purist, unwilling to compromise design integrity for efficiency, and so, as a result, the first three versions of Windows were dogs. Scott either quit or got fired (depending on whose side you believe) when Windows 2.0 was produced, but all of the basic concepts that are in Windows were stolen from the same place that Apple stole them from. Apple hired Larry Tesler away from PARC; Microsoft hired Scott McGregor. Each person was right for the company into which he was hired, but Tesler kept his job longer than McGregor did. The mistake Scott made was thinking the 80186 was a computer. It wasn't until the Pentium came along that Windows was really fast enough to use without sacrificing the display model. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html