Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/12/28

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Re: Widows XP/Mac was Gamma
From: Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 21:39:22 -0800
References: <NABBLIJOIFAICKBIEPJJKEOMNLAA.darkroom@ix.netcom.com>

> 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.

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Replies: Reply from "Dan Post" <dpost@triad.rr.com> (Re: [Leica] WAS-Widows XP/Mac was Gamma, NOW- What next?)
In reply to: Message from "Austin Franklin" <darkroom@ix.netcom.com> (RE: [Leica] Re: Widows XP/Mac was Gamma)